Connection Card

Nelson Searcy of The Journey church in NYC, has a church development group called Churchleaderinsights.com. On it he teaches best practices of the church in North America. He is tenacious about finding these best practices. That tenacity probably was fueled by his business studies at Duke University.

One of the things I've been studying lately is the assimilation process. Nationally, the best average for retaining first time visitors is 25%. One out of four guests are likely to come back a second time. That is the same for growing churches across the nation regardless of overall attendance. Growing churches see a 5:100 ratio of first time guests to regular attenders, and have a follow-up of assimilation strategy in place. We have a system of follow-up worked out, and in the last couple months of using it, we are seeing a good return.

The centerpiece of our effort is called the Connection Card. This is a tool that is recommended by Searcy, and is used at growing churches all over the nation. The biggest key? Information. We have been surprised in just the first few weeks how people are able to communicate. We have a means now of receiving changing information like e-mail addresses, learning that people are interested in our membership class, volunteering for ministry, sharing prayer requests, and asking for counseling. But while that serves the regular attender's needs, the other side of the card is providing the information needed from guests.

Not every guest is going to stay, but what about the ones that want to stay. We have to be able to harvest information to help them navigate their way into our community. Providing name and contact information is a huge advantage in helping them connect. It's so important, that we take deliberate time at the end of each service to ask people to fill it out. Everyone. Everytime.

We've decided that it would be better to deliberately repetitive than haphazardly responsive to the people who attend, and especially our guests. We ask everyone to drop their card in a basket on the way out of FLRS 101. You know, it's interesting that even though, most of the cards don't give us any information because their regular attenders who don't have any change in their information, the action of them filling it out encourages guests to fill theirs out. Seeing regular attenders drop their card in encourages the first, second or third time guest to drop theirs in. So for the SRC, the connection of new guests is the responsibility of all of us.

Thanks for participating, and helping us grow.

--Ben