About Glendale SDA Church

Mission:
To develop a faithful, hopeful, and loving community that inspires people to come to Jesus, become like Jesus, and overcome in Jesus.

Core F.A.I.T.H Values:

FRIENDSHIP – Growing from a friendly church into a church of friends. John 15:12-15

ADAPTABILITY – Embracing change for the sake of the Gospel of Christ. 1 Corinthians 9:22-23

INTEGRITY – Developing relationships that pursue grace and truth in Jesus. Romans 12:9

TEAMWORK – Working together in peace and unity as the Body of Christ. Ephesians 4:11-13

HUMILITY – Reflecting the servant attitude of Jesus as we serve in His name. 1 Peter 5:1-5

Website:

www.GlendaleSDA.org

Address:

2900 E 62nd St
Indianapolis, IN 46220

The Opportunity

Glendale SDA Church is a vibrant, multi-cultural Christian faith community that is passionate about following Jesus and sharing His love with others.

Located in an area of Indianapolis, Indiana, with a large population, the church’s potential for impact within their community is huge as they seek to be a model of racial reconciliation and understanding for the city through the grace, love and forgiveness of Christ.

With more effective evangelism efforts, Glendale SDA Church could experience substantial growth.

The Answer

Rethinking Evangelism^® put together a plan to organize all of Glendale SDA Church’s interests and begin a consistent communication strategy to stay engaged with these interests while also regularly reaching out to the community to acquire new interests and increase awareness of the church.

The Journey

Implement HubSpot CRM

The first step was to implement a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. This is a powerful, cloud-based database that organizes and segments all the individuals that Glendale SDA Church desires to communicate with. Delmar worked closely with church leadership to collect members' contact information and organize it in HubSpot.

In addition, Rethinking Evangelism^® worked to collect all known contacts who had previously responded to Evangelism and outreach efforts and organized them in HubSpot CRM. Over time, HubSpot CRM has become Glendale SDA Church’s Modern Evangelism Engine.

From a technology perspective, the first step was to implement HubSpot. Rethinking Evangelism^® has been working with HubSpot for over 10 years and has seen firsthand how their technology makes a transformational impact on the organizations we serve. It is an industry-leading platform that unifies a vast set of capabilities, including an extremely sophisticated interest management platform with very powerful marketing automation. It is foundational to connecting everything together in an impactful way.

Develop and Maintain a Consistent Identity (brand)

While often overlooked by churches, developing and maintaining a consistent identity is critical to long-term success, especially in a “virtual world.” In the corporate world, we would refer to this as a “brand.” Some think of this as simply a logo, but in reality, it is much more than that.

Every piece of content that a church produces should reinforce and build upon everything an individual has seen previously from that church.

Rethinking Evangelism^® has taken a very deliberate approach with Glendale SDA Church to build a consistent “look and feel” (logo, color scheme, fonts, word usage and more) into every piece of content that is produced (emails, webpages, Facebook posts, outreach efforts, ads, etc.).

Implement Integrated Digital Communication Channels with CRM

Modern Marketing Email Platform: Rethinking Evangelism^® developed a responsive, branded email marketing template that is being used twice a week as a personalized invitation to Church Services for both members and every individual who has responded to previous Evangelism efforts.

Integrated Social Campaigns: With the guidance of Delmar^®, Glendale SDA Church launched a number of targeted Social Media advertising campaigns in the community. Every time an individual responds to a campaign, they are automatically added to Glendale SDA Church's CRM and enrolled in a number of continuous weekly outreach efforts.

Website: Rethinking Evangelism^® designed a new website for Glendale SDA Church that could integrate with HubSpot CRM. This helps provide insight on the topics, sermons and content that individuals are interacting with, which can be used to proactively reach out to interested individuals in the future.

Online Forms: Rethinking Evangelism^® helped Glendale SDA Church launch a number of forms on their website for individuals, including submitting prayer requests, requesting a phone call, or even submitting specific Bible questions. Rethinking Evangelism^® also created a digital guest registry that enabled guests to check in via an iPad at the church. This information is automatically added to Glendale SDA Church’s database. Furthermore, if the contact is new, the individual is immediately added to future weekly communications and outreach initiatives.

The key to building a strong communication strategy is making sure it supports what a church is already doing. Rethinking Evangelism^® worked closely with Glendale SDA and started building a strategy that reinforces their practices and takes them to the next level. Below is a map of Glendale SDA's communication strategy today. And it continues to change and shift in support of their unique focus and current outreach efforts.

Facebook and Instagram Organization

Facebook and Instagram are very important Evangelism tools. According to Barna, 9 out of 10 practicing Christians in the United States use Facebook.

To help reach even more people, Rethinking Evangelism^® implemented both Facebook Business Manager and Instagram for Glendale SDA Church. Facebook Business Manager is a much more robust tool for managing user access. It includes a deeper set of Facebook tools for more targeted advertising, Facebook Pixel for retargeting, and even integration into HubSpot to sync custom audiences.

Google Tag manager

Many modern outreach technologies rely on different types of code that are implemented on their websites. Rethinking Evangelism^® guided Glendale SDA in implementing Google Tag Manager to deploy and manage this code on Glendale SDA's website to make it much easier and faster.

Integrated Text Messaging Platform

If used correctly, text messaging can have a tremendous impact. According to Gartner, text message open rates run as high as 98%. Rethinking Evangelism^® helped Glendale SDA implement EZTexting and integrated it with HubSpot.

Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile is an important technology that not only allows organizations to share information, but it also allows the user to review organizations across a multitude of Google technologies, including Google and Google Maps. Rethinking Evangelism^® updated Glendale SDA's Google Business Profile, including a social posting strategy.

