8 out of 10 are pretty good odds.

And knowing that 8 out of 10 people will say yes to an Easter invitation to church is a great statistic to build promotions around.*

One area of promotion is inviting the community to your Easter services. But the other one, a very important one, is mobilizing the congregation to invite their friends and family to church on Easter. For the last few years we have attempted to leverage this through a targeted campaign. Here is a campaign we did a few years ago. Afterward, if you’re interested,  I’ll talk about the video and how it was made.

 Adopt a Seat Campaign

In this campaign, we wanted to mobilize the congregation to invite their friends to an Easter service. We allowed one of the chairs, Pauli, to speak on behalf of the seats in the sanctuary. The premise is that no seat wants to be be empty on the biggest day of the year. Here, I’ll let Pauli speak for himself:

We combined our in-service promotion and video with a social media campaign. My good friend Luke assisted me by creating some artwork that we used to encourage the congregation in the weeks leading up to Easter. We also make poster boards of the artwork and used them throughout the church. They were posted 1 at a time, but here I included the supporting copy on only one to give you the idea.

Making this video

This all started with a fruitful brainstorming session. We came up with a tentative plan and pitched it to the senior pastor. He was already on board with doing a campaign of some kind, and he was willing to let us try this idea.

I did the majority of this promo in After Effects. I took a picture of the section of our Sanctuary with my iPhone. Imported that picture into AE and bought Auto Lip-Sync from aescripts.com and used that to create the “moving mouth”.

I exported the movie, and within FCPX  I added a camera jitter with a few extra key frames  for the big move at the beginning and to bring in the extra chair for the final punch-line. I could have done the whole thing in AE but I am more comfortable with FCPX and I wanted to speed up the render of the camera shake.

Bada bing. Bada boom.

Not everyone liked the made in New York joke or the final music I chose. Oh well, you can’t win them all. I prefer to try to use humor, especially if someone could feel you’re beating them over the head.

Too bad I don’t have any analytics to see if it actually worked!

Steal it

If you’d like to, feel free to use this video and artwork. the video should stand on it’s own and wouldn’t be too hard to re-edit to replace our times at the end with your own service times. If you’d like the artwork in a larger size, let me know in a comment.

 

Notes

*According to Thom Rainer’s The Unchurched Next Door. Interestingly enough, he goes on to point out that 7 out of 10 people who do not attend church have never been invited.
Perhaps because 98% of church goers have never invited anyone. More statistics.

I say, mobilizing the congregation for Easter Sunday is something worth pursuing.