Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

Remember the 11th Commandment: Thou shalt not advertise in church service bulletins. Well, it says so at: https://adsvalue.com/university.php#CrossTheLine

If you're speaking about advertising the church itself in magazines, newspapers, etc., their marketing follows the same methods as any other NPO.

Dear Luke

Well, budget isn’t much of a consideration if you are an evangelical church in the USA. In fact, our Vicar recently spent a 6 week sabbatical in America and said that one of the most frightening and potentially evil things he experienced was Tele-Evangelism, American style!

If you want to enter the market, it helps to be a believer and to have complete empathy with the church’s ideals. A teetotaller can market wine, but an atheist can’t successfully market faith. Likewise, if you are not one of the “Saved” from a particular denomination, you are unlikely to be able to do things for their attendance and money making because you will belong to one of their definition of Servants of Satan. For these guy’s being a Christian ain’t enough – you need to have their own particular brand of salvation.

If you have flexible enough beliefs (Or morals) then you will find more in common with the traditional school of IBM salesmanship than you will for an NPO like The Home for Tired Donkey’s (Some people thing that the Latter-day Church’s brand of street evangelism owed much to IBM’s sales school, or perhaps it was the other way round.)

By the way, marketing to churches used to be exemplified by the sound company Bose. They used to have and for all I know probably still have a division which is staffed by my happy-clappy pals who promote the idea of worship at a 120dB from the sound system. It’s like trying to meditate whilst a squadron of F16’s do a ground level fly-past, but each unto their own!

Steve Alker

A Christian – I forget which flavour – I didn’t think that we needed them!