You will never be larger than your first meeting of the year.
I’ve been doing campus ministry for over seven years with Campus Crusade for Christ and I have never seen a ministry grow significantly larger than the size of the first official meeting. Yet ministries often treat the first day, week, and month the same as every other week, except with a larger amount of excitement and anticipation.
Have you ever watched Plinko during the Price is Right? The people who, on average, win the most money are the ones who win the maximum amount of chips during the first part of the game. Sure your one chip may land on the $10,000 space but I would rather have four chips than one any day.
College ministry is very similar: You may have a year or two when a large amount of students join your ministry, but the best way to grow your ministry and see your vision manifested on your campus is by engaging and connecting as many students as possible during the first four weeks.
Here’s how:
1. Strategically plan EVERY day of the first four weeks (and the weekend before school starts)
Try to balance activities taking into account the amount of energy it takes for a new student to attend. For example you do not want to pack in multiple outings that require large amounts of time in a single week. Think through easy/fun/high energy events that can be done ON campus (ultimate frisbee course of your campus, capture the flag, whiffleball or games on an athletic field. ALSO balance guy and girl friendly activities–at Chico State we dedicated one day to planning single sex activities.)
2. Carefully craft your contact cards to make it as easy as possible to follow-up new students
The name box is the most important, especially with Facebook. Make sure it’s the most prominent, bigger in size than everything else, and allows plenty of space for the student to write their name. Also consider removing as much info as possible (especially the “I want to be involved in X, Y, and Z check boxes). Leaders are going to rise to the surface regardless of check boxes. Make it quick and easy to fill out your form.
3. Make EVERY LEADER contribute to exposure and follow-up during the first week.
Some of your student leaders are introverts and have a hard time initiating with people. They still need to contribute to exposing and following up new students. Partner them up with extroverted students. It will motivate them and take some of the initiation load off of your most outgoing students.
4. Treat the FIRST DAY of the year like your LAST DAY of ministry.
I’ve seen a dramatic difference in openness among new students between day one and day two of the year. The goal is to get as many students as possible in your ministry to help with passing out flyers, inviting new people to your events, and any other exposure related activities on the first day of the year. Don’t forget about the hour before the first class starts, especially with freshmen. My ministry at Chico State passed out free maps of the campus the morning of day one–new students LOVE this.
5. Connect everyone with your Facebook Group or Fan Page.
A best practice that I have found to connect students to your Facebook Group or Fan Page is to 1) Add them as a friend 2) Click the “add a message” box 3) Provide a short description and clear invitation to join “hi this is Brian from Campus Crusade! you filled a card expressing interest and i just wanted to invite you to our meeting on ____day at ____pm. Please also join our (fan page/group page). The advantage of a Fan Page is that you get a custom url (facebook.com/yourministryname) that you can share in emails, text messages, and messages like these. There are many more advantages as well. Click here to learn how to set up a fan page.
By the end of the fourth week of school your ministry foundation will be established for better or for worse.
If you plan and execute the first four weeks properly you will see that by the end of the fourth week a ministry foundation will be established in both size and quality (the students will know each other well enough to feel at home).
It’s now up to you to share 3,995 other ways to maximize the first four weeks! I made this list short because I’m sure you have great tips, best practices, and thoughts for maximizing the first four weeks! Please help us all out by sharing them in the comments!
[ Blog-a-thon home ]
====================================
Brian Barela is the Director of New Media Strategies for Campus Crusade for Christ. Click here to follow Brian on Twitter! Click here to subscribe to his blog!
25 thoughts on “4000 Ways to Maximize the First 4 Weeks on Campus”
This is, obviously, a phenomenal run-down. Thanks for not just sharing methods but sharing the whys – that's so important and so overlooked.
thanks buddy! we were sync'd up on the maps idea. hope lots of campuses try that out this year if they have yet to do so.
The map give-away is sweeeet idea.
Thanks for the tips. Meeting a great felt need at the moment.
Great thoughts Brian. I'm going to have our staff team read this post during our staff planning next week! Really like all 5 of those. Here's a few more to get you closer to 4,000:
6) If you start the first week of school, you've started too late
– At least at our campus, move-in week is THE week to reach freshmen. Freshmen move in as early as a week before school starts. And then they sit there all week with absolutely nothing to do. We do cookouts and other events all week in order to meet as many as possible and . . .
