5 Questions with Ministry Marketing Coach Chris Forbes

I first met Chris Forbes of Ministry Marketing Coach last year right before I started this blog. I had seen and heard about Chris’ work and he was one person I wanted to meet as I started my role as a church communications director.

… then on my first day, he left a business card for me. Needless to say, we struck up a great friendship that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. We try to meet often for coffee, “venting” and talking about church communications and marketing. It’s always a blast.

Chris is one of the best marketing strategists I’ve ever met. I appreciate his insights so I thought I would do a long overdue question and answer post(s) with him here.

Here goes:

1. Give me your background and experience in church communications and marketing.

I grew up in a marketing family. My mom had a product field marketing firm and I remember seeing many of the national products we know and use now when they were all brand new. I was the first kid on the block to try almost every new product. Except for the girl stuff of course! J

Anyway, I never thought much about that part of my life until I was a missionary in Spain. While still in language school, we were helping in an outreach someone set up, handing out tracts. It wasn’t working well at all and I remember thinking, ” Mom would never handle a field marketing promotion this way.” That’s the first time I started thinking maybe marketing had something to say to help improve Christian outreach.

Since that day in 1996, I have been in constant study mode learning and applying marketing. I have studied and participated in just about every marketing application there is from research to advertising. Back in 2000, I started one of the first ministry marketing website eZines www.newWway.org (offline now, you can see an archive here). We didn’t know much about blogs then, but I have been connected to talking up the benefits of learning good communication strategy on the web since 2000.

I was the media strategist for the overseas office of the International Mission Board before I came to Oklahoma to work in our denominational state office in church planting and evangelistic media strategy. I also do a lot of marketing coaching with churches and organizations through contacts via my blog.

2. What are some good and positive trends in church marketing?

I think it is very positive that ministries are starting to take their marketing beyond just using it for promotional strategies. You see a lot more talk about becoming more contextualized in ministry. Contextualization really comes out of overseas missions and that’s where a lot of the talk about being missional is fueled. (Incidentally, that’s where church growth comes from too.)

I love it when people stop looking for canned approaches to reaching people and move toward really understanding the people they want to reach. The more people in ministry take their eyes off how cool they look in their marketing collateral and put them on real people and the needs of the community, the more success they will have at really reaching people.

3. What are some bad and negative trends in church marketing you see?

Bad marketing is all around us because too many ministry leaders try to use marketing as a program. They ” do some marketing” by creating some kind of ill-conceived ministry outreach, and then use marketing promotion tactics as a programing strategy to try to get people to respond. That’s the main source of bad marketing.

The other source of bad marketing comes from people who are infatuated with their graphic design software and use it to create edgy looking marketing promotional tools that practically nobody, besides the artist, understands. Bad marketing is always “YOU” marketing. That is marketing that talks about (or portrays) how great YOU think you are. Good marketing is ME marketing; it tells me how I and my family will benefit from what is being offered.

4. You talk a lot about the “ministry marketing mindset” … can you explain that?

I think most people already have the potential to be really effective ministry marketers, if only they would experience a change in how they think about marketing. In most people’s view marketing is about creating a message and pushing it to a target audience. A sales approach. Their way of thinking is flawed.

The real mindset you need is to start with the audience, understand them, learn what are the bridges and barriers to reaching them and know as much as you can about their needs. You use the bridges as a means to develop understanding with the people you want to reach so you can open their understanding to the gospel. If the people you want to reach have barriers to understanding, the communicator can contextualize the message to lower the barrier if it is not a compromise to the message. Do this all while meeting real needs in ministry. It’s basic missionary work. Paul said it best, “I am all things to all men…”

The mindset is this: Know the people you want to reach, learn their needs, and link your message to life application solutions to their needs. If you do this people will be attracted to you won’t have to constantly be pushing and selling. Like Peter Drucker said, “Marketing makes selling superfluous.”

5. What does it mean to be a media missionary?

I have had the joy to work with all kinds of media missionaries in my work overseas and in the United States. I wouldn’t say there is one definition for all of the possibilities for what kind of work they do. I know media missionaries who use Chronological Bible Storying as their medium and don’t use other media channels at all. But they certainly are media missionaries. Paul’s use of letter writing and rhetorical speaking tactics in the ancient world in his ministry made him the first media missionary in my opinion.

If I had to define media missionary work, I would say a media missionary is “a person who is a missionary using media.” Kind of corny, I know, but really, there are plenty of people using media who don’t know how to think like missionaries.

Good media missionaries have the missional ministry mindset and they use media strategically to accomplish their outreach. Because this work involves using channels traditionally used by marketers, a media missionary also understands and adapts the marketing concept in their work.Thus, they have the “ministry marketing mindset”.

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Note: Check out Chris’ offer for free church marketing coaching here.

July 29, 2007 · Filed Under Church Marketing, Q&As

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One Response to “5 Questions with Ministry Marketing Coach Chris Forbes”

  1. Enquiring Minds Want to Know! Cory Miller interviews MMC | Ministry Marketing Coach on July 30th, 2007 5:21 am

    […] good friend and supremo blog-meister Cory Miller who created ChurchCommunicationsPro.com has just interviewed me on his blog. Cory is a very sharp guy (I even cast him a commercial I worked on recently). He’s […]

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