This guidance is designed for those who oversee a parish Adult Formation program whether that program is offered for several weeks or spans across a number of months. If you have an effective program that suffers from meager attendance, your starting place is attention to advertising that is compelling, proactive, and consistent.
Effective and ongoing program and topic advertising makes a radical difference in terms of attracting attendance. Provided here are optimal and time-tested advertising content strategies as well as samples that the reader is most welcome to utilize.
Advertising your Adult Faith Formation Program Weekly
Before we dive in, if weekly advertising for your required (or optional) sessions is not a strategy that you are presently implementing, that’s a change that you need to immediately tend to if you are suffering from small numbers and/or inconsistent attendance.
Proactive and Compelling Adult Faith Formation Program Advertising
Our three decades of solid attendance outcomes, is rooted in a range of factors. We focus in this article on the first step which is effectively communicating to very busy and distracted people who are pulled in multiple directions that the sessions are worth their time.
Something is worth your time if it addresses a critical question and/or solves a vital need. Our Catholic Faith absolutely supplies both but most efforts primarily suffer from ineffective and/or unclear communication of this reality.
To that point, all too often parish advertising is both dry and generic leading potential attendees to immediately lose interest. Worse, this type of advertising does a great disservice to both the potential recipient and the best of everything our Faith has to offer. Those who encounter such advertising are not inspired by or confronted with WHY any particular area of our Faith majorly matters.
Further, ineffective advertising reinforces for many that they have a sufficient understanding of the basics. In short, people don’t know what they don’t know. Effective advertising needs to flip that dynamic.
Bottom line, attention to proactive and compelling advertising makes all the difference in effectively addressing these obstacles and getting someone’s attention.
Communicating WHY People Should Make Time for Catholic Adult Faith Formation
In addition to putting across WHY any particular aspect of our Faith matters and not a waste of their precious time, it’s important, as well, to balance giving potential attendees a vital reason to make time for a session and/or program while affording them flexibility. Put another way, it’s helpful if you strive to achieve a healthy tension between compelling a soul to want to take advantage of what you’re offering while affording them the “mental” flexibility to do so.
Use Adult Faith Formation Advertising to Evangelize!
Lastly, one additional goal in our advertising is to ensure that even if a soul does not end up taking advantage of a particular session, they do gain a new insight about the Catholic Faith from the advertisement itself.
Sample Weekly Email Blast Template for Advertising Your Adult Faith Formation Program
Provided below is a sample of one of our weekly email- blast topic advertisements that strives to accomplish all of the above and more including:
*WHY the topic matters
*What crucial need it fulfills
*What problem it “solves”
*Alerts you to the fact that what you think you know may have entirely “missed the mark” or has been incomplete
*The session (or program) is worth your precious time!
*The commitment is flexible and not binding
NOTE: Following this first full email blast advertisement (which includes both that particular week’s topic AND details about the overall program), I have provided here two additional topic advertisements as well as one of our monthly bulletin advertisements to extend to the reader a range of advertising approaches and options!
Further Questions?
To Adult Formation Coordinators that need assistance in this area, don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any follow up questions and/or would like me to send on to you any additional sample topic advertisements!
Free Adult Faith Formation Sample Advertisements
Click below to download 2 free email blasts and a bulletin announcement.
Sample Adult Faith Formation Email Blast #1
Sample Adult Faith Formation Email Blast #2
More Adult Faith Formation Posts from Peggy:
Editor’s note: Adult Faith Formation (or OCIA) has replaced the label “RCIA.”