In an article for pastors.com, Travis Sinks offers several suggestions for ways to get maximum effectiveness in following up on visitors to your church. Here are his first four ideas:
You can’t use information you don’t have.
One of church’s greatest faults in follow-up is not getting information to begin with. If you plan on giving every visitor a phone call, or card in the mail, you first have to get this information from them.
Use every piece of information you ask for.
The second greatest fault in follow-up is asking for information that you never use. If you ask people to give you their address, phone number, and email, and then only give them a phone call, you make people wonder what you ever did with their address or email. Did you sell the information? You obviously didn’t use it. You simply wasted their time by having them give you information you didn’t even use. So let’s make sure that this Easter, we only ask for information we plan on utilizing.
Thank them for coming.
Nothing is more off-putting then an unloving, unthankful church. We are excited when people choose to take time to seek God, and we should make sure that we tell them we are. This helps lower their guard as most people think of churches as looking down on them for not coming every week, when we’re actually celebrating that they came at all.
Give them a next step.
As I’ve written about before regarding your website’s call to action, it’s extremely important to ask for a specific response from people, and this includes your church’s follow-up procedure. This could be made easy by having them check a box if they’re interested in joining a midweek study, or serving, or another church group as they give their information so you have a specific thing to tell them about. Otherwise, you need to decide what your default is going to be. Read the full article