Marketing and Coffee Hour

[Guest post by Murphy Daley]

“Coffee is for closers.”

In the famous line from Glenngarry Glen Ross, Alex Baldwin encapsulates the cutthroat world of sales. These desperate salesmen will do anything for leads, to get a sale. All the emotional manipulation and fact fudging is fair game when trying to get that sale.

Salespeople are not trusted, not those kinds of salespeople. But everywhere I turn I see advertisements on how to do the RIGHT kind of sales and marketing.

I have something to market and sell. I have my blog, and last year I published by fourth book. I’m so proud of it! The Russian American School of Tomorrow  is beautiful and brilliant, and I want to get it in front of readers.

But not like THAT, not with bait-and-switch slimy methods. There has to be a better way.

I found this free course online from Hubspot, an online marketing company, called “Inbound Certification.”

I didn’t even know what it meant, but I wanted to learn more about marketing and it was free. I have to say, it was really useful. Not hard, and it shed some light on the spam emails I keep getting. These “free ebook” offers and, “sign up for my mailing list of free tips on X” have a strategy in mind.

There is a revolution well underway, to leave behind that hard sell “Coffee is for closers!” culture. “Inbound Sales” means people come to you, because you draw them into your sphere by providing some value (a free guide, perhaps) or some service that the potential customer wants.

Inbound sales requires that the sales and marketing team know the life and story of the customers as they come looking for what the team is offering. They call it the “buyer’s journey”, and the goal is to provide the right sort of message, service and value at the different moments in the journey.

Each step matters, and it is expected that some customers—no, RELATIONSHIPS– will slip away and that a certain percentage will become paying customers.

Retaining customers is just as important as getting new ones, so the team pays attention to delighting the buyers even after they “close.”

This is all fascinating as I work to expand my audience and create relationships on social media and in real life for my messages.

Coffee is not just for closers.

All through these classes, I couldn’t help but think…Service and value are church words.

Relationships are the whole point when it comes to a worshipping community.

And when it comes to coffee, at church the coffee is for everybody.

I look at how things have changed in the last decade, and some people have not kept up.

I still get offers for a free weekend in Vegas if I come listen to a presentation about a fabulous time share opportunity. It’s like a time capsule.

And for church–

I would like for the church to understand the value we have. Of COURSE we have inbound relationships all the time.

This way of understanding the journey–and what message and service is required at different steps along the way–is Christianity’s specialty. It’s okay to remember that, and not get buried under the committees and session meetings.

In this post-Christendom world, did the wider world just co-opt what we’ve had all along?

 

thanks Rocky for letting me guest post on your blog! People can stay in relationship with me in these ways:

Steady-State Thinking vs. Church Growth

It’s a weird week when Douglas Rushkoff releases his new book raising the alarm about our culture’s constant growth mentality and two prominent church figures spit on small churches. I’m part of a small subset of nerdilicious nerds who will take note of both those things.

First Bill Easum said that pastors of churches that aren’t growing are wasting their lives.

And then Andy Stanley told his church that people who prefer small churches are selfish (his measurement for a big enough church is odd: enough junior high and high school students to have separate youth groups).

Throwing Rocks at The Google Bus is not about small vs. big. It’s about big enough. It wants to insist that there is such a thing, despite the Just-Keep-Growing code that runs the digital economy and that, to my view, pervades thinking about church as well. It’s an important argument.

Rushkoff advocates “Steady-State” thinking about companies. I’m applying it to churches. “Instead of thinking of a company as an entity that must continue to show growth,” he writes, “Think of it as an entity that must continue to generate enough revenue to pay its employees.”

He compares the former approach to a football game, where there must be winners and losers. The Steady-State approach he compares to a fantasy role-playing game where the goal is to play as long as possible.

And here’s the real kicker. Research shows that the business that employ a Steady-State approach the best are family businesses. The chair of the Italian rice grower Riso Gallo, a family business, says, “We didn’t get this company from my parents, we are borrowing it from our children.”

Every church I’ve ever served has used “family” language to describe itself. This is a no-brainer.

 

 

 

 

Creating Value Costs. Churches Can Ask People To Pay

This is the second post about Douglas Rushkoff’s new book Throwing Rocks at The Google Bus: How Growth Became The Enemy of Prosperity. Read the first post here.

 

Churches should add value to their communities, not extract it. But how? And if it’s valuable, can we charge for it?

I’m thinking yes we can. Most churches I’ve known have depended upon a pledge-based annual budget, wherein a fall stewardship campaign interprets the coming year’s ministry goals and costs, inviting church members to pledge giving towards those goals. Revenue projections, then, are based on those pledges.

