#21 - Navigating Digital Marketing for Churches: Insights from Expert Justin Price

Ever felt the frustration of marketing campaigns that don't quite hit the mark in promoting your church's mission? Our latest episode zooms in on the critical issue of marketing accountability, especially within the context of church growth. We unravel the mystery behind why content should do more than just exist—it needs to breathe life into your audience and cultivate genuine engagement. Addressing the elephant in the room, we confront the fear of accountability that holds back many from results-based analysis and share insights into how enhanced inter-departmental communication can propel a church toward collective success.

Our conversation takes a compelling turn as we grapple with the delicate dance between faith and strategic marketing in expanding church communities. Can you strike a balance between trusting in divine providence and harnessing the power of advertising to reach new souls? We examine the missed opportunities churches face by not jumping onto the digital bandwagon sooner and the exciting potential that AI-enhanced marketing holds.

Wrapping up our discussion, we simplify the complex world of church marketing and operations, debunking myths about the necessity for a full-time marketing role within your church. We explore the clever use of fractional expertise to deliver effective digital marketing and share innovative strategies for repurposing existing content. The episode also demystifies the intricacies of media buying, the benefits of agency partnerships, and culturally savvy marketing tactics. Join us as we navigate the evolving landscape of church marketing, where the goal is not only to attract visitors but to nurture a thriving, hope-filled community.

Show Notes

The Nonprofit Renaissance is Powered by Vers Creative. An award winning creative agency trusted by global brands and businesses.

Follow @collinhoke
Follow @heredes
Follow @vers_creative

Work with Vers

Transcript

Justin Price: 0:00

I think every client asks us how much am I going to pay and what am I going to get, and how are you going to quantify if that's valuable or not? That's really what they want to know. They'll ask it a thousand different ways, yeah tell me, tell me, how Cool Mo.

Justin Price: 0:17

And when we were talking about some of the problems with marketing and why I'm empathetic to a lot of pastors who have dealt with marketers who have maybe felt like I don't know if I really got that much from it, I paid this guy to do one thing or another. I've been paying this. You know, a lot of leaders don't even really like talking to their marketing team because leaders are looking for results and the marketing team is looking for doing the work. Like they want to make the content and say that's enough, but that's not marketing, that's not the end of content marketing. Good content marketers should be looking at the results from the marketing, meaning what happened? Did people share it? Did people comment? Did they engage with it?

Justin Price: 1:00

If it's just content strategy like, did you grow the audience with the content or is the audience shrinking because the content sucks and because you're not really doing that good of a job or you're not really in touch with the market that's listening to your content, so they stop listening because it's not in touch. I've noticed that a lot of us in the marketing space are afraid of accountability and will shy away from really strict results because the results that we're looking at don't tell the whole story, because the results that we're looking at aren't enough of a clear story, and they're typically you're focused on a small part of the whole user experience, or you're focused on a small part of the whole organization's marketing strategy, and so it's either so siloed that people don't even have access to what other people are working on. We were in a phenomenal church, a church that's distributing content across 90 something countries 93 countries.

Heredes: 2:01

93 countries, I didn't know there was that many countries.

Outro: 2:06

They create countries to be able to listen.

Heredes: 2:08

It's a geography podcast 93 countries broadcast. Crazy content Daily amounts of hours and hours of content.

Justin Price: 2:17

Beautiful TV studio, beautiful radio studio, beautiful quality content and the people who are responsible for social are not even talking to the people who are responsible for the website. The people who are looking at the website analytics are not even in communication with the programming people who are distributing the content. There's no connectivity between YouTube, the website and a broadcast distribution in 92 countries. A church with we're talking about there's a church that is having like 50 to 100 salvations a weekend.

