HAVE FAITH

Everybody wants to believe in something, and Church Initiative found the light online. The marketer of materials for crisis support groups is using the Web to promote its ministry and help its customers help each other.

After several years of direct mail and telemarketing, the nonprofit realized the Internet was its path.

“Direct mail was expensive, especially for a nonprofit start-up,” says Steve Grissom, president of the Wake Forest, NC-based organization, which offers programs such as DivorceCare and GriefShare to help churches operate recovery support groups. “The Internet was the most significant marketing investment we could make.”

The ministry was founded by Grissom and his second wife Cheryl. His first marriage ended in divorce. “It was an awful experience, as most divorces are,” he says. “I went to my church for help and some people gave me individual love and care.”

It occurred to Grissom — who has a background in television news — that it would be beneficial for churches to have a structured program in place to help people in times of crisis.

“Divorce ministry is hard to do without resources,” Grissom says. “It needs to be an ongoing thing. It can't just be a weekend seminar — you need someone who will teach on a sustained basis and be there for support groups.”

Grissom hit upon the idea to use his journalism experience to gather content for a curriculum that could assist both clergy and laypersons in the task. He identified experts in divorce matters and invited them to appear in a series of videos that would be the ministry's core. And unlike a lot of previous church videos — which took the less-than-exciting format of “man at podium for 30 minutes” — these would look more like a television magazine show.

While Church Initiative is a nonprofit, businesswise it operates like a publishing house, supported by sales of materials such as the videos and workbooks. The initial curriculum is about $350, and participants' workbooks go for around $12. Besides DivorceCare and GriefShare, the ministry now offers DC4K (Divorce Care for Kids) and Chance to Change, a support program for gambling addicts.

About 15,000 churches worldwide use the curriculums, which presently are available only in English. Each program features a module on how the support groups can be promoted locally. Included are sample press releases and ads, as well as four-color brochures and posters local churches can customize with their meeting information.

As for the ministry itself, when it began 14 years ago Grissom used a mix of telemarketing and direct mail. With the latter, finding prospects can be a challenge for faith-based marketers.

“There are a lot of good lists but they're very fragmented,” notes Craig Wood, CEO of Clarity Group, a consultancy that works with Church Initiative. “You can buy 100,000 names here or 50,000 there, but it's hard to find the defined target audience you're looking for. You want to get as specific as you can and as actionable as you can, and those lists don't really exist. So you're culling lists from a bunch of different sources and trying your best to put together something as close to the target as possible.”

“It's a tough market to find prospects,” agrees consultant Jim Seybert, adding that some faith-based clients he's worked with have built their own lists by collecting names via surveys on spirituality site Beliefnet.com. “People hold [their beliefs] close to the vest.”

Building demographic profiles for the faith market can be difficult, Seybert says. “The problem is that you can live on a cul-de-sac with people who have the same lifestyle and drive the same type of car. But when it comes to faith, you can be on a cul-de-sac with a Buddhist, a Catholic, a Presbyterian, an agnostic and a Muslim.”

For Church Initiative, ads in card decks to a few hundred thousand churches — which Grissom tried as a “lark” — proved very successful at first.

“It got down to a penny a pop,” he says of the cost. “I didn't have high expectations, but we began to see a clear ROI on every mailing.”

Then response fell off — coinciding, says Grissom, with the rise of the Internet.

Today the Web is where Church Initiative concentrates its marketing. A challenge for the ministry's site (churchinitiative.org) is that it has to serve multiple audiences. “It must be inviting for people who find the site when they Google ‘divorce support group,’ and it has to be a place where a church that's heard about us can find information on how to start a group,” Grissom notes.

Search is a critical part of the marketing plan — key terms include ‘recovery support group’ and ‘grief group.’ And the Web site and e-mail are used for group leader development.

“These are caring laypeople, but they're untrained professionals,” Grissom says. “To keep the groups running and perpetuate the ministry, we need the ongoing support of sales of workbooks and the like.”

The site offers a leadership forum for peer-to-peer interaction, which is supplemented by leadership training conferences around the country. And e-mail is used to upsell, cross sell and announce new products. “Churches that are using one curriculum are good candidates for another,” Grissom says. He adds that it's easy to describe the other products because the curriculums use formats that are much the same.

“The hottest things right now are online communities, where marketers can build a network of people who share similar values, faith fabric and core motivations,” Wood says. “A number of faith-based marketers are tapping into that.”

Traditional media such as catalogs and direct mail still work, he continues. “But building a network where people advocate and talk and share is becoming much more popular and effective in the marketplace.”

Online and off, in the past four to five years Church Initiative has seen word of mouth become an enormous factor — from pastors and churches recommending the programs to each other, to people who've gone through the support groups and been helped. “They've become very effective marketers for us,” Grissom says.

About 50% of the people who attend support groups are church members, but not necessarily of the church that hosts the group. After being helped, many go back to their home parishes and tell the clergy there that they'd like to start a chapter.

“By ministering to that person, we were propagating new groups,” he says. “That was mind-boggling to understand. There's not much you can do to fan that flame. You just have to do a good job of ministering to them.”