People ask me what “reaching your community on their screens” actually looks like, so here is one real campaign, laid out honestly: our Easter event at Vision Church, in our own Bromley postcodes.
About a month before Easter, we put one invitation on Facebook and Instagram — a real photo from the previous year, a warm line of words, the date and the address — aimed at families in the postcodes around our building. We ran it for twenty-four days, watched it daily, and adjusted the words twice when we saw what people responded to. Alongside it, a simple sign-up page where families could say they were coming.
times the invitation was seen across our postcodes
unique neighbours who saw the door to our church
clicked through to the sign-up page — 132 responded in some way
On Easter morning, over two hundred adults and children walked through the door — around a hundred children and around a hundred adults, most of whom had never been inside. The Sunday after, we held a full baptism service, so full that we had to go and find more chairs. For a church that started with eight people, I still find that hard to say out loud.
Almost nine in ten of those views were on the Facebook mobile feed — a phone, in a hand, at home. The rest were Facebook Reels, videos and Instagram Reels. Nobody found us on a desktop. Of the people it reached, 82% were women, and the biggest single group was aged 35 to 44: the person in the house who decides what the family does on Saturday morning. That's who was planning to come to church before we'd met her.
Being seen more than once matters. Ten thousand views among 2,636 people means most of them saw the invitation three or four times. Nobody responds to the first glimpse; they respond to the familiar one.
The sign-up page is not admin — it's the moment of decision. A hundred and one people made a small commitment in their own front room. The welcome at the door is what turns that into a Sunday — or, that Easter, into a baptism.
It works again. We have run this every Easter since — five years now — and it has worked every single time. This past year alone: around two hundred at Christmas carols (2,068 neighbours reached), over two hundred at Easter, and at our summer fair in August the invitation reached 4,984 of our neighbours, over a hundred came, and families signed their children up to our youth groups. The faces from those mornings are in the building today.
If your church has an event coming, this is exactly what we now do for other churches, start to finish. And if you'd rather just talk first: twenty minutes, no strings.
Want to talk any of this through for your own church? Twenty minutes with me, no strings.