Turning Holiday Church Visitors Into Members: 3 Things You Need

Christmas Eve. Christmas Day. New Year's Eve. These holidays are packed, and churches record a surge in attendance during this season. But it can be discouraging in the weeks that follow, when the numbers drop back down.

So if you want to keep your numbers relatively higher than before the holidays, you have to make your holiday visitors feel connected to your church. In this blog, we cover three things that will help you turn holiday church visitors into church members.

What Are The 3 Things to Turn Your Holiday Church Visitors Into Regular Members?

80% of church visitors will not come back. But you can convince the 20% who are available to stay. First, you just need to cover the three areas below.

1. Create An Amazing First Impression
   "You've got 10 minutes. Somewhere between the parking lot and the children's centre, they should know they matter to us before they hear how much they matter to God." —Mark Waltz, Granger.

• Greet with a smile on your face
  Ask staff to keep a relaxed body posture. The visitors are people, not aliens.
• Get ready to direct them to their seats, the restrooms, and the children's room
  Most holiday church visitors haven't been in a church building in a long time, so they need all the help they can get. You can assign a staff member to do this.
• Let them know all about your church
  Have a pamphlet or a QR code that links to a page with your vision, history, departments, and service times. You can use ChurchPad Tap for this; with a single tap, visitors learn what they need to know.

• Make your program amazing
  A program that stays authentic. Song selection that actually speaks to your audience. You don't need the best technology; you just need to curate your programs with both visitors and members in mind.

• Collect their information
  You can't make people feel connected without knowing anything about them. You want to celebrate them; you need their details. You want to send them text messages; you need their phone number. And for the children's ministry, you need to know how many kids they have.

• Sort out the children's department
  Most church visitors are family people. They can't concentrate on your amazing program if they are constantly worrying about whether their kids are secure, watched, and engaged properly.

One way to communicate security to parents is with a foolproof check-in system where nobody picks up a child without the parent's knowledge, and both the church and the parent confirm the child has been dropped off and picked up. That is what ChurchPad's children's ministry feature offers, and you can check it out on the free plan.

2. Secure Their Commitment
Make an altar call. As a church, your primary goal is to lead people to Christ, to spread the gospel. Whatever you are doing, people come to church to feel connected to the body of Christ, to become one with Christ. So make that altar call.

You can also celebrate those who heed Christ's invitation. And what better way to celebrate them than to use the ChurchPad Celebration Wall, where you can celebrate every new convert, every person who dedicated their life to Christ. You can also invite them to join groups and celebrate them for every milestone they hit.

3. Follow Up
This is, by far, the most important way to turn church visitors into church members. It also doubles as a great way to help them feel connected.

• First, get their information through a QR code
  That is preferable to pen and paper, which may get lost. And if it gets lost, you will not follow up, and that communicates nonchalance to the visitor.

You can send an SMS the very first day after service saying, “Thank you for coming; we appreciate you.”

• Ask for their prayer requests
  This is another form of amazing engagement, because everybody has one or two things they are going through, and they would love to know that other people are praying with them. Once they share their prayer request with you, you can put it on the Prayer Wall on ChurchPad Tap, where everyone comes together to pray for each other.

• Celebrate special days with a personalized text and email.
  ChurchPad's SMS and email features come with ready-to-use templates, so you never start from scratch.

How Do You Make Your Church's Holiday Visitors Feel Connected?

You don't have to build everything we mentioned yourself or remember to do it every time. ChurchPad already has it, ready for you.

And the follow-up? That is literally what ChurchPad's Follow-Up feature does. You assign a staff member to each visitor and keep track of where they are in the journey.

Want to go beyond a Sunday handshake? Hangout With Pastor lets your leaders set up real one-on-one time with visitors and members.

Every new convert, every milestone, every altar call response, put it on the Celebration Wall. Let your whole church celebrate with them.

And to stay in touch after the holidays, you have SMS, email, and voice broadcast.

If you want to know whether any of these is actually working, the Church Growth Tracking Dashboard shows you, in real numbers, how many of your holiday visitors are becoming regular members.

All of these live on ChurchPad, the all-in-one in one place. Discover the ChurchPad Ecosystem with the 30-day free trial.