These marketing essentials will help you develop an effective plan to market events and programs that will reach young adults.
Promotion and outreach are important for any organization – but what we’re selling is not just a product like any other. Young Adult Ministry is not about numbers and profits; it is about the Gospel and the living Body of Christ. Consequently, marketing for young adult ministry should be approached differently. Guided by the right principles and strategies, promotion and outreach to young adults can become a ministry in itself.
Strategies that are successful for other ministries in your parish may not suffice. The people you are trying to reach are often on the cutting edge of today’s communication tools. Marketers of all sorts seek the time, attention, energy, and resources of young adults. The competition is tough. Even if your parish has great success with the promotion of its other ministries, your young adult ministry outreach may require renewed creativity and effort.
In this section we’ll guide you through everything you need to know from foundational principles to logistical know-how. We will consider how to reach young adults inside and outside your parish and help you develop a plan specific to your setting. This section will enable you to sustain and expand outreach as your ministry thrives. In addition to all this practical information, we’ll show you how marketing can be more than just something else on the to-do list; outreach to young adults is a ministry when it is done right.
Promoting your young adult ministry will be less overwhelming if you recognize the subgroups within the larger demographic. Consider in-reach, outreach, and age range. In-reach concerns the young adults who already belong to your parish community, outreach concerns the young adults in the surrounding community. For both groups, think about age as well as ethnicity, language, socioeconomic status, relationship status, etc.
Once you divide the young adults into sub-groups in your parish and wider community, prioritize which demographics you strive to reach. Perhaps you’ll begin with outreach to the 25-30 year old single professionals within your parish and then plan to reach out to the 18-25 year olds in the college town nearby once your ministry is off the ground. You may focus on promoting your ministry among the young adult parents at your parish before reaching out to homeless young adults in your neighborhood. See “Mapping Our Ministry for Promotion and Outreach” handout.
Maybe you’re reading this because you are a young adult that has volunteered to get something going for your peers. Perhaps you’re a parish staff member that would like to see a stronger outreach to the young adults in your church. Either way, the young adults you hope to reach should serve as your experts. Every local young adult group is unique. Young adults in your community may respond best to online communication, while others will answer to personal invitations, and still others paper bulletin announcements. Sit down with one or two other young adults from your community – or create an entire team representative of the different groups you want to reach – to focus on building a promotional strategy for your ministry. If you have already put together a leadership team, this is an ideal task for that group.
This is a chance to affirm the talents that young adults have to offer your parish. In addition to having important input about your outreach strategy, your young adults may have expertise in the communication tools you need for executing this strategy. Don’t know how to create that catchy looking flier that your outreach plan requires? Ask a tech-savvy young adult to teach you how to navigate the necessary software and social media platforms. This will utilize and recognize the gifts of young adults at your parish and is another form of outreach and ministry: it sends the message that young adults are valued. They will want to belong to communities that need and affirm their gifts.
Trying to reach young married couples? Sit down with the parish coordinators of marriage preparation and infant baptism to share information. They might welcome a stack of young adult ministry flyers with QR codes or even a visit to one of their meetings. Want to attract young professionals? Grab a cup of coffee with the staff of your local college campus ministry. They may be willing to refer graduating young adults to you or invite you to an upcoming campus event where you can begin to build relationships with students. Communicate with others that serve the young adults you would like to reach out to.
There is no shortage of promotional tools to help you get the word out about your ministry. See “Outreach Resources.” Is the best way to market to young adults to utilize as many venues of communication as possible? Or to use all the latest technologies & social networking tools? Not necessarily.
Young adults are a highly targeted demographic. Once they feel bombarded by advertising, they often start to ignore it … even resent it. Send them two to three emails a week and they may start deleting them before the emails are even opened. This doesn’t mean that email is an ineffective method; it means that two to three emails a week is an ineffective method. Strike a balance between communicating enough … but not too much.
Promotional tools serve different purposes. X (formerly Twitter), with its word length limitations, works best for last-minute reminders. Instagram, being an image based website, is great for visual promotions like digital fliers and event announcements. It would be useless to a young adult who did not already have more detailed event information from another source. If you don’t have a sense of the best way to use a potential ministry tool, ask a young adult.
Very few people have the time and stamina to engage all the marketing tools that are out there. Do your ministry and yourself a favor – be discerning about which promotional tools to engage.
Sustainability requires realistic expectations. In most parishes, 50 young adults will not show up to your first young adult ministry event, regardless of how effective your marketing was. Don’t let unrealistic expectations overshadow the slow and steady success of your outreach plan. Set realistic goals so you can recognize your successes and see where your outreach strategy needs improvement.
Assess your resources. Some promotional tools require more time to maintain than others. Do you have that time or do you have a volunteer or young adult team who does? Some tools are free while others require a one-time or recurring fee.Do you have a budget that can support the tools you want to engage?