Justin Price: 2:55

A weekend Like doing something incredible. I mean, that's really amazing. That gets me super pumped to hear of a church. That's like having that level of impact and really like good longstanding. This isn't a flash in a pan church. This is a church that's been in the community for a long time and worked really hard to get to where they're at today, but because they're communications people and they're marketing people are not even talking. They're not even sharing analytics and they're not even looking at collective goals, because this is all new, because there's so many things that don't work. It's like, well, I don't want to get tripped up on the thing that's not working and lose my job For somebody. I don't want to be accountable for these numbers over here. What happens is people just try to hide the analytics. They try to hide the numbers. They try to just focus on something they can actually see, that's tangible, like, well, here's a video, like producing 10 videos a week. So we're doing a good job. We're communications.

Justin Price: 3:53

We're not marketing that, though, and so bridging that gap takes some guts. It takes being brave, and it also takes stability from your leadership, one of the biggest things we talk about here. At first, because we're constantly having to try things that fail. We're constantly trying to push the boundaries for our clients because that's what they really need us to be doing, and so we've got to fail. If we're not failing, then we're missing out big time on whatever is happening that is new, and we've got to be failing if we are trying new things that are going to be taking some risks. Now I try to take the least amount of risks that we can with clients' time and efforts and as much with ours.

Justin Price: 4:38

The reality is is like if you're not in a stable organization, if your leadership isn't stable which maybe your organization's gone through some changes with leadership you're not going to be taking those risks. You don't want that level of accountability for the risks you are taking because you might not feel like you're in a stable organization. So I would just say that's a big part of what we see on a regular basis when we come into an organization is that you've got really good, hard people with really hardworking ethics and it's a lot of it's being wasted because they're not working together and there's no central connectivity, there's no accountability, and so what we try to do typically is get past all that crap and we try to get people to let go of their egos and also bring some stability to say, hey, I mean, we're working with, we're spending tens of millions of dollars on ads nationwide. We're spending, we're running lots and lots of accounts. We can give you a ton of good national data and we can actually tell you guys where you should be, what kind of metrics you should be hitting, what kind of conversion rates should you expect.

Justin Price: 5:48

Meaning, like, if you're running an ad, it costs $250 to get a new family to come into your church and the reality is is that half of those families are not going to stay at your church. They're going to check you out, they're going to try it and then you're not going to be the right church for them. So the real number is for a lot of churches it costs $500 to get a family to walk in. The crazy thing is is that they're spending $5,000, $4,000 to maintain serving the families they've got and they're not willing to spend $500 to get another family in, meaning like that church that is spending $2 million to serve four or 500 families. That's $4,000 a year just to maintain those families, but they've got the facility to handle three times that. So for like 2.2, they could be serving a thousand.

Heredes: 6:45

Justin, let me ask you this question as a follow-up. I'm gonna put the pastor's hat on here. They didn't teach me this stuff in seminary. Are we just trying to play God here? Doesn't God increase the church? God's gonna bring the people. Justin, am I buying? I'm buying families. Now, are you crazy? What?

Justin Price: 7:00

are you doing? It doesn't sound good, does?

Heredes: 7:01

it. It doesn't sound good, so but let's talk about it because they think that that's number one. Number two is and address this because I feel better about seeing the billboard, because I can see it. I feel better about even though I've got capacity in this building, I can still grow this, I can still guess what. At the round table with the other pastors, it's kinda sexier to say that I'm launching a new thing over there and I'm doing this thing over here and I'm doing something that feels good to me, feels better to talk about.

Heredes: 7:28

But when you track data, when you actually look at the numbers, what is it gonna cost to reach that neighborhood, those families, without considering the low-hanging fruit or the foundation of what's available through marketing, through digital, which a lot of churches miss on social media wave when they came like well, no, it's just a kid's toy kids. Too late, right? Because if you try to catch up now, those who got on same thing with marketing, right, it's old news in some way, because brands and business are selling, we're being sold to, we're being, but to not leverage it for the gospel, for the good news, to reach the millions that need to hear, need to taste and see, it's a miss, right, that's why we get passionate about it. And now even further right, because we're chasing. We still talk about this, but we're an AI-enhanced marketing agency leveraging that and not afraid of it to find solutions for churches, for nonprofits, for businesses.

