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In our last post, we observed one church’s experience using GuestView to manage their guest follow-up. One of the recommendations we made was to provide a welcome packet for your church’s guests. Below we’ve put together some ideas for your visitor welcome packets.
In the comments below, please add your own thoughts. How do you build your visitor welcome packets?
Presentation
- A simple portfolio folder. This will be easy for your guests to bring home with them. It’s worth taking care to find a good-quality folder to leave a good first impression.
- A gift basket.
- A coffee mug with your church logo. You can use the mug much like a gift basket.
- A small tote bag.
Content
Here are some ideas to get started. You should be selective so that you don’t overwhelm your guests with too much information!
- A welcome letter from your senior pastor.
- An informational brochure on your denomination, church-planting network or family of churches.
- An informational brochure on your church: your statement of faith, mission and vision, history, etc.
- A list of your church’s ministries and services, to help your guests connect and find ways to serve or receive care.
- A directory or map of your church’s small groups or Sunday school classes.
- Invitations to upcoming meetings or events.
- A free book on Christian basics, such as Jerry Bridges’ The Gospel for Real Life, John Piper’s Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die, or C. J. Mahaney’s Cross-Centered Life.
- Instead of a book, you could include a gift certificate for a free book at your church’s book store or book table.
- A brochure or tract that clearly explains the gospel. An outstanding resource for this is Matthias Media’s Two Ways to Live.
- A CD sampler of some of your church’s songs or hymns.
- A card with information about your church’s online resources. If you are already using GuestView to manage connections with your guests, you can include this sort of information in an automatic welcome email that you send to your guests. Such an email could also point to a guest feedback survey.
- A nice pen with your church logo imprinted on it.
For any printed materials, you should use high quality paper stock and printing; also be sure to have someone copy edit your materials to look for obvious errors. Quality and professionalism in presentation goes a long way toward making a good first impression!
Delivery
You can deliver welcome packets to guests in a number of ways:
- Hand them out at a guest welcome desk in your lobby.
- Have your ushers distribute them to guests who raise their hand during the service.
- Make them available at key traffic flow points in your building (for example, at all entrances to the auditorium).
- Have your welcome team hand them out to guests at the front door.
- Make them available to guests at a guest reception after the service.
GuestView allows you to assign guests to your church’s follow-up team for making calls. You may also want to make other individuals or groups in the church aware of guests that relate to their geographic location or their area of ministry, but without having to actually assign guests to those individuals for calling. We’ll discuss how you can do this below.
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First, you should make sure that the tags you have set up in GuestView allow you to mark the guests of interest to a small group or ministry team. Tags are the checkboxes that appear to the right when you edit a guest’s information. For example, you might create tags such as “Interests:Singles ministry” for your singles’ ministry, or “Location:West shore” and “Location:Downtown” to mark guests in particular small group regions. We have written a tutorial on tags that will help you set up your tags to suit your needs.
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You should train the individuals who enter guest response cards to select tags appropriately. For example, they can transfer a “Singles’ ministry” checkbox on the response card to the “Singles’ ministry” tag in GuestView. For geographic locations, they will need to look up guest addresses on a map to determine what region a guest lives in.
Tip: If you save a guest’s information, including their address, GuestView displays a link to a map of their address. You can click this link to display their address, and then edit the guests’ tags directly on that page.
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You can then add your small group leaders or ministry team leaders to GuestView. We have written brief instructions on adding users to GuestView. One thing you should consider doing is putting your ministry team leaders or small group leaders in a separate group to themselves. The GuestView group name is one of the pieces of information you type into the user’s page when you add them, and the group name is usually displayed next to their name throughout GuestView. This way, when someone assigns guests to callers, it will be clear to them that the small group or ministry team leaders are part of a separate group and not on your calling team. That way, these leaders will not accidentally receive reminders to call a guest.
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Now that your small group or ministry team leaders have access to GuestView, you can instruct them to set up an automatic email report for guests that are of interest to them. They can do this by clicking the “Reports” menu item in GuestView. Then, by clicking “Add or change report,” they can choose to receive an email report for any of the tags that you created in step 1 above.
GuestView allows you to choose email reports on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Gospel Software 