On the road: We're all advertisers, how to market your church, visiting publishers, shutting down a warehouse

Last week was a busy one on the road. I visited the School of Theology at the University of the South where I co-presented with Mary Ann Patterson on how to market your church.

The point I tried to get across is that church leaders (rectors in particular) are marketers and that they have something to advertise. The audience was eager and participated vigorously. It was interesting to listen to them debate and define their "product." Consensus seemed to form around the "parish experience."

I quipped, "If you as rectors and church leaders are marketers, then does that make the members of your congregation 'customer service reps'?"

"It makes them sales reps," someone called out.

As an exercise, after I explained the basics of blocking and tackling, the class helped a seminarian brainstorm a marketing plan for a Latino ministry he hopes to launch in his home diocese outside of Miami.

Here's a picture of beautiful Sewanee, Tennessee:

Next I visited some of the Episcopal Digital Network's clients in Nashville at Abingdon Press and the United Methodist Publishing House. Church Publishing Incorporated has recently started using Cokesbury to handle distribution. It was great to put names to faces!

Thursday afternoon I flew to Grand Rapids, Michigan. United Airlines was very accommodating and not only put me on an earlier flight but also gave me a complimentary pass to their red carpet lounge in Chicago! Planes continue to fascinate me and it's hard to beat these views of a 747 from your perch at the bar:

 

Friday morning I met with the marketing team at Baker Books. In addition to a fine line-up of titles, Baker imports the Cambridge editions of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. I own one of these Bibles. You won't find a better made book.

Finally, I paid a visit to Zondervan. Zondervan is owned by Harper Collins which I learned on this trip is owned by News Corporation. Until a few weeks ago, a great many of the bibles sold domestically were shipped from Zondervan's distribution center in Grand Rapids, but that's now been outsourced to print giant R.R. Donnelly. The new distribution center is in Indianapolis. I got a last look at the the silent conveyors inside the empty warehouse:

And this last bit of inventory sitting on pallets waiting to be shipped:

The distribution system we've set up in this country is amazing and yet we take it for granted or seldom think about it.

Four Wisconsin congregations show Episcopal church how to do digital marketing

Last week, I wrote about three things mainline Protestant denominations should be doing right now.

Here's how a group of four Episcopal churches in Madison, Wisconsin pooled their resources and took their first steps into the world of digital marketing starting last Christmas.

First they created a simple, easy to follow landing page. Next they added an image gallery, service times, descriptions and locations. Finally, they integrated it with Google maps.

"We bought Google ad words before Christmas and are doing it again for Lent and Holy Week," said the Rev. Jonathan Grieser, rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Madison. "It's a start, and much more cost-effective than the holiday print ads we'd been jointly running," he continued.

Here's six ways they can make it better, to generate leads and ultimately drive foot traffic to local congregations:

•    Try setting up different landing pages for A/B copy testing
•    Create pages that are geared more towards seekers
•    Create leads by capturing contact information (name, phone, email)
•    Have teams from the local churches start contacting these leads
•    Or (for a more low-key approach) offer to send a free Book of Common Prayer
•    Create a seekers' email list that gets activated once or twice a month

The possibilities are endless, aren’t they?

Three things mainline Protestant denominations should be doing right now

The Consortium of Endowed Episcopal Parishes 2012 conference is chock full of ideas and take-aways. Here are a few that I came up with on my own.

Number 1: Start buying Google search traffic. People go to Google before they go to their therapist or minister. They Google "Does anyone care?" or "God, do you exist?" or "I need peace" or "Is Jesus real?"

We should be buying this search traffic and routing it to custom landing pages, based on location, so our local churches can start answering these cries for help. In case you're wondering, a landing page is "any page on a website where traffic is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result."

Marketers call this "lead generation and conversion." I think Saint Paul called it that too.

Our outreach and evangelism committees are going to be quite busy.

(Not surprisingly, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is already doing this. Check out SearchForJesus.net.)

