Stewardship MASTERCLASS For Parishes - Ep. 187

In this epsiode, I go over my 3-part strategy for helping Catholic churches. I hope you enjoy and subscribe.

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What's going on, guys? Hope everyone is having a wonderful Monday night. I recorded an episode in DGL and I did it on my live. So I did it in my office on my phone, going live on Instagram, and then with my microphone. Halfway through, my microphone shut off. So that's great. So the podcast is I have I have like four minutes of it, but I'm not I'm not gonna post it. So I'm gonna I'm gonna re-record and I'll talk about actually something that's a little more interesting. I did the episode earlier on the bulletin. Um, but I don't know, sometimes the talking about the intricacies of church bulletin design shockingly can get a little dry. So I thought I'd share what I've been doing lately for Catholic churches, kind of the system I figured out, how I've kind of came to this. And uh yeah, if you work if you work for a church or are a pastor perhaps, um, and kind of take this system. You might not know how to do everything, but you you have your hands around a system that's working, uh, that's tried and true in Catholic churches. So uh when I was starting, I started this endeavor in January of 2026, and I didn't know what I was doing. I mean, when you start a business that's been done by a lot of people, you kind of have an idea of what you're supposed to do. If I start a nail salon, kind of know the basics and I know if I'm doing the right stuff. But with this business, helping Catholic churches get young adults, kind of grow the youth. Uh there's no business out there, as far as I'm aware, doing this. And so for the first, I would say, really up to like a couple weeks ago, I'm kind of just shooting from the hip, trying stuff that I think might work. So the first month, I was just posting on people on Parrish's Instagrams, thinking that was the move. Um, anyway, going through all these different things. And I would say over the last couple weeks, I've settled on a system that is pretty much plug and play. And I think I'm gonna run with this system for the next for the foreseeable future, because it seems to be working. So I'll kind of run you guys through it and what I've settled on. Uh social media does play a part, um, but it's basically three pillars. So when I talk to churches, I'll give a little context first. When I talk to churches, there's usually two main issues. They are predominantly funded by the old guard, and that's not that's that's like high risk for an organization, is like your donor base, the funding is leaving in like 20 years. So the goal, goal number one is get kind of the youth, the young guard to engage and give and donate, and they're doing baptisms and family stuff, and it's just it's a young church. And then so engaging the current parishioners that are younger. And then goal number two is getting new people in the door. I thought in the beginning it was money was the number one goal, not the case. Money, money's a I would I think it's a lagging indicator, leading indicator. No, lagging. So if if you have the engagement and you have the people that are happy and they're happy with the parish, the money comes. Um, so anyway, um, those are the two main goals. So, because of that, here's how I've separated this system. This I'm calling it um like the young adult engine, because I'm I'm sort of installing this in parishes, and it is, it's it's an engine. Um San June has part the first part, the first pillar, the first part, which is we have to reach new people, we have to like go outside of the parish bubble. This is this is the novelty, this part. The other stuff is like helpful, but this is the key. Because right now, most churches do not have like a coordinated system to reach brand new people. They'll email their email list or they'll post on their Facebook page. But guess who's on an email list? People already in the bubble. And guess who follows the parish Facebook page? People already in the bubble. We would need to reach brand new people. So pillar number one is running paid advertisements to local young adults 18 to 35 on Facebook and Instagram. That's it. And we keep that slow burn running all the time. It's not that expensive if you live in a regular size city of, you know, let's say 50,000 people, 10 to 20 bucks a day can last you a month, three weeks, maybe, and then you refresh the ad. So it's it's not like we're spending crazy amounts of money. But the point is, is you constantly have that slow burn going. And you're like that means you are perpetually reaching out to brand new people that are interested in Catholicism. You might think like, oh, how do we reach people that are kind of on the fence? Don't worry about it. The AI will take care of it. It knows who it is. So what we do in the ad, the ad campaigning, is it's very simple. We just run an ad that says, hey, have you ever thought about coming to mass or are you nervous to come to mass and you want to, but you know, you don't know how to start or whatnot? Just drop your phone number below and we'll connect with you before Mass. And you can meet with a friend and we will go to Mass with you so you don't have to feel lonely. That's it. Obviously, this requires a little bit of operational work on the parish's end. I need a person to connect the prospect, for lack of a better word, to right? I also need some type of tracking system in the back end, but I use Google Sheets because it natively integrates with Meta, so it's free. So highly recommend that. But anyway, that's it. So just imagine this is like the key. This is like if you're like, Joe, what's the single biggest thing you're doing for the churches? It's this. It is a slow burn of every parish, just constantly the young adults in the area are seeing invitations to come to mass at the parish. And we run the ads to um 18 to 35 year olds. It's not gonna go to people that are already going to mass. The ad will already, based on the primary text, the headlines, the subheadings, the descriptions, everything. The AI will figure out this is for people who are on the fence. So you don't have to worry. This is this is perfect. Um, it's you know, just a side point, it's kind of like we've never had this in advertising before. We got to think, you know, in the 50s you had radio kind of shooting from the hip, it goes to everyone. And then television, same thing, magazine, same thing. It it's kind of the first time in history where we have like sniper rifle-like advertising where you can run paid advertising and just get the just it goes exactly who you want it to go to. It's fascinating. That's it's one of the reasons I just I fell in love with this um this niche. So anyway, um, I hope you guys see how powerful that is. That's the key. Every parish I talk to, I what's your how much are you spending on like outreach? Well, we don't really have an outreach. Okay. Are