I shared some thoughts on how to set up your church’s budget a while back (click here for that post), and today I’d like to give you the first of two “hard-learned” tips about how to spend that budget.

I want to address specifically how you spend the line item in your church’s budget marked “advertising” or “promotion” or whatever you have chosen to call the funds that you have set aside to spend on getting the word out about your church.

You do have an advertising budget, don’t you? If not, that may be a topic for a different post…

Too often I see well-meaning church leaders take their already scarce advertising budget and make two painful (and completely avoidable) mistakes that lead to very few, if any, results in their churches.

Here is the first of those two painful mistakes (and how to avoid it):

Advertising Mistake #1: Spreading the advertising funds so thin that none of it makes an impact.

I see this all the time.  Your church carves out a few thousand dollars to spend on advertising for the year and then tries to streeetttccchhh those funds to do something each month.

The end result is that very few people are even presented with your advertising message (whatever media you choose  to use) and you end up disillusioned about the whole process.

Solution Principle #1: Focus every dime of your advertising budget on your church’s Big Days.

Like I teach in The Ignite Seminar, I believe churches can maximize their evangelistic efforts by building to four “Big Days” each year (one in February, Easter Sunday, one in the summer, and one just after school starts).

By focusing your advertising on these special Big Day opportunities, you can afford to touch more people with your ads AND you can boldly avoid….

Advertising Mistake #2 (which I’ll share in Part 2 on Monday)

P.S. For more information on planning, preparing, promoting, executing and following up on “Big Days” at your church, check out The Ignite Seminar.