Follow up for church events
Summer is ticking away and many local churches are doing events like vacation Bible school, block parties, sports camps, and other creative ways to reach the community. After these events, it is so important to follow up. Many churches find that these valuable prospects slip through their fingers because of the lack of follow up.
Let me give you some tips and practical ideas to help you be more intentional and focused this year with these VIPs (Very Important People!).
Prayer Team
Recruit a short-term prayer team to pray for your special event and the follow up effort. You might decide to have this prayer time as a virtual event once, twice or three times a week. Utilize prayer prompts to help participants stay focused. Compile the names of pre-registered and have your prayer team keep these lifted in prayer by name.
Gather Information
During your registration, be sure to capture all of the information needed for follow up. You might consider having a volunteer dedicated to making sure that all of the information is completed and if needed they would be the one to follow up and secure this important data. Nowadays, it is vital that you get emails, phone numbers, and find out if visitors have any church connections.
Goodie bags
Create follow up goodie bags! You know everyone is exhausted by the time VBS is done so plan to have a few folks or even recruit a family to put together some goodie bags for families that come to your event. Goodie bags should include something theme related, candy, snacks, and church information including an invitation to an upcoming event. These can be distributed at the end of your event or you can consider hand-delivering them within 48 hours of your event by volunteers recruited just for that purpose.
Free parenting event
Host a free parenting event within a month of your event and be sure to advertise it to parents during and after your event. Partner with your school or a local agency (hospital) to secure an expert to come and lead a relevant workshop for parents. Do it at a neutral location like a library or other town building. After the event, be sure to have an invitation to another event to keep the connection going.
Adoption kits
Engage your church family in follow up with adoption kits. These kits would be designed with information about a child or family (birthday, age, likes, interests, address, phone number, and family information) who came to your event. It is a way for your church family to meet, pray for, and encourage participants of your event, and it also helps your church stay in touch with new folks. Provide your church families with adoption bags that include the child information, a birthday card, stickers, or other easily mailed items they could use when making contact as well as the invitation to an upcoming follow up event. As they event draws near, your adoption families will make personal contact to invite them to be part of your next event.
Make a commitment to being more intentional to follow up for your next event and you will find that each time you do, you will retain more of the guests that wanted to connect with you in the first place… it’s a win-win, I’d say!
Sandy Coelho serves as lay leadership development coordinator at the Baptist Convention of New England.