Number 2: Publish a mainline trade magazine. One estimate I've heard states that the Episcopal Church alone (and taken as a whole) generates 2 billion dollars in annual revenue. Assuming that figure is roughly the same for the United Methodist, the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America then we mainline Protestants are an 8 to 12 billion dollar a year industry. Maybe even more.

Any multi-billion dollar industry I know of makes common cause. They start a trade association. They publish a magazine. They share best practices.

Oh, and there are these people called advertisers with lots of money to spend to reach that 8 to 12 billion dollar market. Maybe it's time (once again) to let the Procters and the Gambles of the world underwrite some of our mission and ministry.

Outreach magazine is a great example of a church "trade" magazine, but it targets the evangelical Christian audience. In the spirit of the new journalism, we should aggregate this content and add to it so it reflects our own experiences as America's historic churches.

Number 3: Develop a common calendar of marketing opportunities. Let's face it, real news doesn't happen very often. Instead, the media we consume and most of the events we attend or care about from March Madness to the Academy Awards to church on Sunday happen according to a calendar that's been planned out months, sometimes years in advance.

(In fact here it is: http://www.zapaday.com/home/.)

Do the mainline churches have a prophetic word or a word of comfort to say to mainstream culture? If so, let's put our heads together and think about how we're going to engage God's world and God's people, where they already are, from Coachella to Cannes.

What could the church learn from Kodak's bankruptcy?

I just read Om Malik's article Why Kodak's bankruptcy should scare Nokia and I wondered if the church might have reason to worry too.

Here are some questions I would ask to help us learn from Kodak's fate.

First, examine the church's -- particularly the Episcopal Church's -- core competency. Where do we dominate? Are we at risk of losing that dominance?

Second, will a "turnaround" be the answer? Restructuring didn't save Kodak.

Third, can we identify any areas where we once led or innovated but where we have not realized the benefits of that innovation? In the mid-1970s, Kodak's R&D developed some of the first digital cameras, an innovation that in the end killed the brand. What was our "digital camera", if any?

Fourth, where is there fear of cannibalizing our existing church models? Is that fear acting as a bottleneck stifling innovation?

Finally, what's in our name? Here is another take on Kodak's fall that says it wasn't their failure to adapt to digital, but that it was actually in their name -- a name that screamed "print photography!"

Could our very name be dead?

Advertising’s disillusionment is church’s gain

In Matthew Creamer’s commentary in Ad Age on the marketing forces behind the Occupy Wall Street protests, he quotes Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn as saying: “It seems to me the advertising industry is divided into two parts: there’s the selling of products, and there’s the selling of ideas. The world will need these brilliant creative minds to sell great ideas.”

Lasn’s picks for great ideas that need selling are “reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act” and “the banning of high-frequency trading.”

But once the brilliant creative minds are finished with Lasn’s agenda, I’d like to invite them to take up a different and perhaps harder challenge.

Perhaps it’s fair to say the church isn’t cool anymore. Maybe it never was cool. Maybe “cool” is one of those 1950s words that were purpose-built to be counter-cultural.

And what was that culture? Well, I suppose it was largely the culture the church had helped to build over the years. The church was “square,” but cool was, well, cool.

Maybe that’s why attempts to make church “cool” (or contemporary, or relevant) have never really resonated with me, though I’ve grown to appreciate that what feeds my soul doesn’t necessarily feed someone else’s. And that’s okay.

But a new study suggests that for all the box-church programing, contemporary Christian music, and homeschooling of the past 30 years, yet another generation of young people are about to be lost to the church.

And, at least from where I sit, that’s a bigger problem than reinstating Glass-Steagall.

The church was only ever really about one thing: the selling of an idea. A really big idea. “God so loved the world” and all that. I want some brilliant creative minds to come help me work on selling that idea. Maybe we can start with the ones whom Mr. Lasn says aren’t too proud of what they do.

God so loved the world is just the beginning of the story, and I want all of the narrative arts – from fashion to journalism to architecture to advertising – to start telling it again. Tell it like it’s never been told. Tell it like we’re hearing it for the first time, because, frankly, this generation is hearing it for the first time.