we doing any do we have a coordinated system at all to get new people to walk through the front door? No. It's like, okay, well, of course your church isn't growing. Of course churches are getting shut down. This is huge. This that's an engine and it just runs and runs. And you have to refresh the ads maybe every three to four weeks. But it's the same thing. Uh there's like a phrase in them. Sorry, just short circuited. Take it from the top. There's a phrase in advertising that has to do with like a present. You're like re-wrapping the present. So it's the same gift, different wrapper. So same thing. You all the parishes could do this. I mean, they don't need me. You can just, I mean, they kind of do because they don't know how to do this. But the idea is like you you don't need to recreate the wheel. The ad starts to get fatigued. You just put a new design, a new picture, change the text a little bit. Instead of nervous to come to mass, say, have you ever thought about coming to a Catholic mass? You know what I mean? Just uh rewraft the present. And that's it. And that is the most surefire way to get new people in the door. Okay. All right. That's pillar one. Pillar two is nurturing the people inside of the parish bubble. So now that these people have came to mass and you already have your email list and all the people follow on the Facebook page and all the Instagram page followers, you've got everyone. Now you want to nurture them. This is what we do with social media. So you want to create content to make people know, like, and trust you. That is how you nurture someone. So, good example. I think I've probably given this example like a billion times, but it's such a good example. Bishop Baron, he makes a bunch of free content. It makes you know, like, and trust him. And then one day you'll see the ad for the word on fire Bible, and you'll buy it because you bought it. When you see it, you're like, wow, I know, like, and trust this person. I'll buy from them. Same idea with the church. Um, that's what leads to increased giving, increased attendance. You see, you you you receive content that makes people know like and trust you, or know like and trust the parish, and then they see a flyer for like an event at the parish. They're like, wow, I love these guys. I'll come to this event. That's the idea. That means you have to do the proper posting, all right? And that's where I come in. I do I'm doing content that that does that, that makes the parishioners know like and trust the parish. Okay. Um, that also includes asking. Asking as in like, I want to say advertisement, but I don't want to confuse you guys with pillar one. I mean, you know, let's say there's a bake sale and you make a flyer for it and you put it in the bulletin. That is an ad, right? You are advertising something, you're trying to get someone to come to something. But not to confuse you, I'll just call it like a flyer or another word for it as an ask. You're asking someone. So taking the asks and putting them on social media, what a lot of parishions do is they just literally will like snip the picture from the bulletin and post it on the social media page. And it's like, that's not how you do it, because that gets like two likes, no one shows up. So you post the asks, the flyers redesign them on the stories, Facebook, Instagram stories, um, for a new myriad of reasons, but um, that works better. And then you can include a button to like sign up or learn more or whatever. All right, that's number two. See how it's kind of working? We got the top of funnel, getting people in, and then we got the middle of funnel where we're nurturing them. And then the bottom of funnel would be like outside of my scope. That would be like what people receive. That would be the sacraments and the events and all of that. But the third pillar for me is tracking and optimization. I think a lot of parishes fall oh, excuse me. I think a lot of parishes fall short here when I ask parishes like, do you know how many new young adults are coming into the parish each month, each month? They don't. Um, they don't they don't have tracking, suffice it to say. Good tracking. And so I track everything. Uh, because as the saying goes, what gets tracked gets improved. And you can always write this down. You can always tell the quality of a system by how well the parts of the system are tracked. Right? And that applies in so many things in life. If I told you I was a good salesman, which I am, and you asked me to explain, you know, how do I know that? And I just said, Well, I sell a lot. Oh, how many sales do you like? How could you sales? I'd be like, well, uh, I don't know, I sell most of them. He'd be like, oh, uh, maybe. But then if you were like, Joe, are you a good salesman? I'd be like, yes. And you said, prove it. And I could, I could tell you my show to close rate, I could tell you my cash collection, I could tell you my I have I when I was taking a bunch of sales calls, I had like 11 metrics that I was tracking. And so I could just do do I have all these things because I tell you the offer rate, the pitch rate, the show to close rate, offer to close rate, uh, calls to close, so many things. The point is, is when somebody has that, they take the they're taking it seriously, and you can you can have more clarity on know what and know what to improve. That's something parishes are missing missing. And so my third pillar is I just track everything in a giant Google sheet and I'm just I'm meticulous about it. Um so we can see. Okay, how many new young adults came in? Okay. Did we have a young adult event this month? Or this week, excuse me. Okay, how many, what were the average number of attendees? All this stuff. How many campaigns are we running? What's the ad spend? All this stuff. So that way we can figure out what needs to be worked on. Okay. All right. I don't want to ramble. Those were the three main pillars. The first one is the engine that brings in the new people, the second one nurtures everyone in the bubble, and the third one tracks and optimizes so things are getting better and better. And we're making sure we're not, you know, shooting from the hip and praying. You know, because that doesn't do any what praying does something, but you know what I mean. We don't want to just hope for the best. I want to track, measure, set goals, optimize. So uh yeah, that's my system. That's what I'm gonna be running with for parishes. It's about time I figured out something because I've been I've been uh bringing on these churches, being like, hey, uh, we're in this together, we'll figure it out. But now I now I feel like I finally have some structure. So all right, I hope this was helpful. If you work for a parish, this episode should um give you an idea of my services, but also kind of what I've learned and hopefully what you can take to your parish to help it grow. Uh, if you got value, drop a like and I will see you all in the next episode. Thank you and God bless.