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FOUR WEEKS OUT
Put up
posters around your church and Sunday
School. Use flyers as inserts in your
worship bulletins, and if you mail a
newsletter, use them as inserts there, too.
In any assemblies,promote the coming
meetings. Use the “10 Most Wanted” lists.
Stress that the purpose of this crusade is
to reach the un-churched – the lost – it is
not for reviving your members.
THREE WEEKS OUT
Promote the use of posters out in the
community through your Sunday School. This
should be timed to begin the third weekend
prior to your crusade meetings. Obtain
commitments from your members to go out
after lunch that very Sunday and ask
merchants, service stations, restaurants,
etc. for permission to put up a poster where
people can see it. Provide each of these
workers with a roll of scotch tape to use.
Ask your people to commit one and a half
hours to this mission, or to tape up 17
posters where they can be seen, whichever
comes first. Why 17? Because they won’t
forget that number, nor that they made a
commitment to tape them up.
Notice
that I did not say to distribute posters by
asking the stores to put them up. If the
approach is to leave a poster and ask the
merchant or employee to put it up, you can
save yourself a lot of time and effort by
simply throwing all of your posters in the
trash to start with, because that is where
99.99% of them will wind up with that
approach. To get them up, we have to
put them up ourselves.
TWO WEEKS OUT
On the
second Sunday out, repeat your poster
program as above. This is two weekends
before your scheduled meetings. You can even
assign the same geographic areas as before,
but send each of your teams to an area
different from where they went the previous
time.. You will be surprised by the
effectiveness of covering the same areas
twice. It will bear fruit.
ONE WEEK OUT
On the
weekend before your scheduled meetings, have
your church members come to the church at
9:19 am on Saturday morning. (9:19 because
they won’t forget the time.) Before they
come, buy or obtain city maps, and circle
areas for each team to cover. Hint: your
local U.S. Post Office has already figured
out the most efficient way to walk the
streets
of your city, so ask the carrier supervisor
to show you the carrier route maps. In my
city, each carrier covers an average of 725
addresses
in a shift, and he spends the first 2 to 3
hours casing the mail before he leaves the
Post Office. That means that he covers 725
houses in about 5 hours by himself. What I
am going to propose to you is at least twice
as efficient as the post office method. Here
it is: Assign your people to teams of three,
with one vehicle. You need one adult driver
with the map, and two walkers on each team.
Your walkers can be any able bodied person
from 12 years of age up. Use the Post Office
carrier route map, or if that seems too
ominous, break each carrier’s route into
two. One team member goes down the right
side of the street, and one goes down the
left side of
the street. The driver simply follows
behind, and is right there with additional
flyers when the walkers run out.
A word
of caution: The Federal Government will not
let us put flyers into mail boxes, and most
cities have ordinances that prevent us from
putting flyers on automobiles, especially on
automobiles parked at the malls. Private
property, you know. But in most places it is
completely legal to wedge flyers into the
doors and door handles of homes. So that’s
where they go. If you are including
apartment complexes in your distribution,
you might want to obtain the apartment
manager’s approval, as some complexes have
posted policies against unauthorized
distribution.
In
addition, some churches have been able to
tape flyers to the boxes that pizza places
use for delivery, and some have gotten
permission to stuff flyers into the bags at
a Wall-Mart or grocery stores. The pizza
thing has been fairly productive, but the
bag thing has the problem that it takes an
enormous amount of work, and most customers
will take home from four to twelve bags.
Whatever you do, don’t try to let the store
method replace the
walking from door to door. Putting flyers in
the doors has been the single most effective
marketing method we have seen. |
