Fall Festival Planning: 3 Steps to Success (Part 2)
Fall Festivals are an incredible opportunity to reach out to your families in your community. Many families are looking for a safe place for their kids to trick or treat. You can provide that with your church.
But if you want your guests to come back to your church, you need to have a well-organized event, a solid contact information collection plan, and great follow-up. I’ll talk about how to do all of those things in this post.
This is the second of a two-part series on planning your Fall Festival. You can read part 1 here.
1. Set Everything Up
Whether you’re doing a stay and play event like a Fall Festival or a come and go event like a Trunk or Treat, you still need to know where things are going to go.
Before your event, you need to get a campus map. Your church might have one on file you can use. Or if you’re holding the event outside, you can print an arial view of your church from Google Maps.
Once you get that map, import the image into an editing program like Canva or PowerPoint. You need to map out where everything is going to go. You have inflatables? Mark where you want to put them. Food trucks? They’re going to need to be near the road. Carnival games? What part of your lawn should they be?
As you make these decisions, draw boxes for each activity and label it. Once you’re done, you can print it out and give it to your volunteers who are helping you set up.
A couple caveats
Don’t make all the decisions in a vacuum. Before I make this map, I’ll have one or two people walk out with me as we talk through where things will go. We talk about flow, space, and crowd management. You can take a preliminary map with you, but sometimes pictures can be deceiving.
Also, as you plan how to set things up, think about how people will get in and out of your campus. Many churches have multiple entrances, and most likely a good bit of your activities will be in the parking lot. You need to have a plan for where people will go. You don’t want cars driving through crowds of kids. That’s never good.
On the day of your event gather all your supplies and have a meeting with your volunteers. You can read about how I do that meeting for my Egg Hunts here. Then. get to work.
If you’re doing a Trunk or Treat, you don’t necessarily need to meet with all your volunteers. Just the ones who are helping you with admin, candy distribution and set up. The rest should have all the info they need from the emails you sent.
2. Collect Everyone’s Information
I had one Fall Festival where my marketing went really well. We had double the amount of people show up. One of the biggest problems I ran into was collecting everyone’s information. I had one tent with two volunteers and an info card. But I ran out of cards halfway through! Also, the line got so long people started to leave. By the end of the night, we were just letting people through.
That event was the genesis of one of my most popular posts this time of year, 4 Ways to NOT Do Registration at Your Fall Festival (and one good one).
I won’t go over that entire post here. But you need to have a solid plan. My favorite and most effective plan is to have a drawing. In order to enter the drawing, guests have to share their basic information with us. Think name, phone and email.
If you’re doing a stay and play event, you can do the drawing in person and require people to be there to win. For a come and go, you can just ask people to turn in the card. You can do the drawing later and contact the winners.
With today’s technology, you can also register digitally with a QR code to an online form. These work, but I wouldn’t solely rely on them. Most people will ignore the sign. It’s better to give them a physical card.
One of my essential volunteers are my parking lot attendants. They stand at the entrance of the parking lot and greet each person. As they explain where people need to park, they also hand them a registration card. They tell them about the drawing and how to enter.
I always have an Admin tent in a central location. This tent has first aid, a sound system for announcements, and most importantly a place to turn in the cards.
Not everyone will register and that’s ok. You don’t get everyone’s information when they come to church either. I’d rather miss a few people, than make a line a mile long.
If you’d like to get a copy of my registration card, you can get it here.
3. Follow up with Guests
One of my favorite Jim Wideman quotes about an event is
“We’re going to set our hair on fire and invite people to watch.”
As humorous as that is, that’s what you’re doing with your Fall Festival. However, if you don’t do anything with all that contact information you just collected, you’re wasting your time.
I know you provided a safe place for your people. And you may even see salvations. All good things.
But as I’ve learned over the years, as much as I want people to accept Jesus, I also want the opportunity to disciple them.
I can only do that if they come back.
So, you need to follow up with them and invite them back to your church. And the follow up starts once they arrive. Remember the registration card I give them? The back has an invite to my next event. Usually that’s Christmas. If you’re not doing anything special, you can just invite them back to Sunday.
Once you have everyone’s information, get that into your system as soon as possible. You want to follow up within the week. Don’t wait until Thanksgiving to reach out to them. It’s too late then. (Been there done that.)
You can use a lot of methods to reach out to them. I rely most on an email. Especially if I have a lot of people. The very first email does two things.
First, it announces the winners of the drawing. Even if they didn’t win, people still want to know who won and more specifically if they won. Go ahead and tell everyone and notify the winners in another email with how to pick up their prize. Sunday morning is a great time.
Second, ask for their feedback. I have 9 survey questions I like to ask for every event. These questions help me find any problems I may have missed and what I can improve upon next year. I do another give away for the survey. I’ve learned your responses are far greater if you offer them a reward for sharing some information.
A week after that email, send another asking them to fill out the survey again and invite them to your church for the next big thing.
After these two emails, I put them in my normal email list. This way I’m always in their inbox. You can read more about great event follow up in this post.
Having a Fall Festival takes a lot of work, but it can be very effective to reach your community. To make the event that people will love, make sure it’s well-organized, collect their information, and follow-up!
As a result, you’ll see more people at your event every year, many will come to your church, you’ll reach even more for Jesus.
