Church Turnaround: 5 Easy Steps - Ep. 192

On this episode, I go over a 5-step plan for how parishes can turn things around and grow. At a high level, these steps are:

1. Acquisition
2. Operations
3. Hiring
4. Bulletin Upgrade
5. Optimization

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So I thought I'd take today and go over sort of a five-step process that every parish that I'm guessing, I'm taking my best guess, the majority of parishes would probably need to follow to kind of turn around their parish. Uh the order I go in is should be done in that order. There's a reason I put it in this order. All right. So I'll uh I'll go over what the five sort of steps are to implement, and then I'll go through each one so you guys know. So the first step is um what I call outreach. The the marketing term for it is an acquisition funnel. That sounds kind of business-y. So just outreach, getting new people in the door. Okay, that's the first thing. If you're getting that, you probably won't get shut down. Because that's kind of the the big elephant in the room that every organization has to avoid, which is there are there's not enough money coming in, or there's not enough people, and so we shut down. So most parishes don't have any system for acquisition, for acquiring new people. They sort of just hope that people bring their friends or that people have children, and those children become members of the parish. But don't rely on that because that's not a trackable system. That's not something you can consistently see results for. So, first and foremost, acquisition. Get an acquisition system set up on the front end of the parish. So people are new people are consistently showing up. All right. That's number one. If you're wondering how to do that, I that's that's what I do for parishes. I help with that. I help with a lot of other stuff, but that that's huge because they're usually missing that. Um, it involves social media because young adults are on social media. The high level, the 30-second elevator pitch, is that you essentially run advertisements to 18 to 35 year olds in your local area that say things like, hey, you ever thought about coming to Catholic Mass, or maybe you haven't been in a while, but you kind of want to come back? Just drop your phone number below. We'll reach out and then we'll pair you up with someone who can go with you or answer any questions and stuff. That way it's not as scary for them to come back. So that's like the basic way to do it. Um, okay, so outreach. After you get an acquisition funnel set up, the second thing you should do is operations. All right, this is where a lot of parishes are lacking. Operations involves kind of all the back end, the internal stuff, the stuff going on inside of the organization. So these are things like tracking numbers, SOPs, so standard operating procedures. Like, do you have a clear layout of how someone is supposed to do something? Is it written down and stored in the organization? So if someone leaves and a new person starts, can they review the document and say, oh, okay, this is how we send the bulletin draft to PI LPI? Or this is how we email people for first community. Like, is everything laid out SOP'd? Your whole organization should be SOP'd. Um, the other thing would be tracking under operations. Are you guys actually tracking numbers? Are you tracking how many new people are coming in? How many math attendees are you having? The average weekly collection, the four-week rolling average of the weekly collections. If you don't have trackability, you have no idea where the constraint of the organization is. And if you have no idea where the constraint of the organization is, whatever you decide to work on today, you have no idea, you're just shooting from the hip. If that's the most crucial thing for the organization. And that's inefficient. That's like, I don't know, it's almost like a waste of time. Because we all are busy and you want to work on things that are the most efficient, that are going to see the, that have the highest leverage, that are going to see the biggest results for your work. And so if you're trying to achieve something, it makes sense to look at where it's most constrained and then fix that constraint. But you only know that if you're tracking everything. And every organization has three levels. There's the top of the organization, top of funnel, you could call it, where new people are coming into the organization. And then there's the middle of funnels, which deals with how people are starting to show interest in things. How do people raise their hand? How do people want to learn more? How do people show that they're interested in volunteering? So the middle of funnels, because those are important metrics. And then the bottom of funnel would be the actual things that people are doing. Mass, volunteering, young adult events. Are we tracking the numbers for those? That's how you track an organization. And then there's also the finance tracking. The more tracking, I say this a lot, you can judge the quality of a system by how well it's tracked. And so uh it's a very, very valuable thing to do. And I put it at number two because you want this taken care of before we get to number three, because you might have all the best metrics, metric tracking, and you might have everything SOP'd out, but you might not have the right people in the organization to implement some of this. And that's when we come to step number three, which is hiring. So I have noticed after working with a lot of parishes that the best people are typically not at the parish. Here's my guess. I haven't asked directly, but here's my guess. Because parishes feel like, I don't know, maybe they're strapped for cash or they don't really know exactly what they're doing when it comes to hiring, they rely on volunteers to help out around the parish. But who are volunteers that can devote, you know, let's say a uh a secretary? Who has the ability to devote that much time? Typically older people that are retired or they have a bit more flexibility in their life. And so what ends up happening is a parish organization ends up relying on a bunch of boomers that aren't necessarily qualified for the job. They simply have the availability to put the time in. And this creates a host of problems. Because let's just take