Knowing our audience is a tough task

Too often, we are tempted to say our audience is everybody. And then we design programming to meet the needs of everybody. Imagine how hard it must be for a global company to define their audience—billions of potential customers.

Let’s consider Apple. Their 2017 revenue was $233 billion, but their entire product line can fit on a conference room table.

What’s your church’s annual revenue? Is it safe to assume you offer more “products” than Apple does? (We once attended services at a church with about 250 people in worship; more than 48 ministries were being celebrated on banners.)

One Sunday afternoon we gathered with a group of church pastors, staff, and lay leaders.

We asked everyone in attendance to to recall as much as they could about what had been communicated (or in their cases, promoted) during that day’s services, which had concluded just two hours prior. Some in the room looked nervous. OK, everyone in the room looked nervous. Collectively, they admitted not being able to remember at least half of what was printed in their bulletins, calendars, newsletters, or shared from the pulpit. And what they could remember was largely predictable: bake sales, golf tournaments, pot lucks, receptions…hardly the stuff of disciple-making.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, 10 months prior to the introduction of the iMac, and 12 years after his ouster from the company he co-founded, he found a company selling bake sales, golf tournaments, potlucks, and receptions. As he told Newsweek’s Steven Levy: “Apple needed a plan.” Jobs scrawled the names of Apple’s mid-1997 product line on a whiteboard. There’s the 1400, the 3400, the 6500…15 in all. “And you know how many we make now?’’ he asks. “Zero.’’ This is the advice we gave to that room of church leaders two years ago: Don’t just quit communicating so much stuff…quit doing so much stuff. Because it’s just that—stuff.

We partner with churches to offer Full-Service Communications and Marketing services, but the real work we do is help them move communications from being a promoter to being a creator and collaborator. Our free resource, Kinetic Communications, offers a framework for communicating what matters and eliminating what doesn’t.