Heredes: 8:19

So, and it saddens me when you get the rhetoric of like AI, no, dude, ai, no, it's the end. Boom over devil. So I time out yeah, same thing. The printing press when that came out, same rhetoric, right? No, what? They're gonna print the word of God and prostitute it? No, you kidding me, it's what we're called to do. I know it's a mouthful, what's?

Outro: 8:43

your commentary.

Justin Price: 8:44

Listen, I said I don't think this is a great analogy, but I said it when we were in Miami and it was like this I firmly believe that there are things that are incredibly meaningful and if we're just talking about church for a second, I can send you an invitation a thousand different ways to come to an incredible party, or let's just call it a dinner. And if the main course sucks and I just serve, if I just serve you some tofu, or if I'm gonna open up some canned meat and I'm gonna put it on a plate and it's gonna be cold and that's the main course for the event, doesn't really matter how I got you there, doesn't really matter what other the sides were Like. If the thing you came for, or what we would call the center part of that meal, was junk, you've missed it. You've missed it. You put all the energy in the wrong place, you ran out of time, whatever your excuse is, we have all these excuses.

Justin Price: 9:53

There is absolutely no substitute for the power of God at a church. The church isn't a nightclub, it's not a country club and there's a lot of churches who do nightclub and country club things really, really well. But the thing that makes the church, the most successful organization in the last 2000 years, and that is not needed marketing and is not needed any technology. To grow and be successful and to thrive and live is not anything that we're talking about. That is the meat and the potatoes, the main course all day, every day. That's what it is, and if your church doesn't have that or if you're losing sight of that, that it is God. That you are absolutely 100% trying to deliver to somebody who doesn't know God and is far from God, and you're trying to deliver a nightclub or you're trying to deliver a country club experience and that's the thing that you think is gonna help your church grow. Like that's not at all we're talking about, and so I would say no, I'm not playing God.

Justin Price: 11:05

I would say I think that what God offers through the church is a beautiful thing, and I think that what Jesus built as the church that we have today is the hope that we have in this world that we live in right now, and I'm really passionate about people who don't have that hope, experiencing that hope.

Justin Price: 11:27

And so, as a creative pastor, as a worship pastor, as a person who has suffered greatly in my own personal life and through my own experiences.

Justin Price: 11:44

I want the work that we're doing to mean something, and to mean something to the people who also are suffering, who are also hurting and going through their own things without that same hope that I've had, without the community that I've had around me. I want them to be able to experience that, and so for me, there's a lot of ways that you could get them to that party, cause I think that the main course that most churches have to offer up is really it's much better than anything else that we can find in the world, and that's even when we do a bad job of offering it up, cause it's that good, you don't have to suss it up. So that's, I think that's not. I'm not playing God I believe in. I believe in what the church in Acts is about, and I've experienced it personally and it's what keeps me going, and so I think I just using the gifts that I was given to help people understand how we can exponentially spread that.

Collin: 12:51

I hope that's a refreshing perspective to hear. I know it is for me, cause I think you, I think there you do kind of sometimes have this filter that you have to work through for some people to get past, like it's the salesman filter, to get past like the okay, this person just wants my money. But to be able to hear someone who's saying no, no, no, that's not what it's about for me. So what about this? What about people who would say like well, it just feels manipulative, it just feels deceitful. Shouldn't the message itself? Like you just said, the message itself is the really attraction thing, is the power you know, like, how do you, how do you respond to that? Who say like I feel like we're maybe not being so true or not being so authentic.

Justin Price: 13:35

Yeah, no, if everybody who believed what I believe went out and talked to their neighbors, we'd be fine. But the reality is I've talked to my neighbors like twice. They don't really want to talk to me. Post COVID. We're in a different community. I don't have the same like personal interactions that maybe some communities do have. But I, you know, I go to work, I pick up my daughter from school, I go home like we make dinner, like we don't do a ton of extracurricular things like in the community. So my opportunities to talk to my neighbors are way smaller. I'm not gonna.

