Bad Easter Series? Bad Easter Marketing?

I’ve been getting some constructive criticism the last week or so from some pastors I really respect about our Easter series. We are launching a series on The Apostle’s Creed. Our thought process was we can talk about a topic that will connect with a large portion of dechurched in our area. Our area is one of the fastest growing areas in America and as such we have a lot of northerners moving to the area who grew up Lutheran, Catholics, Methodists, etc. who have been out of church for years but growing up in church would connect with this topic. We are going to show how understanding what you believe affects the way you live. In our minds, it is going to be a very practical series.

However, we also understand that no one is coming to our Easter series because we advertise a series on The Creed. So we chose to push in our advertising Easter 06 and push the uniqueness of Ridge Stone as opposed to the series. This has been our approach for the most part since we started The Stone. We have 9 times out of 10 pushed the church over the series.

I never thought much about it until talking to Tony today. In our conversation we made the exact opposite statement. He said, “We (Granger) have always pushed the series over the church.”

I have been thinking about this a lot today and I actually went back and reviewed our monthly marketing. We have the inside back cover of a large magazine every month in which we market the church. 5 times we have done our entire ad focused on a sermon series. I pulled up the number of responses on the communication cards for every month since we started. I wanted to see how many people say they found out about us from the ad. We keep up with this so it was easy. Our 1st 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 6th lowest months in regards to response to the ad were the months we pushed a series instead of the church. That is 5 of the 6 lowest!

We have MUCH better results when we push the church or a big day instead of pushing a series. I don’t know why this is but I think some of it has to do with the fact that in ALL our ads where we push the church we use a lot of pictures of the church and that connects with people. Most churches use a lot of stock photos, they push their series with some cheesy graphic, etc. I think people enjoy seeing the photos. I think it answers a lot of questions about our church. They see that people are dressed casual, they see our kids laughing, they see we have a full band, etc.

Maybe we don’t know how to market a series. I don’t know…

What is your thoughts?
Do you market series or church more?