From Diana Butler Bass on Twitter this morning
@dianabutlerbass: Churches w/phonebook ads are probably wasting their $$. http://fb.me/vlqJt2za
Good Cities says San Francisco is set to ban unsolicited phone books:
Last week, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted 10-1 to pass legislation (PDF) that would ban unwanted delivery of the directories. Each phone book would have to be “personally delivered to an occupant or authorized representative of the residence or business or left at the residence or business following a request.” A few cities have opt-out registries, but this bill is different. The Yellow Pages would have to confirm you want a book before giving you one. The legislation also includes a public outreach campaign to make sure seniors and low-income people aren’t deprived of useful information.
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And please remember to change service times on your phone and web-site when you change service times, e.g., summer or special occasions. It’s really great when would-be summer visitors arrive just in time for the last hymn because the service time changed but the announcement didn’t.
Just remember if you do this that your address, phone number, and services times need to be on the front page of your website.
Indeed. Who uses the yellowpages anymore? If I’m seeking a church home, I’m going to go on google maps and see what Episcopal churches are nearby, size you up by the quality of your website, use google
streetmaps to see if I like the locale, look at your photo album to see if there’s a community, and maybe listen to a sermon and watch a webcast of a service.
As a church with a limited budget, I may want to eliminate my yellowpages ad, that few are using, and spend it on my web presence.
And I’m going ask myself, who do I need to attract — how about young people. And what media are they using to find me. Using the
yellowpages may be sending exactly the wrong signal to the people we need to be seeking.
We cancelled both our Yellow Pages ad and our newspaper ad when I became Rector of Grace. After several months, I had a couple of people ask me why we no longer advertised in the newspaper. I told them that we had stopped months before.
I’m over 50, and when I’m asked about it, I tell people that in the nearly two years we’ve lived in Madison, I’ve never paid for the local paper and we’ve only used the Yellow Pages once, before we got our internet connection hooked up.