So for the past three weeks (and this week) we’ve been in a series at Frontline called “The AfterParty.”
The series is basically four weeks about what happens after we die. Death, Heaven and Hell were all studied in-depth, looking deep into what the Bible says about these often controversial, and misunderstood, topics. This week we’ll be covering questions that people have emailed in throughout the series. If you can’t make it you can watch it online (my particular place of employment) at 5:30 pm ET at www.frontlineic.com. If you stop by, come say hi in the chatroom!
Anyhow, what I was excited about was that we got to heavily promote the series. We haven’t really done too much series promotion externally before, so we’d be trying a lot of new stuff. Bear with me, this may get long 
A Micro-site
Our first step was to create www.AfterPartyDC.com to use to promote the site. It’s a really simple site…basically just a static page with the fantastically spectacular graphic created by our own Brad Wolf, some text on the right, links to the videos of the sermons as the weeks went by, and, of course, a huge “ARE YOU GOING?” at the top. Seriously though, check out the site. It’s pretty dope.
Blitzing!
Taking it to the streets, we organized a few different types of “blitzes”. In MBC-Speak, a blitz basically involves going out in a group and handing out a TON of promo cards. We generally do this around the Metro stations in and around Washington, DC, largely because there’s a lot of people coming and going, especially during rush hour.
For this series, we decided to not only do our standard Metro blitzes, but also to do “Night” blitzes, where we went to areas around DC with really happening night life (U-Street, Georgetown, Adams Morgan, etc) and hand out cards. Fits really well with the theme, huh?
We were going to be doing environmental projection in the city of the sweet motion graphics that Brad put together, but the generator died as they were driving through Georgetown. Nate assures me it was sweet for the two blocks it lasted though .
We also did an Internet blitz. What is an Internet blitz? Well, basically it was Brandon and I broadcasting for about a half hour on the Internet Campus, giving people ways to share about the series online. Whether it was through e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, blogging, or whatever, this was a pretty cool time for the Internet Campus community (and a bunch of others!) to get together to spread the word about the series.
Facebook
I’m a fan of Facebook. It’s definitely a great way to connect, and it’s also becoming a good way to promote. We used Facebook in a few ways for this series…
The most basic thing we did was create a Facebook event. We sent out an update to the Frontline Fan Page inviting everyone to the event, and encouraged them to invite their friends. This was effective because it was an easy way for people to invite their friends, and as more people clicked “attending” it showed up on more people’s News Feeds, spreading it around virally.
We also gave people a graphic that they could use as their profile picture. This was pretty cool, as all of a sudden a ton of people’s pictures changed to the sweet graphic with the website at the bottom.
Finally, we invested a small amount of money in Facebook ads. Each week we ran them on Thursday and Friday, generating literally hundreds of thousands of views, and hundreds of clicks. This was pretty key in driving people to the website, and each weekend you can see a spike in traffic to the website, which is what we were going for.
Here’s the graphic we used for the Facebook ads:
YouTube Contest
Another fun thing we did to promote the series was hold a video contest where people created videos about the afterlife. I’ll be honest and say we didn’t do a great job promoting this, but all told the videos had over 3000 views in just about three weeks, so that was pretty cool. Hopefully we’ll be able to do something like this in the future.
Yard Signs!
Hah…this was kind of fun. Not sure how effective they were, but it was pretty cool to do…
Giving the Ministry Away
Ok, so this wasn’t an official strategy, but it was something that was woven through much of the different tactics we used. Whenever we empowered people to go out and share themselves, invite people themselves, or promote it using their own gifts and creativity it tended to work the best. Again, this is the basic principle of leadership and ministry…equipping the Church to be the Church. Our job in ministry is to help them “do the ministry,” not to try and do it all by ourselves while the congregation sits on the sidelines.
So how did it go?
Glad you asked. It has been amazing so far! Using Google Analytics (hotness) for website tracking, we’ve had thousands of people visit the micro site, experienced a sizable increase in attendance throughout the whole series, and most importantly, literally dozens of people have come to know Jesus through this series.
And that’s the most important thing. Not that our promotions were clever, but rather, that they were a means to the glorious end of seeing people’s lives changed.
Category: Giving Ministry Away, Internet Campus, Randomness at Work
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