It’s a new school year, which means that lots of families are checking out new churches for their teenagers.
We used to not be very good at welcoming new visitors or friends brought by our students, but since we’ve made some simple changes, we’re seeing a changed atmosphere and a new passion for inviting.
Encourage students to invite!
Make it a part of your culture to invite friends to events! Our students used to ask, “Can I bring a friend?” and now they no longer ask, they just do! Each time you promote an event, make sure to mention friends are invited. For us, the game-changer was streamlining all of our events and activities and creating a night called “Invite Night” that is no-signup and no-cost and on our campus.
Students know the purpose of the night is to invite, and we create events that are visitor-friendly!
Connect with Parents
Whenever I meet the parent of a visitor, I turn on the charm because I know that if a parent feels rapport with the ministry, then their teenager will come back. Another thing that I do is make sure that all of my small group leaders and volunteers are easily recognizable with nametags on lanyards. This is a very simple, cheap, and effective way for parents to notice who the adults leading their teens are. When parents see we have lots of volunteers, they feel more confident about leaving their teen with us.
Connect visitors to super-students
Anytime a brand new visitor comes, I invite another student to buddy up with them. I try to pair this visitor up with another student of the same gender, in the same grade, and even the same school. It creates an insta-friend, and sometimes a visitor will see that they know someone at our church!
Celebrate visitors
In our preteen ministry, we have something called “The Box of Fun.” Any time a friend is brought to our main gathering on Sundays, the friend and our student get to choose from the Box of Fun. We have a theme song and an entire presentation that excites our students and sets the atmosphere for our gatherings. When there is a visitor who wasn’t brought with a friend, we still bring them forward and it puts a huge smile on their face as they make a room full of friends.
At our Invite Night, the person who brings the most friends gets a rad prize. We also enter all of our visitors into a drawing and give out a few door prizes. Being before the room with everyone cheering helps celebrate our visitors and encourages our students to bring more visitors. Some youth ministries give visitors swag with the student ministry logo on it, like waterbottles or t-shirts. We love goofy gag gifts and gift cards.
Invite new students to the “next thing”
After we have a visitor, we make sure that they know what’s next! We send them a postcard with the next big event—a retreat, the next Invite Night, or anything else we have coming up. We want them to know there’s always more fun and ways to get connected in our community. In order to do this, we have a “Connection Card” that each student fills out that includes date of birth, grade/school, address, and family information.
While these ways are effective, they only do so much for creating an environment that is welcoming and non-scary. We used to only see the occasional visitor at our events and activities, but now about 25% of our students at Invite Night are visitors, and some have even started coming to our worship gatherings. At our worship gatherings, we used to very rarely have friends brought and never kept new visitors. Now we have a handful of friends brought each week (which makes the Box of Fun very long!) and most of our new visitors come back.