Justin Price: 14:15

It's weird to go door knocking and to invite them to church. Like that would be super weird. I like a few years ago though it would have been let's just even just say like 10 years ago it would not have been like weird to knock on my neighbor's door and be like hey, I like made you some cookies and then, like a couple of weeks later, like invite them over for dinner. I've invited some of my neighbors over for dinner and like that's it's a challenge. Like it is a challenge to get them to say yes to come. It's a long game, like you know, living out that faith and that's one person like I've got you know three or four neighbors. You know that I see on a regular basis and I like my neighbors and they're super nice and I, like you know I live in like a very blue collar neighborhood where everybody it's pretty like down to earth but it's like maybe five or six families.

Justin Price: 15:28

If everybody did that everybody listened to the Great Commission and spread the word by interacting with other people, we would probably have a problem with capacity at churches. Like churches would struggle to have enough seats and parking. But the reality is is like where we're at in our culture today is that as pastors, we can preach that all day long, like from church. Like we can say you got to invite your friends, you've got to invite your neighbors, you've got to get people to come in these doors. But when we look at the reality of people who have non-weird opportunities and the amount of people they have non-weird, like we could be really weird about it and awkward and have these inauthentic turn off kind of you know circumstances and turn people off from the idea of like going to church Cause like that weird guy keeps bringing over you know weird gross cookies.

Collin: 16:28

That's what they're all like.

Justin Price: 16:29

Yeah, I'm not going to that. So like if we wanted to create that, we could. And I think historically, you know, even especially in the U S like we had way different communities, structures, but we're very silent in our communities now and then we don't communicate that way and in fact our culture has become a post-Christian culture. And this is what I mean by like you've gotta build some relational equity before you just go talking about your faith to people if you want them to listen, because it's offensive to some people. Right, it's an immediate wall right now. It wasn't when we were praying in public school 20 years ago. It wasn't when we were singing Christian words, like in our national anthems, but we're cutting all that stuff out and we're now, in the first time since the founding of this country, we're not saying that that is OK within our communities and we're saying like, hey, I'm going to shut you down, I'm going to reject you and you're not going to get another shot.

Justin Price: 17:35

And so, as a mature Christian who wants to actually do follow the Great Commission, those opportunities, the windows are way harder than they used to be. Let's take that one step further Social media when it started 10 years ago, we all had Facebook pages. We had when Instagram started to take off.

Heredes: 17:56

Myspaces.

Justin Price: 17:57

We had even. Well, we'll leave the MySpace people alone for right now, but like we could say, we were Christians and we could talk about God and we could invite people to the thing, we could share religious things. But in the last like five to 10 years it has gotten so heated that I know elders, I know really great scholarly Christians who are just said first of all, I'm not even going to talk, I'm not even going to post on social media and, second of all, I'm not going to, I'm just going to leave this topic off because it's a heated, debatable conversation. That's not healthy on social media and my point is not to offend and piss other people off about my faith. My point is to be open and be loving and caring. But the medium of social media is not conducive in the culture that we have today. So if you take those two very like small examples and we could sit here for an hour and come up with like 100 examples of where the things have changed with maybe when somebody started a church 20 years ago or 30 years ago, to where we're at today and why I don't think that what we're doing here is all that crazy and why I'm not saying that we're playing God.

Justin Price: 19:10

It is saying as a church or even as like Christians like for the church to say what they believe into and make these outgoing social media videos content and to post what it is that they do inside of their church and to now start to reach out with that content through advertising. That is a way in which you go into the cell phone, you go into the home, you go into the car, just like a broadcast television evangelist would have, like Billy Graham would have at a crusade. They went out of the walls of the church, they went into a community and they distributed the gospel in the ways that they had the technology to do in those days, and my grandparents are a result of that. My faith is strong because of a Billy Graham crusade, but today we're not doing crusades like that. Our communities are not receptive to that.

