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January 27, 2021

Determining Your Audience

By New Churches Team

When you are creating communication plans and strategies, if you don’t know who your audience is, you might as well take those plans and strategies and throw them out the window. You need to know your audience so you know how to plan and strategize to effectively reach your audience. 

Demographics

When you are trying to determine who your audience is, you need to know things like age, location, gender, marital status, etc. You want to know as much information about your audience as possible. Gathering this information will build a complete picture of the people that are in the pew and provide details of the demographics you are trying to reach. 

Church Database

A simple way to collect that information is to create a church database. The old school way to do it is a printed church directory. You may have had one of these in your home that included pictures of every member, their birthdays, and contact information. All of that information is electronic now. Or at least should be. You need to create a database and make sure the information is in there. More importantly, the information in the database needs to be updated regularly to ensure you have the most accurate information about the people in the pew. 

If you can use this information to determine who is in your small groups, you can figure out how to best target those small groups. Is the majority female? Is it people above 40? Married? Single? You can pull that information from the database if it is properly maintained and up to date. 

So, how do you start a church database if you don’t already have one? Simply search online for church membership database options. Call a church near you and ask for their recommendations. Once you have a database in place, you need to get people to put in their information. Provide people a survey or create a marketing campaign about getting to know your members. You want everyone to put in their information. This is a tedious task. It isn’t easy. But once you get started, it is going to give you a wealth of information about your audience. 

Maintenance

Once your database is set up, you then have the task of maintaining it. 

To read the remainder of this article, and to listen to the entire video training with Darrel Girardier, click here for the full videos and post.

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