WHAT WE DID FOR EASTER, PART IV

Well, if you're still hanging around reading about Easter, I appreciate it! As I mentioned yesterday, we'll pause here and talk about how we wanted to promote this particular Easter service.

Once we had a solid idea for the service order, we talked a bit with our communications guy. This was a basic idea - just a few core concepts about using the letter "V" as our logo. We decided to fully embrace the logo as a vague-marketing tool...being comfortable with folks saying, "Hey, what is this about?"

Joshua, our communications director, came up with the painted-letter look almost immediately. We made a couple a font change early on for promotional material that would outline our service times, etc. Once the overall concept was ready, we started talking about how to implement it.

Since we have a brand new website, we decided to use a microsite where folks would land if they clinked any of the Easter links via Facebook or e-newsletters. We also planned a huge postcard mail-out to what's considered "south Tyler", the area where our church is located.

That was daring enough for Bethel, but we took one more shot. We opted to hang "V" banners in our sanctuary. These three banners would show up the week before Easter with no announcement or focus. They would be simple hangings that featured only the letter. However, when Easter Sunday rolled around, three NEW banners were hanging. These were a second set of V banners that each featured the words of the service (volition, violence and vicarious.) We didn't have a prominent place for a 'victory' banner, but we figured Ross could handle celebrating Jesus' victory from the stage!

The last thing that seemed to make an impact was a large banner in our front yard with the logo and our service times. It looked good and seem to catch some eyes!

TAKEAWAY: This aspect is a bit easier to judge since you can pretty easily get a sense if your people are interested/excited in what you're doing. At this point, we're still not sure if the postcards (one mailing) worked. We had asked people to "redeem" the postcard at our welcome center for a gift, but we didn't get any of those. However, the rest of promotion seemed pretty successful for a first outing. As with anything new, there were a lot of people interested in what the heck we were up to. I think that helped. Coming into Easter, we knew that the service would need to deliver something unique and memorable because we had described it (through the various promotions) as such. We probably would have benefited from multiple mail-outs and and earlier jump on the overall look. We were surprised at how many folks mentioned that the outdoor banner had piqued their interest.