The Rock (Round Rock)- Now that we’ve caught our breath, we can take a moment to look back at our Easter events and see what worked and what didn’t.
At The Rock, we tried a little something different this year. Last year’s Easter Egg Hunt was a success seeing as how we had over 150 people show up to our event and it was below freezing with snow and ice on the ground. But sadly, our focus lately has been inward. Thus, we needed to figure out how to get our people back in outreach mode. In an effort to challenge our people to reach out to the neighborhoods where we live, we attempted 3 separate Block Parties/Easter Events.
The concept was simple enough. We put 3 teams together. Each team consisted of our people that lived in and around the same neighborhood. We had a Northwest Round Rock team, a Northeast Round Rock team and a Southeast Round Rock team. Each team has one person who was “in charge”. Each team was responsible for planning their Block Party. From activity booths to advertising, each team took care of their own event. The block party took place on Saturday (the day before Easter).
The goal was to have each team minister to their neighborhood. There was no mass mail outs, newspaper ads, and no radio or tv spots. It was strictly a neighborhood wide invitation. People were invited through door hangers, word of mouth (personal invitation), church newsletter, posters (hung in neighborhood businesses) and neighborhood association newsletters.
The “payoff” was far greater than we had imagined. Each block party had over 100 people show up (one had over 200), and church was full on Easter Sunday (we used the block parties to invite people to church on Easter). The block parties also lit a fire under our outreach burner. People are wanting to know what our next Block Party/Outreach event will be. In other words…the people are on fire. And, the ownership that was created by having the teams plan and implement their own event was priceless. We also gave people in our communities a chance to know us better and we gained more name recognition.