Picture this – a young adult has been eagerly awaiting your parish’s huge Theology on Tap. She’s seen all your great promotional materials online and in the Sunday bulletin. She shows up for the event and there is no one there to greet her. They have run out of nametags. The other young adult participants seem to know each other, laughing and chatting while she sits silently, gazing around the room. Despite all the inviting promotional materials, she leaves the event feeling unwelcome. The message she took away from the event completely undercut the message promoted by your outreach efforts.
Consider outreach strategies that utilize those you’ve already connected with. Try a bring-a-friend night. Have everyone give out three brochures or hang up three fliers somewhere. Create a culture of outreach within the group so that everyone takes responsibility for inviting others in.
Benedict XVI was right to acknowledge the limitations of technology and social media. However, he also named its many benefits, such as “dialogue, exchange, solidarity and the creation of positive relations.” Still, if you question the ethical implications of available promotional tools, take the opportunity to engage your parish community – especially young adults – in a conversation about ethics and social media. How is social media used in ethical and unethical ways? How should we, as a parish or ministry, be using it? How should we, as Christians, engage it? Such conversations could not only affect your ministry but also the everyday lives of community members.
Because of technology’s rapid evolution, it is difficult for everyone to keep up. You are not alone in feeling overwhelmed. Here are four ways to improve your skills with online social media:
First, remain open minded and patient. Like any new skill, technology requires a willingness to learn and the time to do it.
Second, ask a young adult to teach you. Invite him/her to walk you through the technology, and if necessary, whip out pen and paper to take notes or write out a step-by-step list.
Third, check out YouTube’s many “how-to” videos that will walk you, step by step, through the newest technologies. Also, check out the list of “how-to” YouTube videos in the “Outreach Resources” section for various social media platforms.
Finally, keep practicing these technologies!
There are too many apps, but the good news is that you don’t have to use them all. In fact, it’s better to determine which is best for your community. Talk about it with your leaders and community members, find out what platforms they are already using. Also consider the use for each one. Instagram can be great for advertising an upcoming event, but WhatsApp can help send out notifications in case of a time or location change. Each platform will have its advantages and disadvantages, consider which one or two would work best for your community and invest your time in learning those.
AI has become a ubiquitous term in the tech and advertising world, and has raised many questions regarding the ethicality of AI. There are also so many AI platforms out there, from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and beyond. Figuring out which one you might want to even use can seem a headache. While AI can do many things quickly, such as generating wording to advertise an event, talking points and questions around a subject, and images to use, it can never truly replace the human element and ingenuity. There are times and places to use AI, but don’t look to AI as a magic cure-all for ministry. Remember that utilizing the gifts of your community will help lift members up and create a greater sense of community buy-in.
Assess what’s going on:
Which subgroups of young adults am I hoping to work with? See “Mapping Our Ministry for Promotion and Outreach.”
Survey young adults and ask:
Learn the skills you need and find people to help:
Getting things started:
These YouTube videos will walk you through some potential promotional tools for your ministry outreach:
ParishSOFT is a fee-based platform geared towards Catholic parishes in marketing efforts. It helps in not only managing emails and other digital communications, but helps to foster a greater sense of community in the parish. With a simple text, a member can join a particular list, such as young adults, in the parish for updates on events.
ConstantContact is a fee-based website offering members online marketing services. For those who can afford it, it is a great way to streamline your ministry’s online promotion and outreach efforts. In addition to providing professional email templates, the site allows you to store various email lists so group emails are only a click away. It also allows you to connect emails to other social media sites, like Facebook and X. Its e-mail tracking statistics indicate how many email recipients opened your email and which links they clicked. This library of videos helps you navigate everything Constant Contact can do.
Take the following list of possible promotion or outreach tools to your young adults and see what they would add. Have them rate each item on a scale of 1 to 3 (1 – always, 2 – sometimes 3 – never) to find out which tools they are already using to get information.
| Describe | In-reach: Who are the young adults in my parish? | Outreach: Who are the young adults in the community surrounding my parish? |
|---|---|---|
| Age range(s) | (i.e., recent graduates, singles in late 20s-early 30s, newly married with children) | (i.e., young adults attending local college) |
| Ethnicities | (i.e., is your parish largely white, hispanic, etc.? Who is present in your community?) | (i.e. what is your neighborhood community like?) |
| Other significant factor defining subgroup: | (i.e., recent graduates -- looking for fellowship activities to make friends, build relationships) | (i.e., looking for welcoming parish while away from home) |
| Other significant factor defining subgroup: | (i.e., singles in late 20s to early 30s – interest in service projects) | |
| Other significant factor defining subgroup: | (i.e., newly married with children – looking for activities to do as couples) | |
| Other significant factor defining subgroup: | ||
| Other significant factor defining subgroup: |
Prioritize: decide which young adult subgroups you will target in your promotion and outreach and which promotional tools you’ll use to reach these groups. Consider creating a timeline for outreach to additional subgroups in the future.
