Follow Up Funnels

Do you follow up visitors to your church each Sunday? They are much more likely to return and get rooted in if you do! Do you have a process of follow up that takes someone from being a first time visitor to a member?

The Church Admin plugin has follow up funnels to help you assimilate and track new attendees towards membership. I’m going to describe our process and the steps to get the church admin plugin to help track and use it. You can adapt it to your setting however you want!

Follow up funnels

To create and administrate an effective follow up process there are a few steps to do.

Member Types

People in your directory can be categorised by membership level known as Member Types in Church Admin. The default install comes with mailing List and Member. We have created four member levels – Visitor, Irregular attender, Regular attender, Member. Our process helps to guide people who have come through the Sunday front door through to membership.

To create new member levels, head over to the People tab and scroll down to Member Types – that will show you what you currently have and allow the creation of new levels.

You can drag and drop the levels until they represent a process from first visit to membership.

Click on Add a member type to add a new one.

Add new member type

What teams will be involved in the follow up funnel process – prehaps a visitation team to pop in on first time visitors.

  • Welcome Team – welcome on a Sunday, give out a welcome pack and get visitors to fill out a welcome card.
  • Visitation team – who visit a newcomer or meet for coffee within 48hours if possible. Herb Miller in the classic “Magnetic Church” cites these stats
    • 85% of guests return if visited in 36 hours
    • 60% of guests return if visited in 72 hours
    • 15% of guests return if visited in 7 days.
  • Small Group Leaders welcome newcomers into their group (although our small groups are also a front door of the church via outreach parties and Alpha courses, but that is in a book I wrote Friends, Food and the Gospel)
  • Our elders run Joining days.

Create the ministries needed to do that and recruit your team. Once you have worked out your process, created the member levels and ministries to run it you can start creating some follow up funnels.

Follow Up funnels

These can be found on the Church Admin menu. The funnels are created in the Follow Up Funnels section and can be assigned under “Recent People Activity” either in the back end or using the shortcode [church_admin type="follow-up"]

Firstly create some funnels using “Add a Funnel” button. This can be found on the attendance tab in the section “Follow Up”

add a follow up funnel

Create follow up funnels for every step of your process.

Now in the”Recent people activity” section, when new people are added or updated, there will be a dropdown menu for the next step in the follow up funnel for that member type.

Here Fred Bloggs needs an invite to an Alpha Course – you can assign the task to someone in that team. At the top of the page there is a link to email out to the assigned people their tasks. Once completed they can click a link and the follow up step is closed.

What get’s measured, gets better. So hopefully the follow up funnels will improve your visitor retention and stickiness. There’s a key moment when someone stops saying “your” church in conversation and switches to “our” church – may you have many of those moments!

Our visitor welcome card collects name, address, email and cell and has a tick box for “receiving emails” – we send a postcard on Mondays to all our visitors thanking them for attending. After a couple of weeks, someone will ask them if they’d like to be on the address list and have a log in to view the address list – that’s a key ownership moment. You can simply change their member level to which ever one is used in your address list shortcode.

When they get a login, they can edit their entry on the website or iOS or Android app. We love using the app in our church – it’s so helpful for folks to check what they are rota’d/scheduled for, to be in touch with others, listen to a sermon and much more. The app is free for your congregation to install on their devices and $129 per annum (other currencies available) payment for the church. You can cancel anytime – but I’m sure that you’ll value keeping everyone connected!