HOW MANY?

I've been more than a little obsessed with numbers this past couple of days. I am aware of the fact that we need to hit critical mass right out of the gate. Go big or go home doesn't always apply, but it's certainly my mindset when it comes to planting a new campus.

So what advertising is going to make maximum impact without breaking the bank?

We've opted for door hangers over direct mailing as the returns on direct mail nowadays are generally minimal. It's a couple of years now since I read a book entitled Your Marketing Sucks by someone or other and they said if you want to do direct marketing, just cut out all the effort, open a window and throw your money out -the end result will be the same.

The problem with doing door hangers is that it's labor intensive, so how many can we realistically expect to be able to do?

There are 16,400 and change homes in the tri-village area - Mastic, Mastic Beach and Shirley and I would dearly like to cover them all. Our pastoral team advise that it may be unrealistic to go for that, so the question of the week is how many can we expect to do and therefore how many do we buy?

We talked about 5,000 - not a number I was happy with - but then I did a little more research. My friend Tim Fowler who is launching a new church in western Texas the week before we start in Mastic, gave me some very good input.

He reckons you can do a minimum of 90 door hangers an hour, so I reckon for each person giving us two hours we can get 180 out. That means that 50 people could get through 9,000 in two hours, which is a number I like a bit more. Add in 1,000 for a church that has offered to help us and we should be able to cope pretty easily with 10,000 door hangers.

So that's my latest thinking. Nothing ordered yet!