Evangelizing Registered Teenagers |

Without question, the most effective way to evangelize teenagers is to have peers evangelizing peers. Part of the reason we cancel our small groups once a month is to plan an event that our teenagers will feel comfortable inviting their friends to. But that doesn’t mean adults are off the hook; even if some of the other ways we reach out to teenagers are less effective, we have to keep trying.

A while ago we discovered a couple ways to make one of the less effective outreach techniques a little more effective. One of my volunteers did some research to find out what kind of snail-mail parishioners actually read. He discovered that a simple 5’x7’ postcard is our best bet.

I’m not a big fan of mailings. I don’t like wasting hours of my life typing, labeling, folding, stuffing, licking, and stamping something that I know people will barely skim over before tossing it out. But his postcard discovery changed my outlook. Postcards save me a ton of time; There’s less space so I don’t feel pressured to fill a whole blank page, and there’s no folding or stuffing which is the part of mailings I dread the most. And apparently people are more likely to read something if they don’t have to open it. Win-Win. Plus, the postcard solves the age-old debate “Should I address this to the teen or to the parent?” We always address our postcards to the teenagers, but I like to imagine the parents scanning the card before dropping it into the mail pile.

I don’t like to think about or talk about marketing our Church, but if we want to effectively reach out to the registered-non-participating teenagers, then it might be helpful to borrow a few marketing strategies. Tomorrow, I’ll share Doug Hall’s three keys for effective mailings. Doug Hall built a million-dollar consulting business and he says he did it all with direct mail marketing, so his pointers should be able to help our humble church flyers.

(Look, I made it through an entire post without using ellipses or parentheses, oh wait . . . darn it!)