7) Get as many contact cards as possible (thru great prizes)
– All our events/outreaches the first few weeks have contact cards. We aim to do spiritual interest surveys with 50% of incoming freshmen. How do we motivate them to take the time to fill out surveys? Great free stuff – for us, Chick-fil-A Sandwiches. And we have tons of door prizes at our events/cookouts. We call around 100 local businesses and get donations (like a free round of golf, free oil change, free cut and style at a salon, free subs, etc).
8) Contact all your contacts before your first weekly meeting
– Text all your “interested contacts” before your first Bible study/Weekly Meeting. Google Voice can do this. Or what we did last year is had 40 students leaders get together for a free “texting dinner” where we had them text 50 people each to invite them to a Bible study.
9) Do Large Co-ed Dorm Studies in every freshmen dorm on the first day of class
– High momentum, large group Bible studies that attract 30-50 students in each dorm. They provide a shot of momentum to kick start the year.
10) Communicate to your staff team that this is not a normal season
2 reasons – 1) they need to know that they won't be working 60-70 hours a week all year long. 2) They need to know that this time of the year is worth the investment of 70 hour weeks. And they need to bring their A game. Don't schedule a hair cut at 3pm on the first day of school. And don't spend your first few weeks catching up with returning students on the frisbee golf course. Have them read this post. All weeks of the year are not equal.
thanks tim.
yes your number 6 could be my number one.
by the time we met frosh at move-in (mid-week) some of them had already made friends and established their network, which put us at a disadvantage. i'm sure you have seen the same thing: the students who stay are the students who are relationally connected.
cookouts are a great idea–anything outside we've found to be great.
Thanks for this points 4 & 5 are very good, as well as the others. We are printing this out to discuss as a team which idea we could add/ blend to make our first 4 weeks stronger here at Crusade Alabama! Thank you!
Brian,
Great post as always and thanks for the good ideas.
I'm going to make a slight change in the conversation based on your opening line. It is something that has been haunting us for a few years now.
Shouldn't we be concerned that our first meeting of the year is our biggest? (and it is). I mean, if we are truly a movement and not just a ministry shouldn't we be growing throughout the year? These are things we've been struggling with as we look at our own ministry.
Great observation, Eric. Here's my 2 cents for anybody pondering the same thing (and this may get a little geeky…):
It seems like two big variables come into play during that first meeting. First, there are many students visiting the ministry that won't (and shouldn't) come back (hopefully because they've plugged in elsewhere). Second, an enormous percentage – nearing 100% – of our returning students will attend that night.
So let's say things go REALLY well and we retain 50% of those first-week visitors AND all our students are super-involved and attend, on average, 3 out of 4 meetings for the rest of the year. It would still be very hard to grow as big as that initial meeting, right? -and not for factors that have much to do with effectiveness.
A Large Group of 100 the first night (40 of whom are freshmen) would then drop to an average of 60 when normalcy sets in. (20 of the 40 stick around; the remaining 80 come 3/4ths of the time.) To “beat” that first night in a normal week, you'd have to add an additional 54 equally involved (coming to Large Group 3/4ths of the time) students to your ministry. Not an easy task.
(I suppose if a minister really believes his ministry is the ONLY choice for students – both among the other ministries AND among their options on a given night – then this stat might not be helpful. But if we recognize that some students will be better served elsewhere AND that there are good reasons to skip a Large Group Meeting on occasion, then this might comfort those who are discouraged by the dip in attendance.)
On the other hand, if we're counting how many new people connect to our ministry from, say, Week 4 to Week 14, THEN we're evaluating in-semester growth. Further, this whole discussion points out that it's worth deciding multiple points of measure – not simply Large Group attendance (which is the easiest), but every point along students' Path of Involvement in our college ministries.
Thanks for letting me geek out for a second. Anybody want to join me? I'd love your tweaks of my stats – including my guesses at how many might be freshmen and how regularly we can/should expect students to show up.
Great list, Brian, thanks!
For the record, one year in my ministry at Temple U we actually INCREASED from our first meeting through our fourth, and then STAYED at that number for the remainder of the semester.
