Annual reports are not easy beasts to tame from a marketing standpoint. Some might even wonder what this has to do with church marketing since your annual report isn’t even on the radar. After all it’s just a bunch of facts and figures, right?

No. Your annual report is, or should be, a report on the health of your church. We just wrapped up an annual report for a church and only 4 pages of the 20 were facts and figures. The rest, including a full page on marketing and communications, told of both the health and growth of the various ministries of the church. The health of a church is about more than just numbers. A growing church is a sign of a healthy church, but growth isn’t limited to the number of people that walk through your doors.

Growth is found in the depth of your ministries, the increase in outreach, missionaries support, well received sermon series and yes, the number of people that are showing up to all of those things.

Of course not every church can celebrate growth in all areas, there may be areas that need attention. Don’t shy away from that, in fact I might argue that every church should have at least one area that they should focus some added attention to. Take the opportunity to cast a vision for those areas that haven’t been growing, build excitement. This is the half time locker room talk when you’re down by 21. The second half is yours!

Tags: annual report, growth, ministry

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 9:56 am and is filed under growth . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.