Evangelism Coach

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Last month, I posted an entry on Surveying 1st Time Visitors to help improve your church’s welcoming.

I contacted each church mentioned and discovered the effect of such an online survey was a zero.

One was a broken link.  The second seemed to have removed their form since I couldn’t find it on the website. 

The 3rd hasn’t used or promoted the form for a year or so, leaving only one of the four functioning.  In conversations with the webmaster, I learned that not too many people fill it out because there is no effective means of getting visitors to fill it out.

Survey of visitors seems  like a good idea, but  . . .   

The question is:

Why would they come back to fill it out? 

The people who wrote

Fusion: Turning First-Time Guests into Fully-Engaged Members of Your Church

have an answer. 

They actually use online visitor surveys and have been very successful in getting them completed.

Here is the key:

Visitors who leave an email address on the visitor card get an email on Monday (personalized) from the pastor who taught that week, with a link directly to the visitor website.

This begs the question — how do they get an email address from visitors?

That church uses a response card system, where everyone fills out a response card, not just the visitors.  When people enter the sanctuary, they receive a program (bulletin in church speak), a pen, and a response card.

At an appropriate time in the service, everyone, including members and regular attenders are invited to fill it out and place it in the offering basket.

The hospitality team processes  the cards and by Monday afternoon around 3, the first time visitors get the email from the pastor who taught that Sunday.  In that email is a link to a short survey and they have found a pretty good click thru rate.

Order your copy of Fusion: Turning First-Time Guests into Fully-Engaged Members of Your Church to see their actual response card (I couldn’t find a reproducible one on line).

Let me ask you this:

What do you do to make contact with visitors that come to your church?

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