Mostly, it’s about duty: “You’re a part of this community. These important services aren’t possible without your giving.” Even when pledges are solicited with something more than duty, like an appeal to members’ desire to improve their community or to start some new program, stewardship still relies on a communitarian sensibility.

That works less and less well in most churches, even though it’s theologically sound and a vast improvement over a “pay-your-dues” mentality.

Throwing Rocks . . . is making me wonder how churches might add revenue to their budgets that is based on willing payments made by participants who value particular work the church (and more to the point: particular leaders in the church) is doing. Pledging to the operating budget isn’t going anywhere. But could we go all Amanda Palmer on some things?

Palmer got booted off her record label, so she launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new album. She raised $1.2 million from close to 25,000 fans. Rushkoff observes, “She doesn’t need a massive following. She just needs enough people to pay for her music. She may not get rich this way, but she can live on to sing another day.”

Isn’t that a very churchy way of creating value, living on to sing (and feed and tutor and house) another day? What if some of the work churches are doing started to not need the resources from a pledge-based operating budget, but only the support of enough people who care deeply about it for it to sing another day?

 

It’s about more than fundraising. It’s about creating a connection between valuable work and the people who care about it. That takes more than flyers. It takes personal investment from creative men and women who are willing to put themselves on the line for work that matters to then and to ask people to join them.

Church Should Add Value, Not Extract It

Douglas Rushkoff’s new book came out yesterday. It’s called Throwing Rocks at The Google Bus, and I read the first chapter yesterday. On a bus.

Rushkoff’s core contention is that the imperative for growth is killing us. Here’s a money quote from the introduction.

“We are running an extractive, growth-driven economic system that has reached the limits of its ability to serve anyone, rich or poor, human or corporate. Growth is the single, uncontested, core command of the digital economy.”

He’s talking about economics, but I’m thinking about churches (surprise!).

Most churches are not growing. Membership decline has been the reality in most of our churches and denominations for as long as I’ve been in ministry. There is no shortage of anger and guilt among the remaining church members and their leaders over that fact. People like Bill Easum go so far as to assert that pastors of churches that aren’t growing are “wasting their lives.”

I once had an earnest conversation with a pastor who was leading her church out of the PC (USA) who, in addition to theological scruples, was deeply offended by the denomination’s decline. She was moving to a new denomination, she said, because, “I want to be part of something that’s growing.”

I’ve never been able to square Jesus’ claim that one must lose her life in order to find it with the equation of church growth with discipleship. The decline of church participation in our context is an organizational problem, and a deadly serious one at that. Yet a theology of church growth commits the same sins that Rushkoff is laying at the feet of Uber and Facebook: it extracts value from people rather than making value for them.

Growth was never the goal for the Church. Growth serves a bigger purpose, namely the formation of a community of disciples embodying the grace of Jesus. That community ought to thrive. Where it doesn’t we have work to do. Getting it to grow, though, is not the focus of that work.

Rushkoff’s subtitle is great: How Growth Became The Enemy of Prosperity. I wonder if an assumption of growth–and guilt over its absence–has become the enemy of something in our churches.

No Strategy Means All of The Challenges And None of The Opportunities

Putting different groups of people in a room together does not make them mix. The people in those groups will cling to their own. Without some strategy for creating new connections between people who otherwise will not mix, diversity won’t happen. You may even get a worse outcome than you had before.

We introduced a new group of youth to a big youth activity last summer who were from a different part of the city. We were pleased with ourselves for our “diverse” approach. But we didn’t prepare them, and we didn’t prepare the existing group, and we didn’t prepare ourselves as leaders, for the challenges and opportunities inherent in new connections, and so we were caught flat-footed by the challenges and realized few of the opportunities. We lacked a strategy.

Of course, not everything needs to be connected. Positive things running parallel to one another is a fine outcome.

It remains important work, though, to create bonds between groups of people who differ in age, gender, race, and class (Sociologist Robert Putnam called this “bridging social capital“). But just putting those groups in the same room is not a strategy.

How Do We Help Youth Doubt Their Doubts?

Could it be for those of us who work with youth in progressive churches that we need to nudge our students–particularly our high school students–toward the acceptance of things they cannot see more than we presently do?

Youth in the kinds of churches I serve are quite comfortable expressing doubt about some of Jesus’ claims and teachings. That’s good and healthy, and I don’t want to change it. One of the most valuable things we do in youth ministry is create a safe, welcoming space for teenagers to say of the faith, “I don’t understand” or even “I don’t like it.” Let’s keep doing that.

When a 12th grader said of Jesus’ warnings to repent in Luke 13, “I don’t agree” I said, “Good” without even thinking. I can work with that.

