Five Positioning Strategies for a Startup Church

Can you redefine the mega church brand?

When you’re a startup church in a city seemingly full of mega churches, just as important as what you do is what you don’t do. Here are five ways you can position yourself against a mega church by redefining them.

1. Distribution. You can’t afford a city-wide direct mail campaign. There is no way you can blanket the city in billboard signs. Television and radio are pretty much out of the question. So what are you going to do? You’re going to start out by reaching out directly to just a few families, win them to Christ and equip them for ministry. And you’re going to keep doing this until you have a solid core on which to build.
2. Access to Capital. You don’t have access to capital. So be frugal. You’re going to be missionary-cheap in everything (I can say this because I’m a missionary’s kid), so much so that it’ll make access to money a mute point.
3. Brand Equity. The best way to redefine the mega church is to position yourself against it. There’s a big difference between positioning against a market leader and competing head-to-head with the market leader. You’re going to be “deeper in discipleship than the mega church”; “wider in spiritual experience than the mega church”; and “stronger in relationships than the mega church”. The more the mega church brand gets publicized, the more your positioning statement increases in value.
4. Relationships. Your strategy is not to go after the mega church’s people. Instead, you’re going to go after a beachhead in your city. Then by serving people, slowly but surely you’re going to increase market share. You’re going to relentlessly focus on one person at a time. And you’re going to go after the kind of people that don’t fit the mega church mold.
5. Staff. I can hear you chuckling. You’re saying, “What staff? It’s just my wife and me here.” Well . . . you guys are great ministerial staff, so stay intentionally small, probably never more than three people, including your wife and you until you reach an average attendance of 200. And the third person is going to do clerical and administrative work to free up your wife. Your job is to equip a volunteer army for ministry. Paid staff just give your people an excuse to withdraw from the battlefield.

Steeple provides fund raising and organizational development services to faith-based and community-based organizations of the nonprofit sector. Our efforts are dedicated to putting nonprofit managers and trustees in touch with the tools and resources they need to develop their organizations and to conduct successful capital campaigns. Our work with clients is for the long-term—to build internal capacity, to create brand equity, and to attract and retain funding. Since 2007, we’ve helped nonprofit organizations like yours raise more than $14 million.

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