First Church Communications Team
Tuesday,
Mar 6, 2007
Members Present: Megan
Chichester, Jerry Niebaum (interim chair), Michelle Parmley, Candice Ranney,
Bill Uhler.
Guide Book & Email: Email
was sent out to church members prior to this meeting asking for people to
opt-out of having their email addresses published in the upcoming guidebook.
Approximately 10% of the congregation either opted out or their email address
bounced back. The email did not contain a link for opting out as Jerry had
planned. There was some discussion about whether another message with the
working link needed to go out. Jerry said he would discuss that with Rachel.
Easter Publicity and other promotions: Last year, First Church ran ads promoting Easter
services as a package deal with the Journal World and Channel 6. The question
was do we want to do a similar promotion this year. The package includes a 30
sec spot on Channel 6 with 3 other churches that will run for 2 weeks AND a
print ad in the Journal World to run 2 times the week prior to Easter.
Depending on the size of the print ad, the cost would be $775 for a 2x3 or $975
for a 2x6. The other option was to run a 2x6 print only ad for $475. It was
decided that we would do the latter, running the print ad April 1 & 4 in
the Journal World. Megan has offered to design the ad and will get together
with the church staff for their approval.
In addition, we discussed
other promotion during the year and determined that Easter and Christmas are
the 2 major promotional times. There is $3000 in the budget for advertising
this year. Another area of promotion is the movie theater ad. Currently, we
have a slide that runs at the local movie theater, and Megan has done some
research on getting another matching grant from the national UMC conference for
this promotion to continue. The current contract is up in May.
Business Card
Collection: The jars for collecting
business cards have been placed on the info desks at both locations. We are
trying to collect cards from the congregation so that we may scan them and
create an online church yellow pages, however we need publicize this ministry.
Megan has offered to do a PowerPoint slide and an article has started running
in the Sunday Morning News.
Web Disk Storage Space: We
now have addition storage space available to us on the web and we discussed
various ideas in using that space. One idea is to put audio files of services
on the website. Megan, who is involved with UMYF, will ask the youth if anyone
is interested in helping convert audiotapes into digital files.
Another idea for the
website is putting members photos on the web, or at least the church staff. The
pictures would be from the directory. The company that does the directory for
us offers a CD with thumbnail sized photos.
Creative Church
Promotion: Last meeting, Jerry
challenged us to think creatively about promoting the church. Megan said while
filling up with gasoline recently, she noticed an ad on the handle of the gas
nozzle. “Fuel Your Soul” was offered up as a creative church promotion on gas
nozzles.
First Edition &
Sunday Morning News: Candice brought
to our attention that it is often difficult to find material to fill the First
Edition, and doing the newsletter twice a month has become challenging because
of this. She wanted feedback on moving to a once a month frequency. It was
tentatively decided that she would continue to publish the newsletter twice a
month, move to once a month in the summer, then continue that into the Fall,
and then gauge congregation reaction after that.
Next Meeting: Tuesday, April 3rd, 7:30pm room 303
Downtown.