As accusations emerge that large churches are using geofencing in an attempt to poach Christians from smaller congregations, Joe Gallant says we should be reaching the lost, not preaching to the converted
Geofencing, or location-based targeting, where your advert is only shown to people in a particular georgraphical area, is nothing new in the world of online advertising.
It’s actually one of the first things I mention when churches approach me for advice on paid advertising. After all, it’s no use inviting people from Cornwall to attend your church quiz night in Aberdeen!
Geofencing allows churches to target local people, and to ensure that only relevant people who live or work nearby are seeing your Google or Facebook ads.
It is a pre-meditated attempt to lure believers away from smaller churches
Healthy competition?
Most towns or parishes have more than one church, of course. And so there will be, for want of a better word, competition. Which church will local people choose to attend?
And herein lies the problem - because as churches become more savvy at using techniques such as geofencing, there’s going to be some crossover. The church down the road from you might be operating in exactly the same way.
This is to be expected. And in one sense it’s no different to people living on a given street in your area receiving two flyers through the door for two different carol services run by two local churches. No big deal, right?
But recent accusations against one church in the USA have taken the issue to a much more disturbing level…
According to Dr Michael Kelly, lead pastor of Central Triad Church in North Carolina, when a new church came to his town, they allegedly targeted their ads at Christians who were already attending other churches in the area, including his.
In the above video, Dr Kelly recalls a conversation he had with an advertising specialist who revealed this church routinely used geofencing to target smaller churches with location-based ads, ensuring that their congregants were pushed advertisements intended to draw them away from their current church home.
Reaching the lost
Specifically seeking to map out the physical location of ‘competitor’ churches is a step beyond the unavoidable nature of accidentally targeting the same people - it is a pre-meditated attempt to lure believers away from exisiting, often smaller, churches.
We don’t want to waste time inviting people from Cornwall to attend our church in Aberdeen
It has been reported that the church using geofencing in this way is a large megachurch. I don’t envy the job of figuring out how to target theiradvertising and managing what one can only assume is a sizeable budget. But whether you’re a church of thousands or a church of tens, we are all called to play our part in building Christ’s Church, not just our own. It seems a questionable attitude towards building the Church when we’re slyly removing bricks that other builders have put in place.
Sharing the love
Where does this leave the person or people in our churches who are charged with advertising church activities? Well, while paid ads can be an effective way of forcing visibility, we live in a society that’s saturated by advertising. As such, people can often simply scroll past. So, while we may seek to put some budget towards it - including making use of the grants available to nonprofit organisations - we shouldn’t do so at the expense of other methods, such as social media, websites, e-mail newsletters and even print and door to door. Accepting the time investment, these platforms are often more cost-effective than paid, or even free ads.
But every way in which we seek to communicate as a church should be done with the right heart attitude. We want to share God’s love with the people around us. We want to see people joining our church. And this can be difficult when the church down the road wants exactly the same thing. While it’s not always possible to directly partner together towards this goal, our efforts should never be seeking to take away from our Christian neighbours. Let’s never put a fence around the Gospel.
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