a step back and talk about talent, is what it's called in business. Um, the different levels of talent. Um, this comes from a lot of, I don't know, this is kind of nomenclature now. Like colloquially, people talk about A players, B players, C players. Um, there's also a book called Top Grading that talked about this like sort of tier list. Um, but people know what you're talking about in hiring when you say A, A player, B player. All right. So here's the thing. There are A players who want to work at the parish around. They're local. You just have to find the difference between an A player and even a B player is about 10x. Okay. So an A player is someone that as soon as you bring them on, they make your life easier. A B player would be someone who you bring on and you have to train them for a while. And, you know, they ask some questions, but over time, they do make your life easier. A C player would be someone who you can kind of guess where this is going. They they always need help. They always ask questions. They don't necessarily make your life easier. They can handle tasks if you really help them. Another way to look at this, too, uh, the A versus D list is with um accountability. So an absolute killer employee would be someone who's a five out of five with accountability. They can execute tasks and they can make decisions and they don't need feedback. A four out of five with accountability would be somebody who can execute tasks, who can make decisions, but they need your feedback after the decisions. Three would be someone who can execute tasks, but they can't make decisions. Two would be someone who needs help making, who needs help executing tasks, and a one out of five accountability would be someone who can't even execute tasks without your guidance. So you just based on that, you whether you consider like the accountability dial, it's called, or um, the A player versus D player list that people often talk about, you could probably take a second and just think about the people on your team. You probably sort them and come to the realization you probably don't have A players and you probably don't have five out of five accountability people. And that's stressful. It's really frustrating. Now I know what you're thinking, Joe, we can't afford those people. Uh maybe, but that's probably not the issue. And you can't confidently tell me that's the issue because we do not have what's called a talent acquisition funnel in place at the parish. You do not have a system where you're consistently reviewing applications, pre-qualifying them, interviewing them, and hiring them. So I want to give a rule to parishes. You're no longer gonna hire anybody unless you've interviewed 20 people for that role. Interviewed, not 20 applications. No, no, you pre-qualified the applications and now you've interviewed 20 people. Joe, that's crazy. I can't find 20. Yes, you can. I will tell you. So if you don't have a talent acquisition funnel, this sounds crazy. But you need this because you have it, it's too valuable to not find a great employee. And I the reason I learned this is because I made this mistake. I would just hire the cheapest person or the first person I found because it's easy. I don't have to put any time in, especially if they were a friend, because then you already trust them, and it's just easy. And hiring is kind of a drag because you don't make any money with it, and it's just an internal thing that's a lot of work, but you don't want to skip this. So here's here's what I say when it comes to the talent acquisition funnel. You want to get a ton of applications for the role, a ton, like a hundred, and then you pre-qualify all the ones that aren't even just at a first glance going to be an A player. And then you host interviews. The first round of the interviews is setting the expectations. If they can't meet the expectations, they're not a good fit, regardless. They could be the greatest person ever. But if they can't like come in nine to five or something, you know, obviously they that the buck stops there. So I always do the first round of just explaining the expectations. This is what you need to do. This is what the software you need to use. Does that all sound fine? So, and then everyone that passes round one, round two is where you do the deep dive, figure out their character, you know, their mindset, all of that. So you might be wondering, well, Joe, how the heck do I get a hundred applications for a parish secretary? Well, there are four main ways to get applications for hiring, and it actually correlates to the four main ways to get people to know about your stuff through marketing. Um, hopefully this isn't too much, but this is really valuable stuff. Um, the four main ways are uh you can think of it like a square, like a grid, a uh two by two grid. And there are one-to-one or one-to-many on the right side, and then up top is cold versus warm, and it's like a grid. And so one-to-one warm would mean you're reaching out to people one-on-one that you already know that are warm to you. So that would be people like your friends or your parishioners. Maybe you send an email to all the parishioners. Um, that would be one to one. Well, I guess one a bulk email would be one to many, but you know, just imagine like texting your friends. Hey, do you want to sign up for this role? One-to-one cold would be you're reaching out randomly to individual people to apply for the role. That would be like door-to-door door knocking or like sending cold emails to people. That would be one-to-one cold. One-to-many warmth would be um bulk emailing your parishioners or mailing your parishioners, something like that. People that already are in your bubble, but you can reach them uh a lot of them at the same time. All right, and then the one that's my favorite: one to many cold. This would be asking people that you don't know, but a lot of them at the same time. And that would be ads. So you probably have tried one-to-one warm texting your friends. I don't know how fruitful that's gonna be. One to one cold, you're not gonna do that. You don't have time to like door knock or like send cold emails. One to one, I'm sorry, one to many warm emailing your parishioners. Yeah, that might work. Maybe. Certainly do it. But then one to many cold is the key, and I think parishes are