Marketing Team

Chair: Mary Garcia
Members of the marketing team will work closely with the Evangelism and Communications teams to promote Immanuel.

The newly formed Marketing Team has been working hard putting together some ideas on improving the marketing for the church. This committee consists of Mary Garcia, Zoe Lyons, Joann Hellberg, Amy Reiman and Pastor. A presentation of our Marketing Plan was made to the Strategic Planning Task Force in April and many of those plans are now being implemented. Here's an overview of the plan and the current action on each:
We targeted 5 major group areas to work on:

• Web:
• We have a new and improved web site with our own domain name now. LynnEtte Mueller is the Webmaster and has done a good job of making major improvements to the website to make it more user-friendly. We hope to add more video and photos to the web in the coming year. We feel that the website is a critical part of the marketing plan if we want to attract younger families. Although this may not be the way that you and I search for new churches, it is one of the most common ways the younger generation searches for information. Check it out - the more hits we get on our website, the better! The address is: www.immanueljackson.org.

• Brochures and Flyers:
• We are minimizing the mass printing of costly brochures and are purchasing some that can be custom printed for a particular purpose. The Evangelism Team has created a new brochure in 2008. If you haven't seen one, ask in the office.

• Advertising:
• We are recommending that we continue our weekly ad in the Jackson Citizen Patriot, even though there is an expense to this. We have also found opportunities to place ads free in some of the surrounding papers. We would like to take advantage of opportunities to promote the church through articles in the paper and local magazines, as well as on JTV.

• Signage:
• The Marketing Team has proposed putting up a message board sign on the corner of our property at Michigan and Brown. We have one of the busiest corners in Jackson and it would be a great opportunity to get our message out to literally thousands of people daily as they wait for the light to change. We have worked with Johnson Sign and have a tentative design. However, before we can place the sign, we have some issues to work through with the city. Ted Wilson, Mary Garcia and Pastor Erick are working through these issues as rapidly as possible so that we can proceed with the sign - hopefully yet this fall. The cost for this sign will not be coming from the general fund. There has been a commitment for a donation to cover the cost of the sign from an anonymous donor. Stay tuned for more details as they become available. City council has turned down our request for the sign.

• "First Impressions":
• The Marketing Team feels that the appearance of the church is critical in attracting new members. We developed a wish list of several improvements we would like to see. We are now working with the Property Team to compile these suggestions into a worklist and to come up with a cost for each improvement. Some of these improvements are minor with very little or no cost. Some of them are bigger items. These will be presented once the information is complete. We hope that you will start to notice some of the smaller improvements we will be making, as well as some major improvements in the year to come. If you have suggestions, you are always welcome to send them to us.