.jpg) When it comes to marketing events and boosting meeting attendance, planners for faith-based groups usually have one thing in common—a small budget, if any at all. While in the past that could severely limit meeting planner struggling to build attendance, it’s not necessarily the case today if they are willing to take advantage of online opportunities.
Charis Ministries, charged by the Chicago Province of the Society of Jesus with reaching out to younger men and women in their 20s and 30s, has gained a national reputation for its ability to create communications and boost attendance to its retreats and spiritual events.
“Ideally, a ministry should be able to market its events,” says Lauren Berke, communication coordinator. “But the reality is that most ministries don’t have the staff or the money for a basic marketing program. In the case of trying to reach younger audiences, Berke says that ministries have to remember that “we live in an age when our target market is being reached by messages like iPod ads,” and that the message to this market needs to be clean, clear, and often online.
“We try to encourage ministries to establish an online presence, to have a website, or to belong to an online community, or to allow people to be able to register for events online,” Berke says. “Ministries have to be able to reach this audience in a place that is familiar to them. If they’re not online, they really don’t exist.”
Cris Canning, CMP, the owner of Hospitality Ink, has created a niche for herself in the meetings and convention industry as a marketing expert, and is a big proponent of the way social media can be used as a cost-effective marketing tool. Social media refers to those online tools—such as blogs, wikis, message boards, and online communities—that people can use to communicate with each other. And the importance of social media should be apparent to planners from faith-based groups because, Canning says, “most everything having to do with the Internet is free.”
Although it may seem apparent, a crucial part of developing any kind of attendance-building marketing plan is doing some preliminary homework. Understand your organization: What is its reputation? What are its weaknesses? “You should look at your group as if it were a competing group,” Canning advises. Understand the competition: This, Canning says, could include anything a potential attendee could do with his or her time, other than attending a group’s event.
According to Canning, the key for a successful marketing plan is to define that target market as well as you possible can—age, gender, geographic location, all play into it. Then you should be ready to start using social media, which really is “all about building relationships.”
The community-building value of social networks is readily apparent to the teenager or twenty-something who uses Facebook or MySpace, and should make this kind of virtual community an important destination for planners who are focused on planning youth events, for example. But social networking is not just a young person’s phenomenon. Over 40 percent of Facebook users are between the ages of 35 and 55, while over two-thirds of MySpace users are older than 25.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of social networking sites on the web today, including some that are faith-based. For example, just this past June a site called Faithbook was launched on Facebook with the announced aim of encouraging multifaith understanding through the social networking site. A site called Youthroots is aimed at leaders of faith-based youth groups who can create their own groups. Members can perform searches through Youthroots to coordinate with other groups that share common interests or geographic location—and do a little bit of event marketing by posting event calendars.
But the groups don’t have to be faith-based in order to prove useful to event planners. Giving meeting attendees the opportunity to network before and after an event is always a good attendance builder, says Canning, and social networking sites like Facebook give planners the perfect tool. By creating a special Facebook page, even a blog, for the event, attendees will be able to communicate with each other on the topics of their choice.
Your Own Network?
If you’re unhappy with the social networking choices available, create your own. “Blogging is certainly part of the social networking world,” says Canning. “If you don’t have one, start one up.” As for your own social networking site, there are obvious prohibitions. It involves a certain amount of technical expertise and expense. But there are some places online that allow you to create your own site. One of Canning’s favorite sites is Ning.com, an online development platform that Canning says is readily accessible to any novice web user.
A Ning social network can be either public or private, and can contain blogs, forums, and video and photo sharing. It has become so popular that Ning estimates that within a couple of years it will be hosting four million social networking sites.
While most social networking sites offer free content, many do provide options that contain fees.
Canning suggests using as much free content as possible, then making an informed decision on whether to start paying. For example, Ning’s services are free as long as a network creator agrees to host Ning’s advertising and have Ning.com be part of its web address. If you want to create an ad-free social network (or even profit from your own advertising), it will cost $20 per month, and a further $5 per month if you want to mask the Ning.com address.
What is Social Media?
There are probably as many definitions of the term “social media” as there are users of this communication source. The simplest explanation is that social media refers to the use of the Internet for people to share information, opinions, and experiences. It differs from the traditional media, such as newspapers, magazines, television, and radio, in that social media allows user–through various Internet tools—to interact with each other. These tools include what are known as wikis, blogs, online forums, and social networks.
Wikis: A wiki is a website designed to be an open, collaborative forum allowing anyone to contribute. It allows users to add, remove, or edit content. Wikipedia, the free Internet encyclopedia, is a prominent example.
Blogs: The term for web log, this is a website–usually maintained by an individual–that can be basically anything that individual wants it to be. For example, it can be a journal, a news source, or a place to write opinion pieces. Blogs usually have entries that are posted in reverse chronological order and have links to other blogs and other web sources. What can make them interactive is giving readers the ability to leave comments in response to the blogger’s posts or articles.
Online forums: These are Internet systems where users can read, write, and respond to messages on certain subjects. Forums usually consist of members who register into the system and submit topics–or “threads”–for discussion. There are many group/forum sites on the Internet, such as Google Groups.
Social Networks: These are usually web-based online communities that bring together people who share some kind of interest or activity. The beauty of these online social networks is that they allow people with common interests to interact on a global scale. These social networks usually give people a variety of ways to interact with each other, such as emailing and instant messaging. Commonly known online social networks include Facebook and MySpace.
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