Justin Price: 20:08

But we can now go out into the community in an advertisement and we can pay a small amount of money and if we do it well, we can send out a message that's authentic and true, that is scripturally based and that is well representing an organization like a church and we can put a message in front of somebody who might be looking like searching for hope on Google at one o'clock in the morning when your church staff is asleep and they can find a landing page and they can actually see like, hey, there might be something here at this church that I've been looking for. And I believe that if we could do that well, that it is just taking the opportunity in our culture today and doing what we were called to do 2,000 years ago and that we've been trying to do as an organization, as a church big C church and what I think a lot of people have tried, a lot of different ways from puppet ministry. I know, colin, you had the felt board, that's you just got rid of it.

Collin: 21:11

You attribute your strength of faith to your grandfather and Billy Crusade. Mine's the puppet ministry.

Heredes: 21:16

You know what got me there?

Collin: 21:17

I would not be where I would be.

Heredes: 21:19

It was the hand belt.

Justin Price: 21:21

The what? The hand belt choir, hand belt choirs, oh man.

Heredes: 21:23

And when they did the Christmas special. The Coldplay cover.

Collin: 21:30

Which bell were you? You got saved. I was C sharp. Which one were you?

Heredes: 21:34

I was C sharp minor 7th.

Justin Price: 21:37

I was a complex bell. Yeah, he played in the jazz bells, justin, jazz bells.

Heredes: 21:43

Not calling it the jazz hands, the jazz bells, the jazz bell, you wow, that's great, brought to you by Christian memescom.

Collin: 21:51

The jazz bells.

Heredes: 21:52

Justin, when you talk.

Justin Price: 21:56

Have you convinced you that? No, I'm trying.

Heredes: 21:58

I'm here. It sounds pretty when you talk and if you put some music underneath him, like I could be compelled emotionally, ok, it's just still like I don't have the right people, like dude I know, and how do I? It's too much out there. It's about the Bible, it's about worship. It's simple. New Testament church is freaking simple. Now you're just complicating it and it feels just like business and it feels like the secularism, capitalism is encroaching in gut. It's the same. That's what Pastor Aridus Rebeiro, the, but, as you is thinking, and then I don't have the people I don't have. I have to go hire these people. I need to be paying. We're starting churches in Nicaragua and I need the seminary student to learn Hebrew. How do I get there? Because I'm trying to get what you're saying. I'm still skeptical. I'm still not sure We've been growing fine, we're still open, right, like there's people. You know, I baptized a kid three years ago and it's great. So how do you reconcile? How do you talk to that pastor? How do you talk to that? Like what?

Collin: 22:56

Do you talk to that?

Outro: 22:57

pastor.

Heredes: 22:57

And let me ask you this yeah, no. And then the challenge and for me it's just shifting the thinking here and the framework and the mindset, because it took me I'm a forward thinker, early adopter and personally for me it took a while to grab and obviously we're role playing here, if you haven't figured that out yet and listen, it took me a while to understand that, oh, I don't need to hire someone, because hiring somebody, the acquisition of getting and hiring somebody, a staff member, the lifetime value of a staff member, if you're doing it properly, it's not just their annual salary, from onboarding to the lifetime, to years, to you're talking million plus You're talking million plus, boom off the bat if a healthy culture, if you actually want to retain somebody, so off the bat hiring.

Heredes: 23:43

I'm gonna write off the idea of digital marketing because we just can't hire I can't right now. But there's another way. There's a solution to actually not having to and sometimes it's gonna require the hiring and we encourage it because we're believers in it and, depending on your size and your scale, you should have dedicated folks in the field, expertise that's still of God and that are for the church to be doing the work of God. Talk to me. Talk to me, then, because I think you helped me understand and see how, from fractional to segment to getting expertise from a team, it's still possible. You don't need somebody 40 hours to scale you right, but if a team is dedicating collectively that amount of time, it could be affordable. Talk to that pastor who's thinking right now.

