One Rockin’ Church Marketing Idea & Outreach: Hugging People With Hershey’s

Pastor Jay Jones of The Pentecostals in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is implementing one rockin’ church marketing idea called Hug Grand Rapids, using Hershey’s Hugs, special promo business cards, and a specially-themed website to both reach out into the community and generate exposure for their church.

This church marketing idea (aka outreach ministry) really impresses me because they are using the web for ministry (their specially-themed site rocks of simplicity, beauty and function), empowering their people to evangelize, and most likely, are going to garner some great exposure and PR out of it all.

Anyway, here’s the summary of this project in Jay’s words, with some highlights I added to emphasize some of the things I love about this strategy:

Last year for Valentine’s Day, our small (but big-minded) church bought bags of Hershey’s Hugs, hundreds of ziplock snack bags, and confetti, and printed up business cards with our “Hug” graphic.

We assembled several hundreds of these bags during a church fellowship time, putting 4 Hugs in each, a small spot of confetti, and a card.

We then bagged up 25 of these into plastic grocery bags, and gave them to our saints to distribute on Valentine’s Day.

The goal was for each person in the church to distribute Hugs to as many people as they could. We specifically targeted people who were working in stores, restaurants, and other places of service. The reason for this was to be a blessing to those who were having to sacrifice their own time to make sure others had a good holiday.

The results were incredible!!! We received so much positive feedback that we almost couldn’t keep up with it. Phone calls came in, our website traffic went through the roof, stories from our saints about people breaking down in tears at the kindness … a few of the workers, cashiers, waitresses and waiters that got a “hug” actually came back and returned it with a real hug with tears in their eyes.

I have to report that nobody visited our church directly from receiving a “Hug” bag last year, but several people have come as a by-product of it … these workers went home and shared our church’s kindness with other people, and our church has been blessed because of it. We have a very, very good reputation in our community not just because of this outreach, but because of the consistency in doing this type of outreach.

And I can’t begin to explain the impact that outreach alone had on our own people. They have turned into an outreach machine!! People that never thought they could do evangelism are now the biggest contributors! People who had a bad taste in their mouth at rejection and vowed never to do outreach again (believe it) now do personal evangelism consistently … as a personal ministry! My saints asked me to modify the card from saying, “Have a great Valentines Day” to just “Have a great day” so they could give more out all through the year. One of our ladies has taken it on as her personal ministry and regularly assembles and gives these bags away. She’s making a difference in people’s lives!

It’s awesome stuff, guys!

Now here’s this year’s twist!

Every “Hug” package that our church gives out this year will have a link to www.HugGrandRapids.com on the business card, and will encourage people to, “Send a virtual hug to a friend.”

This year, I registered the Hug Grand Rapids domain name and am in the process of designing and building a new website that will allow people to visit it, type in an email, name and message to a friend, and send them a “virtual hug”. The site will email a “hug” to the friend with a link BACK to the site, where that person can in turn send a hug to other people. The site will have a running tally of how many hugs have been sent. Every email sent will have a link that says, “Sponsored by the Pentecostals of Kentwood” which will promote our church’s website.

This year, our goal is give away at least 1,000 hug packages on Valentine’s Day at our local restaurants, shopping malls and hospitals.

We’re having our people “adopt” an area of town so we don’t overlap efforts.

We’re hoping that the website will continue year-round because of its novelty, and will be a constant reminder and advertisement for our church.

So … there you have it… this year’s Hug Grand Rapids campaign!

I’m not sure how much Hershey’s Hugs cost … but here are some of estimated costs I figured with this outreach:

>> Domain Name & 1-Year of Website Hosting: $80-100 a year
>> Registration form: $9-24 a month (using Icebrrg, the online form registrations site, there’s no need to find a coder or do any real coding. Just set it up with Icebrrg and copy and paste the code into your HTML page. Cost would vary depending on how many registrations you get.)
>> Design costs: Depends on how complex, but for one page, you could easily get this done for $100 or less. Of course, ‘you get what you pay for’ and Jay’s site is really nice. :-)

January 22, 2007 · Filed Under Church Marketing, Rockin' Web Sites

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6 Responses to “One Rockin’ Church Marketing Idea & Outreach: Hugging People With Hershey’s”

  1. Rich Schmidt on January 25th, 2007 7:23 am

    Thanks for sharing this idea! I might just borrow it! :)

    BTW, for your cost breakdown…

    Depending on your hosting plan, the only additional cost may be the domain name ($9-$10/year). We can host unlimited domains and sites at ours, for $96/year. Adding another website costs $0.

    I’d also suggest that if you’re going to pay someone to code the page… you might as well pay them a little extra to code the registration form. You could pay them $200 instead of $100 as a one-time cost and skip the $9-$24/month you’d pay to icebrrg for the rest of your life. :)

  2. Paul Giertz on January 27th, 2007 7:40 pm

    This is a wonderful idea that is “outside the walls” of church!

    Very innovative!

  3. Michael Wood on January 27th, 2007 11:29 pm

    We certainly are going to try giving out the “hugs”. We will let you know the results from Bay City. Great Idea! How do you come up with this stuff?

    God Bless you brother Jay

  4. Mary Dupre on January 29th, 2007 4:15 am

    Love your ideas . What a “sweet” way to spread the message.
    Lord Bless you and Your family and church as you spread the “Hugs”

  5. Jay Jones on January 30th, 2007 8:48 am

    If anyone is interested in having my hug site modified for their church, please let me know. For $300, I will customize the header and site text for your Church and City, and host it for a year. You may contact me through our church’s contact form at http://www.mypentecost.com/contact.php

    Also, I can offer high-resolution business card graphics for your own hug campaign as well, which you can provide to a professional printer.

    God bless you! And thank you, Cory, for the article and the effort you put into this ministry.

    Pastor Jay Jones

  6. Pamela Volker on January 31st, 2007 9:42 pm

    I think this outreach is awesome! I am going to try it at our church in Ft.Wright,KY.

    Ask local businesses like grocery stores, Wal Mart, Meijer’s, & Krogers to donate the candy and in exchange you will advertise their business in your church bulletin. Local grocery stores & stores have donated candy for our outreach programs.
    Good luck on meeting your goal and continue the good work of showing God’s love!

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