Maximize Your Church’s Easter Impact: 5 Strategies to Boost Attendance and Engagement

The root of the problem often lies in how we communicate event information to our congregation. 

Two common scenarios can hinder attendance:

1. Information Overload: When potential visitors search for your church online, they may feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of event information, leading them to abandon their search and potentially not attend your services.
2. Missed Connections: Even regular churchgoers can miss crucial event details, such as the time and date of your Easter services, despite your team’s best efforts to promote them through various channels.

To address these challenges, we recommend implementing a simple ‘AND’ strategy that complements your existing marketing efforts (e.g., flyers, social media posts, banners, telephone chains) with a centralized, digital, up-to-date, and easy-to-manage online calendar.

While you may already have a church calendar on your website, consider the following:

1. Is your calendar reliably up-to-date with all events and changes, even when things inevitably shift?
2. Can viewers filter your events to see only what they need, or do you have an Easter-specific calendar that prominently displays relevant information without distractions?
3. Are your calendar visuals designed to be engaging, easy to use, and optimized for both desktop and mobile devices, guiding users to take the next steps?

Here are five tips to improve attendance at your Easter events and throughout the year:

1. Implement an ‘AND’ strategy, using various media and channels to promote your events while directing traffic to a central, church-owned calendar page.
2. Ensure your calendar page is user-friendly and encourages visitors to take action.
3. Create filtered calendar views for specific events like Easter, tailoring information to each location for multi-campus churches.
4. Use a design that leads to conversion, aligning with your digital strategy, event-specific goals, and unique church branding.
5. Maintain an up-to-date calendar using a workflow that is easy for your team to manage, leveraging integrations with your Church Management System (ChMS) or tools like Display.Church.

Display.Church integrates with Breeze ChMS, Planning Center (PCO), Church Community Builder / Pushpay (CCB), and Google Calendar to provide your church website with a filterable, automatically synced calendar that requires minimal management.

Here are two ways Display.Church can help you this Easter 

Idea #1: A unique calendar

The concept here is to create an ‘Easter events only’ calendar view. If you are using Google calendar, you could create a new calendar named ‘Easter’ and populate it with your events and church services. If you are using one of our integrations, you can use the Display.Church filtering options to just display Easter-related events. For example: an ‘Easter’ location in Pushpay/CCB or an ‘Easter’ tag in Breeze or Planning Center (PCO). No matter how you do it, this specific calendar can form its own landing page on your website or use the automatically-generated QR code.

Idea #2: An event alert

You know those banner announcements which (usually) appear at the top of website pages? In Display.Church, we have named them event alerts. Display.Church event alerts link automatically to your event and are  always up-to-date. Once Easter is over, the event alert will disappear by itself. You can display event alerts on all the pages of your website, just the home page, or on a specific page. In addition, the alert can appear at the top or bottom of the page. It can stick there or stay while scrolling. Your event alert can display immediately or after a short time (you tell us), as well as how long it will remain visible during a website visit. Of course, you can customize your event alert with content and branding.

https://display.church/event-alerts-webinar/ 

Benefits

By incorporating a visually striking, event-specific calendar with a built-in landing page URL in your emails and social media posts, you can make it easy for congregation members and first-time guests to quickly find the information they need while feeling connected to your brand and mission. And those who find you online through paid ads or an organic search can quickly find your weekend service or Easter program using our Event Alerts. 

Free Trial

Display.Church is offering a free trial (no credit card required) to help your church maximize its impact this Easter. Use the invite code EASTER2024 to get started at Display.Church and discover how our integrations can help you create a beautiful, effective online presence.