Planting Space

Home Owners Association (HOA) newsletters can be a great place to advertise. Most HOAs use outside printers such as Kinkos to print their newsletters and have volunteers distribute them in the neighborhood. Consider offering to print and fold the newsletters for free on the church machine in exchange for including an insert about upcoming church events or message series. Include a small type “printed by” at the bottom of the front page. You could even use volunteers from the church that live in the neighborhood to help distribute. This is a great way to saturate a community.

Many HOAs maintain web sites. Identify these web sites and investigate the possibility of either sponsoring these sites or advertising on these sites. Develop a list of neighborhoods including a list of webmasters (HOA person in charge of the web site). Contact each webmaster to determine if your church can be a web site sponsor or place banner ads on the sites. Frequently new people in the community will use these websites to locate local businesses and churches.

A third way to partner is to host neighborhood parties. At LifePointe, we throw pool parties. The HOA board loved it because it was a fun event at no cost and planning to them. Out of respect for the HOA we don’t preach or make announcements about our church. We just have a big cookout. We place a big sign at the entrance/exit to the community the morning of the event with the words FREE FOOD. We always have a couple hundred show up and the event only costs us about a hundred dollars for hot dogs and drinks. When we can afford it, we have cups printed with our logo. The idea is to have our people from the neighborhood present and connecting with their neighbors.

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