It was a notable exception, and there were some extraordinary things happening that semester.
sure. we increased (by 2 people) btw our first and second wk last year. it's the exception not the rule.
thanks eric.
i was at ucla my first two years on staff–we had unrestricted access to the dorms, money to spend on giveaways, and LOTS of students who understood the vision and worked extremely hard to invite EVERYONE they knew or filled out a survey. we had ridiculously large first mtgs, and our numbers usually dropped by 100 or so after the first couple weeks.
if you do the first week right then there should be NO WAY you get bigger because of RESOURCE ALLOCATION.
it's simply not wise to allocate resources that way over the long haul–your students would hate you, and the campus would hate you 🙂
a huge problem i see is allocating resources EVENLY throughout the year even though there are clear highs and lows. i don't think that's what your saying at all.
the big statistic for me is the percentage of new students are we retaining during the first four weeks. if a ministry is growing and healthy then that percentage should steadily rise each year–when it plateaus it's usually a sign of too many leaders and when it drops it's usually a sign of an unhealthy/unaligned leadership team.
does any of this connect? thanks for bringing this up!
thanks eric.
i was at ucla my first two years on staff–we had unrestricted access to the dorms, money to spend on giveaways, and LOTS of students who understood the vision and worked extremely hard to invite EVERYONE they knew or filled out a survey. we had ridiculously large first mtgs, and our numbers usually dropped by 100 or so after the first couple weeks.
if you do the first week right then there should be NO WAY you get bigger because of RESOURCE ALLOCATION.
it's simply not wise to allocate resources that way over the long haul–your students would hate you, and the campus would hate you 🙂
a huge problem i see is allocating resources EVENLY throughout the year even though there are clear highs and lows. i don't think that's what your saying at all.
the big statistic for me is the percentage of new students are we retaining during the first four weeks. if a ministry is growing and healthy then that percentage should steadily rise each year–when it plateaus it's usually a sign of too many leaders and when it drops it's usually a sign of an unhealthy/unaligned leadership team.
does any of this connect? thanks for bringing this up!
good point on the people that land somewhere else. that's so true.
good point on the people that land somewhere else. that's so true.
wow that's super encouraging justin!
wow that's super encouraging justin!
Steve,
Would love to hear some of the extraordinary things that happened…
Benson,
Thanks for your thoughts. Putting numbers to it (however geeky) helped me see the kind of growth that would be necessary. I think now, while I still am working towards that level of growth, I am more okay if we don't reach those numbers again.
Also you make good points about what metrics we are measuring. It's easy to get caught up in the size of the big meeting and miss counting what really matters (number of new believers, number of new leaders year over year)
Thanks.
Brian,
I had never thought about it in terms of resource allocation. As both you and Tim have said, you can't run that hard the whole year. But, if you are going to run hard, this is the time of year to do it.
I do want to see growth in numbers throughout the year because that means that spiritual multiplication is happening. Benson's post helped me see that spiritual multiplication could be happening and we still might not see the large group numbers approach the size of the first meeting.
Thanks.
sure eric. stoked that you are so focused on spiritual multiplication. will be praying that goes well this year for you.
@Eric, @Brian–It was an exceptional year for us. If I could have bottled it, I'd be writing a post on it. It was extraordinary.
This was with a ministry called Crosswalk at Temple University in Philly in 2005-2006. We went from about 100 to 150 in the first month, and then stayed at 150 the remainder of the semester. It was my third year on staff there, and we had built up an amazing leadership team that was united and shared the vision. We had gifted, passionate, energetic people in the right places. For the first time, I had other staff sharing the load with me…a fantastic worship team…as the primary speaker, I was starting to figure out what I was doing, and as a leader, getting better at equipping/empowering others. A bunch of factors converging positively for us at the same time. I'd also say an important factor was that we were really the only functional evangelical campus ministry at the time.
But most of all, with that year I remember a higher level of expectation of God working. Great faith among our team. Lots of prayer. We saw some things that year that I've never seen before or since. It was intense stuff: healings, conversions, spiritual attacks from within and without, dealing with cults, almost a defection of a key leader. The highs were higher and the lows were lower at the same time. And I am NOT the charismatic poster boy!
I haven't seen anything like that year since–all of which to say, it's the notable exception. I won't expect it this year, and will be implementing some of the ideas mentioned here.
Comments are closed.