Happily After All
Seth Godin has a great post about changing the game. For those of us involved in church marketing it is essential that we change things up in order to be effective and heard.
One of the churches we work with approached us to develop the marketing for their 2007 marriage conference. The brief from them was that they wanted to call it ‘Seasons’ and picture happy couples who had found the joy of marriage. Same old thing. Boring. The same people would have showed up and experience the same thing they experienced last year. But how do change something like a marriage conference? How can we possibly find a new way to talk about marriage.
We started with the format. Instead of 2 days of listening to speakers talk about the wide theme of marriage, we introduced workshops. We’ll have general sessions on both days, but then we will break out into content specific sessions in a much more hands on setting. Then we decided that on the first night instead of preaching to everyone we’d start with a short session and then break out into groups for fellowship and games…all under the new theme.
Yes we ditched “Season” but not the idea of joy within marriage. After talking with them about what they wanted people to take home with them, that though marriage can be very difficult you can find joy in it, we came up with a twist on the fairy tale marriage and titled it “Happily After All”.
We then developed a whole storybook theme, even the brochure looks like a storybook, and the wheels started turning. It was fun to watch this take off. With this fresh perspective people really started to dig in. A breakfast will be served by Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, now instead of “How to communicate with your spouse” we have “A House of Bricks“.
By changing the game a bit you’ll not only attract more people, but you will energize all those involved. What do you do year after year that needs a change? What are some ways you’ve mixed it up?
Tags: changing church, creativity, marriage, originality