I say this is unique to churches because I can't seem to find it in the business world. Sure, the more targeted a message becomes the more scarce that vehicle becomes but the number of vehicles is quickly approaching limitless.
Think of Coka-Cola or Nike or a blockbuster film title. They groups can determine who their most targeted audience is, look for the outlet that reaches that audience and purchase space. For example if Coca-Cola were releasing a new product that was determined to appeal mostly to middle-class, white, suburban men and they determined that the largest demographic portion of channel 21 fit that group then they buy ads there. Simple.
With a church they have a very large number of products, in this case called ministries or programs. In our case around 250 (if you want to know what I think about this check out this post.) Churches also have a very limited communications window.
We have a very active campus, with around 50,000 events on campus a year there's always people here, but even with that great bustle going on daily most of our congregation is here on Sunday only. A lot of what happens here happens off campus, such as discipleship, neighborhood congregations and then there's Perimeter West (also known as Starbucks).
So we have the walls of our building to display brochures, posters, postcards, invites, whatever. We have the service itself, which we limit announcements and such in. We have our website and we have our email newsletter, the Pulse. That means we have two active, push style media.
We've done some things to try and help this.
1. We created a tier or emphasis system to make sure that things that need to be heard by the whole congregation are and other things receive an emphasis equal to the portion of the congregation they touch. The problem with that is 90% of the ministries or programs don't get actively communicated.
2. Next week we'll bring live the new Perimeter website. With it the myperimeter section creating a personalized content page so that people can check the info they are interested in. This is sort of active passive. They select the info, allowing them to cut through the clutter of things they are never going to be interested in (like a senior high student may not want to see the children's ministry info) and for the ministry to be able to push content to those blocks.
To be honest I'm looking for a new system to propose. Something that evens the playing field AND reduces the overall clutter and noise.
I think I've got one, comm coins, tell you more next week.
