Welcome brave readers...

The point of this blog is to personally document my attempts to help St. Augustine's Episcopal Church of Oakland to plan, develop, implement and reflect on the needed efforts to grow and renew the congregation.

To this end we need to better capture the folks coming in (visitors), convert them to regular attendees and then engage them in the work of the church to develop a sense of ownership and fulfillment so that they then chose to become members.  Then as members we need to continue to help engage them in a dialog to understand and meet their needs as best we can.

My personal experience is even in a small church you need to leverage technology and simple business logic/best practices/work flow to enable personal contact points, follow through, accountability and in the end a high level of "customer" service.  In my opinion these issues need to be addressed before doing any additional outreach or spending money on marketing, PR or events.  If the systems are not in place to better handle people inside and outside --  then move to fix those issues first before trying to open any floodgates.

As far as marketing and community outreach -- that is a pretty independent process of fixing the system outside of properly plugging the new system into the marketing efforts.  The congregation needs to have its own marketing/outreach plans and execute on them but in our case the limited budget means PR, events, signs and redesigned web and print materials to incorporate the new "workflows" and help funnel people though the redesigned system.

I'd like to do a two pronged plan with community outreach -- hopefully we can create a marketing co-op and a wider campaign with other nearby Episcopal congregations.  Yes, St. A's needs to have and execute on its own marketing plan -- but in reality any significant outreach will need to be coordinated.  Hopefully this pilot project or co-op marketing could then see some backing from the Dioceses as well.  We'd happily share and cross train other congregations within the co-op on our new system as part of the deal.

So I'm starting this blog to kick start conversations, archive information and open myself to the relationships that could hopefully develop across all boundaries to better understand and serve.