Justin Price: 24:22

Well, I mean, this is like it goes back to the challenge of, like we hired a marketing person once and they didn't get us the results and it was like, well, they might've been good at one part of marketing. You know, most of the campaigns that we're running for a client might take like three to five people. So somebody who's really good at setting schedules, project managing it, making sure that all the data's accurate, making sure everything is working right, making sure communications are really good, making sure that we're checking in that everything is aligned right with the church, that's just a project manager, that's a management role. They make sure everybody's doing their job and that the results are coming in. You've got a copywriter. You've got a graphic designer, a motion graphic artist. You've got potentially like video content that needs to be edited, it needs subtitles, it needs to be translated to multiple languages, whatever it is that we're trying to do with the content, or it needs to be created in the first place.

Justin Price: 25:21

Most churches are really good at creating content, so for us it's usually just manipulating something they've already made, like a sermon video or a welcome video or anything like that. Then you need a media buyer to actually do the media buying. That's probably the most challenging one for most churches. They got project managers, they got content people, but they don't have media buyers. That's who is actually taking that concept, understanding that there's, you know, typically anywhere between like 30 and 100 attributes and a media package that you're gonna particularly like find to find the right person that fits the persona for your church. Meaning like the first step would be like just zip code, like just hit everybody within you know we used to do postcards like and sometimes we still do but hit everybody. That's within a mile of my church With the you know.

Outro: 26:09

So this is zip code.

Justin Price: 26:10

That's just one demographic point right of data, but, like a media, buyer is gonna look at like a hundred and they're gonna look at things like this person does actually live here and it's validated and they're also part of this community. We do things like we, you know, we'll look at hundreds of attributes of the people who currently follow you and then we'll build lookalike audiences and we'll market to people who don't currently follow you but they look like the people who do and they're within that zip code. Or maybe you say like I really wanna grow my family ministry and so we're gonna work on not a lookalike audience, because you're 70 and up that's still just hanging on at your church, but you want those younger families. So we will take the family you know versions of the audience that will best fit you and then where your strengths are, we'll typically look at. Like you know, we'll have a strategist say evaluate your strengths within your space.

Justin Price: 27:02

So, like we were talking about the meat and potatoes earlier, yeah, about ultimately like God is the thing that you're showing up here. That's the differentiator about your church and about that community is God. But every church has got its own unique flavor, like its own sauce, its own seasoning for the meat and potatoes. And that's what I love about serving a bunch of different churches. You know, even in being in Miami last week or this week in talking to Spanish speaking churches, that like that's just it gets me stoked because, like there's, we got a lot of diversity within our cultures and so they're bringing this great meat and potatoes but it's like it's seasoned different everywhere and I love that about it. But, like, the advertising needs to understand that. So the strategist is gonna come in, who has tried a ton of different angles, a ton of different ways of looking at it, and so they're gonna speak into the formula and how it is that you reach that audience best, because they're based on the age, based on the demographic, urban, non-urban, what is happening in the culture, and what all of those data points actually tell, what story they all tell for the way that we could best reach them and best convert them to actually getting somebody who is the right person to walk in your doors.

Justin Price: 28:16

And then, when that's all said and done, you got also data analysts. So you have a strategist who's like a dreamer and then an analyst who's like the butt kicker, who's like, hey, this is reality. Look, that's what's going on in the data side. Let's look at your church demographics. Let's look at your data. Let's clean your stuff up and see what's really happening under the hood with all of the data that you guys have right now and go this is how we're gonna actually grow, based on all of that data. So that's a small sampling plus a creative director, typically, and maybe somebody who's even like just overall, managing that account and its performance. So that whole team. Just that's tough for churches to get that's an expensive team.

Justin Price: 29:00

It's an expensive team. It's about.