missing. Yes, spend money to post an advertisement on social media, ideally, because everyone's on there. That's where the most attention is. And it should be, and the cool thing is, is you can choose who the ad goes to. Don't target 70-year-olds, target 21 to 40 year olds, 21 to 50. And make the ad very clear what the expectations are. No, no, you have to be good at XYZ. And you might think, like, yeah, no one's gonna do this. You'd be shocked at how many people apply. Target, you know, 25 mile radius from the parish, maybe 20 mile. I don't know. How far do people drive for work? 20 miles. And the ad just lets you, as soon as they click the ad, it takes them to a form where they can fill in their information. That form's linked to a Google Sheet. So just run the ad and the sheet's gonna fill up. That's it. And that's how you get hundreds of applications. See, people will take a cut in pay to work a fulfilling job. And so it's paramount that you've capitalized on that to try to get the best people at the parish. So that's the talent acquisition funnel. There's obviously steps after that, but that's how you that's how you get the big thing that parishes are missing, which is volume, a volume of applications. Because here's what happens if you're a patch. You think, ah, we don't have a lot of applications for this role. No one really wants to work here. Well, that's probably because we can't afford it. Well, we'll just go with a volunteer. Is there anyone around who's willing to volunteer? And then Cheryl, who's 130 years old, is like, I can help. And you're like, Great, thank you. And now the person in charge of the bulletin is probably the least qualified person ever, which is terrible. That hurts the organization. You're only as strong as your weakest member. So give her that. But the reason we do this after operations is because once the new person starts, and if they are a killer, they are an A player, they show up early, they go home late, they're very diligent, they're gonna want to know how to do the job. And you don't want to keep training people one-on-one all the time, over and over. You want SOPs. Review these documents, review these training materials. And we'll just save you time. That's hiring. Finally, well, not finally, that was third, because we did outreach and then operations, and then hiring. And then the fourth thing you want to do is bulletin design. So remember, as much as I love social media, the bulletin is the church's primary marketing machine. It needs to be optimized. So hopefully by now you found a killer bulletin designer because of all the previous steps. And we've got someone who's ready to roll, they're great at graphic design, they're diligent, they work hard. And okay, so what's the point? The reason we need to redesign the bulletin is remember, step two is operations, tracking. We need to be able to have trackability in the bulletins. And so to do that, we need to implement QR codes. The QR codes need to go to a form. The form needs to be linked to a sheet so we can review the results after mass. And then, yeah, so we need to upgrade the bulletin so we have tracking in the middle of the funnel. Um, and also just because it's the main marketing machine, you want someone talented there. So that's why we did hiring first. So upgrade the bulletin, make your primary marketing machine top-notch, and then we can move on to step five, which is optimization. By now, you have people coming in that are brand new. You have a great team, you have all the numbers, and you have a great bulletin that's actually getting people to raise their hands. Yes, I would like to learn more about this event. Oh, I would be interested in volunteering. Can I learn more? You've got people doing that from the bulletin. So, step five is optimization. You're reviewing the numbers every week. So you've set a goal for the year, you're reviewing the numbers each week, you're figuring out okay, well, this seems like the biggest constraint to get us to our goal at the end of the year. So we have to focus on this next week. And now you actually have numbers driving your decision making, driving your actions. And you can actually do things about it because you have a great team. No longer are you shooting from the hill. So, and you just you you iterate that over and over, you keep optimizing. That would be the five-step solution to solving any parish problem. Like, if you want to turn around to church, if someone was like, Hey, I need you to go into this parish and fix it because they're gonna get shut down in three months, that is what I would do. So, yeah, I mean, you might be thinking, like, well, Jill, there's costs with running ads. It's not even that much. Every campaign locally is like 200 bucks for like any organization because there's so few people relatively in like a local area, right? I have to run ads to all priests in the world, so it's much more expensive. But you just have to run ads to like 50,000 people in your town, and it's ten dollars for a thousand views right now on meta. So it's not even that much. And if you're targeting 20, if you're targeting an age age range, let's say you do like 20 to 50, that's like 30% of the people. So it's even less. Okay. So it's not that much. You could do a hiring campaign for like two, three hundred bucks and get like a hundred applications. That it's not that crazy. And if you really are fit for cash, just have a donor do it. Pay for it. Well, we need to get young adults. Would anyone be interested in helping donate? Because we need to get young adults in. A boomer would love to donate for that. So, anyway, um, that's how it works. That is the five-step process. As my books come out, I'm going to cover all of these. So I think it'll be very I ended up writing the first one on social media, but uh, social media would be farther down the list. It's great, but your primary marketing machine is a bulletin. Social media would be like number six, I would say, of that five part list. But anyway, the books that I write will be outlining all of this. So stay tuned. Um, and yeah, I hope this was valuable. Share this with with a priest if if your parish is struggling. If if you don't know direction, you don't really know what to do. Um, so yeah, if you got value, drop a like. I'll see you all in the next episode. Thank you. God bless.