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10 ways to improve your church's physical presence
Have you ever looked at your church's physical presence through the eyes of a visitor? Ensuring that your church is easy to find, has clear signage, and is accessible are just some of the things that need to be considered when mapping your visitor's journey. In this blog post Mark Crosby, author of So Everyone Can Hear lists 10 steps for improving the 'gateway' into your church.
How To Map A Vistor’s Journey (Identifying ‘Gateways In’ and ‘Gateways Out’ Of Your Church)
One of our aims in church is to increase the size of our ‘front door’ to make it possible for new visitors to come every week, and to reduce the size of our ‘back door’ so that visitors are not leaving soon after they arrive but are instead becoming newcomers, integrated into our community.
A key to this is knowing how a visitor will engage with your church
Here are some steps to help improve your gateway in:
Ask friends, who are not part of your church, to visit your website and in the first 30 seconds ask them what they notice (as a visitor). Compile their answers, then look objectively at your website and make changes to improve how visitors can use your website. One of your main aims is to make it easy to find and visit you, so make this one of the main purposes of your website – highlighting services times, address and postcode, parking details and information for first time visitors.
Once you have looked at your digital presence, work on your physical church presence. Take your team to your venue during the week – this should include pastoral staff and leaders who have significant leadership in the welcoming process, so that they are all on this journey with you.
1. Start half a mile away and both walk and drive towards your venue. Ask them to make observations about how easy/hard it is to find your venue. What could you do to improve this with signage and welcome teams?
2. As you approach your church what do you notice? Do you have signage outside the church which is clear, welcoming and matches the look and feel of what a visitor might have seen on your website?
3. Where are the best places to place a Welcome team, so that visitors will feel welcomed and not intimidated? Think outside and in wider internal spaces, not in smaller enclosed spaces which make it difficult for visitors to have their own personal space, or where they might feel awkward – like corridors, smaller doorways, outside toilets.
4. How accessible is your church? Are you welcoming to anybody with a pram, wheelchair or other disability? How could you improve this and make website visitors aware that you’ve thought through this? Is there anything they need to know before they visit?
5. How can you improve signage inside your church? Will visitors know where to get refreshments? Where to take their children? Where to take teenagers? How to find a toilet? Where to sit? This is especially important where the venue is hired on a Sunday and you don’t have the ability to fix signage in place. If this is the case think creatively about pop-up banners, signage that can be temporarily fixed or hung.
6. What will you hand the visitor and will it help them in their first visit? What are the questions they will have and how can you answer those questions through a church bulletin, welcome pack or information sheet.
7. How can you create an area for visitors that feels welcoming, not intimating? What is the position of this so that they will see it and feel drawn to it. Consider the natural foot flow of your venue and position it so it’s highly visible and unavoidable.
8. Work through the elements of a church service and consider anything that might be a barrier to a visitor engaging with the service, from language to accessibility, to explaining elements of liturgy, prayer or Bible readings so that visitors can understand better and choose to partake.
9. How does the service end? What happens afterwards? How can you make this time a positive experience for visitors and how can you make sure that Welcome teams and pastoral staff get to meet them?
10. Do you have teams on the doors saying goodbye to people so that not only are people greeted but they’re waved off as well? Do they need to have anything to give to people? Do they know what to say so that visitors feel that they had been welcomed?
Take your findings and create a document of improvements, grading the changes between 1-10. With 10 being the most urgent (eg. this is urgent and critical) through to 1 – the least urgent. Add the resources and costs next to each change. Gradually work through this list adding anything else as you receive feedback and become aware of ways you can be more welcome. Knowing that as you increase the size of your front door you grow in size and will then encounter more issues, which will then need to be resolved.
This post was originally shared on the CPO website
This colourful, engaging and practical book will help leaders and members alike be more mindful of how they ‘communicate church’ both inside and outside of it within our dynamic and ever-changing digital culture. Buy now >>
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