Justin Price: 29:01

It's typically it's about five $100,000 in salaries for a small version and about a million dollars in salaries for a large version, if you look at any what you call like a full marketing suite. But there is, there's plenty of people. We, what we have found is like we will do as much, as little, as like we will just handle your ad buying, because that's by far the most challenging, you know it's. It's hard to even just have the ability to buy or have the knowledge or the right it takes the most expertise it takes those expertise time.

Justin Price: 29:34

And also like, because we buy so much media, we can get media at a lower cost, right? So because we have like a large, you know.

Collin: 29:43

We're like the Costco of media buying.

Justin Price: 29:46

Because we say if you're doing thirty million dollars for Domino's this year, you're getting that media at a lower price per click than somebody who's buying $300 for their small, for their one church, and so we're able to typically find that our cost per click is much lower With within our media packages because we do so much buying for profits and also for nonprofits, so that one we do a lot of like Fractionally where it's just like hey, your team makes the content, we work with you, put together content, we were on them, we were on your media packages and we'll help you with your conversion pages, which is like typically when someone clicks on the media, where do they go? They go to your website and they what do they find in their website does not make them want to come to your church. Unfortunately that we see that way too often. It's good stuff and it's not necessarily like wrong about your church, but it's certainly almost never written with the Unchurched person in mind, and so we'll typically help like just massage through where they're actually going and landing, and then that you know that at a small engagement age that's that's what people can do is you can hire a, an advertising agency, to buy the media for you and you can have your team do it and then you can go all the way from like my team doesn't have to be an expert out of that at all. Let me hire out like all of the services will create the content, will be responsible for the SEO, will be responsible for, you know, the updates to the website to make sure that everything's functioning correctly, and they add buying and the reporting.

Justin Price: 31:22

And we're checking in and we're checking in with you guys quarterly and we're, you know, we're meeting with the creative team, we're meeting with the leadership team. One of my favorite things to do is to talk to executive leadership teams who are doing a lot of Crazy things and when they make a decision, it's not a $5,000 decision, you know. It's like it's a hundred thousand dollar or two hundred thousand dollar decision and they want so they want to know that there's, you know, multiple checks and balances on that choice. Yeah, so so it goes all the way to Fractionally leading on an executive level, all the way down to just having a creative director. You guys do the media by.

Heredes: 32:03

Justin. Okay, so I'm a little more convinced. I'm getting there. I'm getting there, okay. Um, I Want, I want to know what you, what am I gonna get, what am I getting? So I want some guarantees. Can you guarantee something here? I mean, we're storing people's money here. This is not. I'm not bankrolling this thing. This is not. Can you guarantee anything? What am I getting? I can put 10k a month on this thing. That's all I got. I can hire 11 people and burn them.

Heredes: 32:28

Yeah or that's what I got, and it's gonna be difficult to 10k. I Need some guarantees.

Justin Price: 32:33

Talk to me. Yeah, the guarantee is like you take experience, you take the amount of time and the integrity of the team that you're working with and the last thing we'll typically do is if we're giving you guys really conservative numbers and you think that you're Like that the numbers all make sense for your church and what your expectations are like in essence, you're like I'm gonna spend twenty five thousand dollars in ads. I want, I expect to see a hundred people. Hmm, that's, we're good. We're gonna go to write a contract and we're gonna say, hey, if we're not on track for that, for based on the monthly and weekly Expectations, then you can just cancel. Like you know, I'm not gonna hold you to a year or two years or I'm not gonna hold you hostage to to that strategy. However, if you come in in our first conversation, you're like I'm gonna spend twenty five thousand dollars, I want to see twenty five thousand people come in. We're not gonna over promise that and put ourselves in that position where you're gonna be upset. So it's pretty advantageous if we stay open-handed with the relationship, knowing that, hey, this is sensitive and you know, church growth is sensitive and there's a lot of moving pieces to it, meaning like. Sometimes those moving pieces are like hey, we're at eighty five percent capacity, I don't really want to spend money to grow in that service, but could you help do something else? Well, that's a shift that might take a little bit of time to to make that shift happen, especially if we've had momentum going on, the thing that got us to eighty five percent capacity, but you're like I'm out of parking. You know this is creating a lot more tension than it was worth. Let's dial it back down. Let's let's let's keep things running at a much lower level. Let's pick up the lowest hanging fruit. Our cost per conversion might be more like a hundred on the lowest hanging fruit and then we're maintaining that level Because people do move away, people do come and go, people's lives, seasons change.