And I’m going to go out on limb here and invite anyone to start telling the story. I don’t really care if you call yourself a Christian or not. It seems to me those labels collapsed a long time ago. Tell me the story of love and community and a second chance (or even a 10th chance) at life.

I am curious to see what you’ll come up with, you brilliant creative minds.

Why does flat rate pricing of ad inventory make sense for sites with fewer than 1000K in monthly impressions?

Recently, I’ve been working on a new rate card for selling advertising on the Episcopal News Service website. I’ve been borrowing heavily from all the other online rate cards that are out there. But I hit a brick wall when I tried to port the CPM pricing model from much larger properties to my own.

As I ran the numbers it became clear: to make money charging by the impression I had to (1) charge more than the advertisers in my category would be willing to spend and (2) start getting a lot more impressions.

As I thought about it, this started to make sense. Before your site hits the one million mark in monthly impressions you essentially have only premium ad inventory, and flat rates work better with premium inventory.

Why?

CPMs for digital media are much lower than they are for print or television. That’s because there is abundance in digital whereas there is scarcity on air or in print.

Advertisers are looking for reach on the cheap. If your site is delivering about 45k ad impressions a week then it could take you almost two months to fulfill an advertiser’s 200k impression buy – and that’s if you’re running just his ad all by itself!

Furthermore, to stay competitive with those smaller advertisers that inhabit the niche category that your blog or site serves, you’ll want to keep your CPM around $10. That would mean you’ve sold your entire inventory for about $2,000.

On the other hand, if you sold seven concurrent one-month campaigns during those two months at a flat rate of $200 per week, where would you be? One four-week campaign comes in at $800; that times seven campaigns is $5,600. Do that again in month two and you’ve grossed $11,200.

So I’m left with premium inventory that I want to sell to those advertisers who want to reach my audience. I’ve got some ideas on how to package that inventory, for instance: ROS and Premium ROS (Home Page, News) packages. Next I need to figure out how to count the number of opportunities I have to sell those packages. Then I will be able to make a reasonable revenue projection for 2012. When I figure that out, I will write another post.

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Four types of power games

Power games are unavoidable. One is either playing or being played nearly all the time. Given this hard fact it is important to learn the basic forms of the game.

The first step in learning how to play is to know the name of the game being played. You almost always will be joining a game in progress, and that same game will continue long after you stop playing.

Each power game is unique. Below I have listed several common games. Many times you will find that you are playing in several games at once. This can be distracting. When you find yourself becoming distracted, stop and recalibrate. Review the properties of each game, particularly the basic unit, the allocation of power, and how to play. Adjust your tactics if necessary. For instance, don't seek a patron in a parliamentary game. Don't assume that a motion (i.e., a well-crafted, discursive appeal) will work in a bureaucracy game or a household game.

In terms of MARCOM theory, having an understanding of power games can help during the encoding and interpretation processes.

I am sure others have studied this more carefully, but here is my first attempt to classify power games based on observation and experience. Comments welcome.

Game:	Bureaucracy
How It Works:	by process
Basic Unit:	the department
Power:	is aggregated
How to Play:	seek a patron
Image:	the Machine
Output:	programs and red tape
Example:	Department of the Army

Game:	Parliamentary
How It Works:	by procedure
Basic Unit:	the committee
Power:	is diffused
How to Play:	form alliances
Image:	the Crystal
Output:	legislation and mandates
Example:	the U.S. Senate

Game:	Plenipotentiary
How It Works:	by petition
Basic Unit:	the motion
Power:	is concentrated
How to Play:	become an advocate
Image:	the Judge
Output:	judgments and verdicts
Example:	the Superior Court of the State of Connecticut

Game:	Household
How It Works:	by kinship
Basic Unit:	the courtier
Power:	is shared
How to Play:	become a favorite
Image:	the Patriarch
Output:	fiats and favors
Example:	Thomas Cromwell

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