Steps to Growth - Call to Action

Peter Leahy

2/17/10

Steps to Growth – Call to Action

 

 

What StG Action Plan is not:

What StG Action Plan should be:

NOT a Strategic Plan NOT an Annual Plan NOT a Work Plan NOT policy or governance focused NOT recommendations on staff

Organizational / systems / functional analysis Holistic, inclusive and integrated in both identifying problem areas and potential solutions Action oriented -- derived from simple planning based on defined goals Identify and triage any current problems impacting “customer service” but focus on prioritizing and solving only those that impact the defined goals. Develop better communication tools and tracking communication (Church->Attendee & Attendee->Church) Focus on small & easy steps that will yield improvements and positively impact individuals’ emotional relationship to St. Augustine’s.  Provide the “emotional” space for sound strategic and annual planning Identify issues and work to develop and implement a larger action plan if necessary

 

Outcomes:

• "Lift the Spirit" of the current congregation
• Increase Fellowship and sense of community
• Retain, Renew and Re-engage membership and lapsed members
• Encourage, Empower and Engage new members/attendees
• Grow membership
• Grow stewardship/tithing
• Impact on the community & wider church
• Develop a solution - software, people, process, and best practices that can be replicated/shared

Overview of the work:

• Trying to tease out (“unpack”) and address the systems that need help and fix them by engaging the right people, with the right skills in the right roles to go the right thing.

 

The Groupings of areas touched:

 

Fix our own house

• Improve the way we invite people to join our community <empower members> (Web site, social tools, people)
• Excel at welcoming people in to the community (Open Front Door)
• Use process and technology to help increase the amount and quality of contacts and communication out to members (Reach out your hand)
• Facilitate and strengthen relationships, connections to the church with new people, lapsed attendees and current attendees (Connect)
• Respond, follow through and minster to members needs (Customer Service)
• Develop key metrics, plan to evaluate and improve our efforts (Analysis)

 

Better share ourselves

• Create realistic focused marketing/outreach for our congregation  (Decide who we want to be)
• Support new ministries and programs that address needs and targets
• Not be afraid to try new things -- but have a consistent launch, follow through and evaluation after a set amount of time (Experiment)
• Work to become an asset to the local neighborhood community

 

Improve our larger faith community (which helps us improve our condition as well)

• Share our experiences & train other congregations once we've developed "best practices" 
• Develop larger plan for coordinated outreach and marketing for an expanding group of churches
• Setup a marketing co-op that can fund and coordinate the efforts
• Cooperate under the umbrella of Area Ministry
• Seek investment in the coordinated marketing/outreach plan by the dioceses

 

 

THE WORK

 

New Welcoming & Re-engagment Process

• Systems
• People
• Process
• Tracking
• Accountability
• Technology
• Web
• Phone
• Voicemail
• Customer Service

 

Outreach & External Marketing

• Congregation Marketing
• The What
• Worship Services
• Groups
• Ministries
• Events
• The How
• Web
• Email
• Phone
• Mailings
• Print pieces

• Area Co-Op marketing
• Larger campaign to feed