Justin Price: 34:32

Also, you know there's cultural changes too. We've seen a lot of people who are like we have way more capacity to our church Because people are only coming once or twice a month now instead of three to four times a month. So I think, like the average in 2019, we saw about 20 to 30 percent more consistency in attendance, meaning our capacity limitations with the same congregation. Today we have 30 percent more capacity just because of the way the culture is running. People are more happy to just watch online or catch the sermon in between weeks or travel after they didn't travel for a little while, and so it goes through to Ebs and F Flows.

Justin Price: 35:12

It flows around and there's not enough time for us to cover all of the changes, which is where I'm going. Like, hey, you just need somebody who knows what they're doing enough to be able to look at the data and figure out what to do next. And but I would say that most people are not even willing to open their eyes to see the data. There's a lot of marketers and a lot of people who are doing I'm doing air quotes, since this is audio Mark it, it's not very good, but they're doing quote unquote like marketing.

Justin Price: 35:48

They're doing communications and they don't really want to look at the accountable number side of it because they don't have enough experience or it's just too hard to understand what to do with that data. Or they'll just look at the vanity metrics, like just traffic, or they'll just look at like how many people impressions did I get on Instagram and Facebook this month? We've got 20 million impressions and pastors are sitting there going like I didn't see a single new face at church this month. What the heck.

Heredes: 36:18

I'm going to make an impression in your face.

Collin: 36:22

I'll end it there. I'll end it with Chris, and.

Heredes: 36:24

I'll equate it to this because and we'll end it here Justin, because that's good insight and I don't know how our listeners are receiving it. If this even called Justin, we'll put his number here, Flash's number, at the end here. But it's equivalent, right? I think you wouldn't want somebody, whether it's without the proper training, handling the teaching, the preaching God's word, and so we entrust and we prepare. So you want to put an expert and somebody called to it In the same manner, to steward all of it. Well, you want to position somebody who has the expertise and has the knowledge to maximize the tools, techniques, the latest and everything from the law that's going on with marketing and social too, trends and what's a fad. And why wouldn't you, why would you just give it?

Heredes: 37:14

Now, while I'm about people and we've developed we've all been in mega churches on staff and massive I'm about building people, training. I mean we got all our training within the church we grew up, and the internship and the volunteer programs, but to not the same way you wouldn't put the intern to preach on a Sunday morning. It's like we need to kind of hold this as, hey, you're stewarding God's word and the gospel, getting out there and people to see and to know about the bride of Christ, Give it the attention, give it the resources, give it the expertise and needs Cause, if not, we're being bad stewards. I think then we are truly not stewarding God's word and the calling he's given us. So I know it's been a passion of mine and, as I've seen it, and I hope it connects with our listeners and pastors who are seeking praying and have the same heart to reach their city, their neighborhood and see more people in heaven.

Collin: 38:09

So yeah, this has been amazing. It's been amazing. The conversation is not done. We're just pausing it right here for now. We've got more coming up, talking more about marketing, about branding, so keep an eye out. Thank you so much for joining, for listening each week. We appreciate you all and we will see you next time on the nonprofit Renaissance.

Outro: 38:28

Thanks again for listening to the nonprofit Renaissance. We hope it ignites a Renaissance in you and helps you go further and grow faster. Be sure to share, rate and subscribe, and if you'd like to recommend or be a guest on our show, send us an email at podcastatfirstcreativecom.