VBS Marketing Made Easy
I recently saw a post asking what children’s pastors do to get kids to their VBS. COVID has changed a lot of things, and this summer will be telling if these strategies will still have as much effectiveness, but I know pre-COVID, my VBS continued to grow, and I saw more and different kids every year.
If you want to reach more kids with the Gospel, you need to tell people what you're doing regardless of whether your VBS in-person, online, in the neighborhood, or something else. With that said,
Here are my 7 steps to market VBS.
1. Build a contact list
Whether you’ve done VBS in the past or this is your church’s first time, you have to have a contact list to begin. The contact information should include the kids’ names and ages, their email, their physical address, and their phone number. If this is your first VBS, your church database should have all this information of the kids in your ministry.
Every year, I add to my contact list the new kids who are currently attending my church as well as the kids who came to any of my events in the past year. This includes our Halloween Outreach and anything we do for Easter.
Getting the kids ages is important, because at some point the kids are going to age out and you don’t want to keep reaching out to those families over and over again inviting them to an event they can’t attend. It’s called SPAM. Don’t do it.
2. Build a website and edit graphics
I usually like to announce VBS at Easter. It’s the first major holiday of the year and many parents who only come to church once or twice a year may be looking for something for their kids to do over the summer.
Since the majority of my VBS registrations happen online in the weeks before Easter, I build a website or landing page for the event on my church’s site. If you don’t have these skills, there should be someone on your staff or a volunteer who can do this for you.
Also, I am a huge fan of Group’s VBS Pro. It's free, but I usually spring for the premium plan of just $35 a year. In VBS Pro, you can build your own custom website with registration, custom pages, and donation links regardless of whether you’re doing their VBS or not. While they do give you the ability to customize your own URL, I still set up a redirect from my church’s site to it. After all, your church's website is where most people will go first to find your VBS.
When Easter comes, I push parents to my VBS page usually with a flyer I made with the graphics that came from my VBS curriculum. As with the website, if you don’t have these skills someone at your church probably does, or you can use Canva, a free graphic editing website.
3. Send emails
This is where the power of your contact list really kicks in. Soon after Easter, I write an email inviting families to sign up for VBS. The email usually includes incentive for signing up early. I’ve seen a lot of churches do a lot of creative things for the incentive, but it all depends on your budget. Most of the time, I tell my parents that if they sign up early, they get to beat the lines when they arrive on Day 1.
This doesn’t get everyone, but it gets a lot. In fact, one year before I sent out the email I had less than 10 registrations, even though it had been open for over a week. After sending out just one email, I had over 100 in a day.
Your contact list is your biggest asset; build it and use it.
4. Send a Postcard
As school wraps up, parents are actively planning for summer, so I send out a postcard to my contact list inviting them to register early. I think of it like a save-the-date card. I try to make it stand out and sturdy enough to last at least a month on the fridge. Again, this is making your contact list work for you.
If you don’t want to handle all the printing, addressing, and stamping of the postcards, talk to your church’s local print shop to see if they have the capability or use an online print service like Print Place to mail them for you. This does cost extra, but the time and hassle it saves is well worth it for me.
On a special note, don’t wait until the day it needs to go out to send it to a print shop. It’ll cost a fortune and might even arrive after your event. That’s wasting funds and is never a good thing.
5. Run Facebook/Google Ads
This one definitely costs money, but you don’t have to spend a lot. I usually budget $500 for this type of marketing but have gotten away with as little as $100. Most of the people who come to my VBS, come because of friends and family, but anywhere from 5-15% of them come from these ads.
Also, you’re far more likely to see new people who’ve never visited come through your doors by running these ads than you would otherwise.
As with building a website or making graphics, this is another technical skill. If you don’t have someone who can do this for you, I suggest you start with Facebook. It’s a whole lot easier to get started and costs way less than Google. However, to run Facebook ads, your ministry or your church will need a Facebook page (not a group or individual profile) or an Instagram business profile.
Apple is changing the amount of information Facebook can gather from your device, which will negatively affect your ability to reach the people you want, but I'm still going to try to see what works and what doesn't.
6. Challenge kids to invite their friends
As I begin to ramp up to VBS a month or so before the event, I challenge kids to invite their friends. However, the challenge itself is not enough. You have to give them an incentive. I’ve seen other churches give away big items, slime or pie their pastor if they hit an attendance benchmark, and more. My favorite is to give away something small and fun that a lot of kids can benefit from, regardless of how many friends they have.
For many years, I created a ball pit out of an inflatable pool with various balls, including but not limited to playground balls, beach balls, and even those cheap balls you get from the Dollar Store. Then I dump a bunch of bags of candy into the pit.
The kids who bring their friends they and their friends get to jump in and grab as much candy as they can in 10 seconds. This worked the best when the entire VBS had snack together. I’ve since changed my schedule, and I’m still working on how to best incorporate it into the VBS.
Nevertheless, the biggest change I saw was kids was brining their friends throughout the week and then those friends brought friends too. It messed up all my attendance models in a good way because attendance continued to rise throughout the week.
7. Follow up after VBS
It’s easy after VBS to just move on to your next event and never reach out to those kids again until the next VBS, but that would be a mistake.
I’ll write another post about my follow up process later, but you need to follow up with those kids within the first week, and then periodically throughout the year. You do this so they know who you are and are not surprised when you reach out to them again.
VBS is a discipleship event, yes, but more than anything for me, it’s an outreach event. It’s a few days where you open your doors and invite the community to come in. You get to serve them and tell them about Jesus. I encourage you in all of your planning to also make a marketing plan and put some money behind it. It’ll have a huge pay off during the week. Together, let’s try to reach as many as possible for the Gospel.
What do you do to market your VBS that works?
If you’d like to read more about VBS you can find the posts here.
