#5 Make Parking Available – 101 Ways to Attract More Visitors

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Hey Digital Communicators, I’m John Falke from Johnny Flash Productions and Amplified Impact, and this is 101 Ways to Attract More Visitors, a practical guide for churches to amplify their impact and reach their communities. Now let’s amp it up.

#5 Make parking available. Now, this may sound obvious, but there’s nothing worse than seeing people drive into your church parking lot, not be able to find a spot and then decide to drive out of your parking lot and go somewhere else.

Now you might think this isn’t a big deal, but this happened at the church that I was on staff at frequently and so we had to be creative about how to make parking available for first time visitors and so we did a number of things.

There's nothing that says we don’t want you here more than, ''Go to the other parking lot because we are full here.'' @johnfalke Click To Tweet

We had spots that had signs on them that said they were for first time visitors only and so we would direct new people to those parking spots during peak times when we knew parking would be limited.

We found a nearby parking lot that we were able to use and so we got a shuttle bus and we would have a shuttle drive between this, a satellite parking lot and our church parking lot and we would ask all of our staff and our volunteers who are volunteering for two services to park at that parking lot.

It would take just a couple of minutes to get over on the shuttle bus to the church and that ensured that we had enough parking for visitors when they came. So figure out what you need to do at your church. It might not be that you have this problem all the time, but maybe at Christmas and Easter or maybe during your peak attendance months, you need to have some kind of extra parking available for your first time visitors. Be sure not to make your first time visitors park at the satellite parking lot.

There’s nothing that says we want you here more than, “hey, go park in the parking lot because you don’t know what’s going on, and he got here a few minutes late.” That’s not a good message to send, so make sure that you have your regulars park in the satellite lot and cast the vision for having close parking spaces available for your visitors and your first time guests.

In the next video, I’m going to show you how to figure out where your guests are coming from so you can utilize that to your advantage. Until then, amp it up.

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