I had a very positive experience working with Chris & his team, and I would highly recommend any church or organization that needs a streamlined product marketing. I can safely say, it was one of the most enjoyable and enlightening trainings I've had in my 24 years as a born again Christian. The knowledge and skills I gained from the trainings will last me a lifetime. They provided a solution to our problems as an evangelism group. The staff and support was second to none, professional, proficient, accessible and always on time.

Trust

Glendale SDA Church

New Website

Glendale SDA Church’s previous website was not compatible with many of the technologies that are most effective in tracking engagement and interest over time, so Rethinking Evangelism^® designed a new website that would allow for greater virtual engagement, greater advertising capability and a more user-friendly experience overall.

Follow-Up Tasks / Processes

It is challenging for any organization to keep track of hundreds of individuals and follow up in a way that is personal, timely and measured. This is especially true for church leadership who are constantly balancing a multitude of priorities. Rethinking Evangelism^® implemented a series of automated follow-up plans and communications for individuals who respond to different outreach efforts, making it easy for Glendale SDA Church’s Evangelism team to efficiently and personally contact each interested individual.

Orchestrating the Weekly Cycle of Outreach

It’s never been easier to stay in touch with a large group of individuals in a personal way. Rethinking Evangelism^® has helped Glendale SDA Church implement a repeatable weekly cycle of outreach communications to its ever-growing database of contacts. This cycle includes specific emails, inviting over 1,000 people to tune in to its livestream or even attend church—every single week.

Analytics

A familiar adage reminds us, “You can’t improve what you can’t measure.” This is even more important in a time when you can’t “see” if someone that you invited to church actually comes or not. Rethinking Evangelism^® has implemented processes that allow Glendale SDA Church to now track those individuals who are the most engaged—the most interested—in order to develop specific outreach plans to stay in touch with those individuals.

I really enjoyed the experience of working with a marketing group that was good at targeting our needs & facilitating our evangelistic efforts.

Denese

Glendale SDA Church

THE DESIRE OF AGES

Rethinking Evangelism^® helped Glendale SDA Church implement an online book giveaway for The Desire of Ages that was hugely successful. (Delmar’s guide, “Rethinking the Way Churches Share The Desire of Ages,” can be purchased h ere.)

Rethinking Evangelism^® structured the campaign to use multiple ads across multiple audiences. For a total budget of only $153.85, Glendale SDA Church was able to reach 2,183 people and generate 5,574 impressions. In addition, 32 people requested a copy of the book, which is significantly more powerful than simply leaving books in mailboxes where people may have no interest. That comes out to only $4.81 per request!

DISCOVERING REVELATION

Rethinking Evangelism^® also worked with Glendale to promote a very extensive evangelism outreach event, Discovering Revelation. This began with creation of a custom landing page on their website where people could view all the event details and easily register. After that, an aggressive marketing effort was launched which included:

● Facebook Advertising for a month before the event with a budget of $3,500. Delmar launched 48 ads across three custom audiences, reaching both the community as a whole and also specifically targeting past interests and people with whom Glendale had already developed the basis of a relationship. The advertising results are as follows:

○ Reached 88,573 individuals

○ Received 288,251 impressions

○ Received 2,855 link clicks

● Three custom social media posts across all of Glendale’s social channels, inviting people to the event. These were dispersed over the four weeks leading up to the event, and they were posted at the optimal times to receive the most views.

● Three custom email invitations were sent to a comprehensive list of all of Glendale’s interests.

● Rethinking Evangelism^® developed a call script with a list of Glendale’s most interested individuals and trained their team on how to conduct a call campaign inviting these interests to attend.

Through all of these efforts, along with a mailing that the conference conducted, 152 individuals registered to attend this event. Of these, 38 were past interests and the remaining 114 were brand new interests who began their relationship with Glendale.

Rethinking Evangelism^® continued to assist in the success of this event by launching 6 text messages and 6 email reminders dispersed throughout the three weeks of the event, to keep people engaged and interested in coming.

Improving Evangelism Processes

Training

Rethinking Evangelism^® also spent a lot of time training the Glendale SDA Church Evangelism team to implement many processes on their own. They now have team members who can:

● Craft specialized emails to members and non-members each week, allowing them to invite over 1,000 people to church each week, share past sermons, and keep in touch regularly with Glendale SDA Church’s interests.

● Edit their YouTube sermon videos to contain a specialized intro and outro that Rethinking Evangelism^® developed.

● Create a web page for every single sermon on Glendale SDA Church’s website so that ads can be run on each sermon.

● Manage contacts in HubSpot and discern who is the most interested so that follow-up plans can be made.

● Respond to requests that come in through HubSpot so that no communication is ever left unanswered.

One of the first things Chris and his team had us do, was compile a list of names and contact information of anyone that had attended our church, as a guest or had attended any events we had ever held over the last 6 years or so. We had close to 1000 names ! It turns out our church was touching more lives than we had thought. This was so encouraging. Chris and team then created an awesome data base that we could use to reach out to all these people online , on a regular basis and start to rebuild those relationships. Had we been handed this list to handle it the old fashioned way we always did of going door to door we would have been overwhelmed and honesty declared it an impossible task. Working With Chris and team we were amazed how efficient it can be to reach out and connect with all our contacts whilst also generating new leads in other ways. We were able to invite thousands at a time to events. The name Glendale SDA church is now in the minds of many. and with time I am sure God shall lead some of these people into his fold. what a blessed experience we had.

Success Stories

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