But if part of our task as stewards of adolescent faith formation is to carefully push teenagers beyond the conventions of the faith they have grown up with so that they own it for themselves, then a 100% celebration of every utterance of doubt and skepticism doesn’t go far enough. In progressive congregations, doubt is conventional; the faithful are encouraged to regard faith claims with a critical eye. It’s a convention I love, but it’s a convention. I think we have to help youth recognize doubt as a feature of the faith tradition they’re in and to critically grapple with it for themselves–to doubt doubt.

Might we need to start insisting that our older adolescents recognize their expressions of doubt as things that, ironically, have been uncritically adopted?

How do we help youth doubt their doubts?

 

 

I Need More Live Music in My Life

I went to a choral concert my niece was performing in, and it was amazing. I came away with a few observations:

It’s hard to put on a program of excellent choral music without hymns and other religiously-themed pieces. This concert featured “I Sing Because I’m Happy,” “Holy, Holy, Holy,” and “Dirshu Adonai.” Choirs’ repertoires would be badly impoverished if you took away all their religious material.

One of the conductors invited the audience to sing along to “America The Beautiful.” “Singing kids come from singing families!” she chided us, and I wanted to add, “and churches!” I am increasingly grateful for the work the Church does teaching people to sing–particularly young people–because it’s an activity that popular culture has associated with celebrity. The good news must be sung as well as preached. In our day and age, choirs and hymnals are kind of revolutionary.

“Teaching kids to sing is an emergency,” said another conductor. I’ve never heard such urgency associated with arts education. The statement struck me as unassailably true.

Lastly, I need more live music in my life. As someone who accumulates, digests, and shares gobs of recorded music, I barely ever seek out live performances, and that’s a shame. Something like an emotional massage happens when a good piece of music played live hits your ears.

My niece’s choir sang a musical setting of the Yeats poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” and by the third note I was wiping my eyes. It was a gift.

More please.

 

Who Wants To Watch A Show About A Remarkable Character Slowly Becoming Less Remarkable?

Mastery is interesting, in reality as in fiction. My favorite stories to watch and read feature protagonists who strive for something difficult and conflict that showcases characters’ exceptional qualities. Even if the protagonists fail, it’s exciting to watch them bring heroic ambition and ability to bear.

It’s true for the antagonists too. Bad guys are interesting who are masters of their bad guy craft.

What is far less interesting is the story about characters who can’t get out of their own way or who overcome conflict by stifling the mastery of other characters . Holden Caufield doesn’t interest me anymore. I can’t cheer for anyone on Hell’s Kitchen.

What’s bringing this on is Mr. Robot. I’m four episodes in and losing interest, because the protagonist is becoming more and more self-destructive, and, for me, there’s no creativity to be found there. I was riveted by the pilot episode, because even though your protagonist fights certain limitations, his exceptional qualities shine because he’s trying. But then the story becomes about him not trying, and who wants to watch a show about a remarkable character slowly becoming less remarkable. What’s interesting about that?

By contrast, Halt And Catch Fire is about flawed characters chasing mastery of something, alternately failing and succeeding, but frequently treating the audience to displays of genius, commitment, and talent–mastery.

Mastery never gets old.

 

I Emailed Seth Godin And He Totally Responded

I emailed Seth Godin yesterday and he replied within the hour with a direct answer to my query and a couple of links for follow up.

Short. But no so short that he hadn’t paid attention to what I asked him. Clear: “not only this–also that.” Practical but not without heft.

There’s no reason we can’t all engage people with the same level of class and attention. It costs only minutes, and who could argue it doesn’t make us better too?

Bonus: check out Seth’s interview with Tim Ferris (h/t Adam Walker Cleaveland) and his talk to music students at Carnegie Hall.

 

Never Do For Someone What They Can Do For Themselves. Never Do For Someone What They’re Not Willing To Do For Themselves.

 

I heard both of these sentences uttered at this week’s NEXT Church national gathering in Atlanta. The first version one came from Bob Lupton, author of Toxic Charity, a book that has been referenced in at least fifteen of my conversations over the past month. The second was pronounced by Andrew Foster Connors, pastor at Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church in Baltimore and an IAF community organizer with BUILD.

“Not willing.” That changes everything, doesn’t it?

When you refuse to do something for me that I can do myself,  you must assess my ability and decide that it is sufficient to the task that you would otherwise perform on my behalf and that helping me actually hurts me and diminishes my dignity.

But when you refuse to do something for me that I’m not willing to do for myself, you’re assessing not my ability but my intentions. It’s clear I could do it. I just don’t want to. That also hurts me. But it hurts you too, because you resent me and we can never be friends.