“I tell you, I’m not an evangelist!” said Eugene Prewitt, pastor of the Arkadelphia 61-member church. “I haven’t been trained for evangelism, but there’s a desire in me to do this kind of work.”
Pastor Prewitt’s meetings in Fall 2014 used archaeology as the vehicle to teach Bible truth. Titled “Archaeology and Biblical Prophecy,” the intent was to reach a younger demographic in this university town with a full-message series. The church used a multi-touch strategy for reaching their neighbors, including:
- direct mail
- personal invitation
- billboard
- posters
- newspaper advertising
- Internet advertising: Facebook, Google, weather.com
The results were amazing: In their small town of 10,000 residents, the church had 108 guests attend at some point during the 6 week series. Their opening night response rate of 3.6 per thousand actually grew over the first week, reaching as high as 6.4 per thousand.
SermonView handled design for all the various pieces, to maintain a visual consistency across all advertising methods, as well as the printing and direct mailing logistics.
“SermonView has been so helpful to me,” Pastor Prewitt said, “Because of their marketing program, I think that very few people in our target audience were unaware of our meetings. I am happy with the saturation we saw in the community.”
Because of the small target area, SermonView recommended a jumbo card rather than a trifold mailer, to be more cost effective. Pastor Prewitt really liked the form factor. “You know how useful it is that you don’t have to open it?” he said. “It means that even if you throw it out, you can’t help but have seen the message on it.”
The Internet advertising also helped saturate the community. Zip code-specific targeting gave them 150,000 impressions, more than 15 impressions per online users in their town.
“Not one aspect of what we did could be considered periphery or minor,” said Pastor Prewitt. “If we had left any one of them out we would have lost a significant section of our attendees.”
“I’m telling people about SermonView,” he continued. “They do good work.”
Portions taken from Pastor Prewitt’s “Advertising for Evangelism” presentation on AudioVerse.