It's Not What You Think  My delemma was: how do I let churches know about "Beneath the Upper Room" (BTUR) in an inexpensive yet ethical way? Banner advertising is almost as expensive as print ads in magazines. I knew I wanted to take advantage of the Internet (KMR Scripts is, afterall, an Internet publishing company) but I also knew I didn't want to have the show associated with spamming, purchased email lists or any other ethically questionable practices.

While I was visiting my home church's website, I noticed a link to our national United Methodist website. I followed the link and saw a "find a church" page that listed all the United Methodist Churches in the whole country. Using this page, I could find information about every church in the denomination. Further, I noticed that many churches had websites and email address listed on their listing page. That's where I got the idea: if I visited each church's website, I could find the email addresses of the people who would most likely be interested in learning about BTUR. I wouldn't need to resort to the "Shotgun" approach where spammers blanket a site with emails, sent to every email address on the server. Nor would I rent or purchase any lists (most of which is comprised of out-dated, long-expired email addresses), use an e-marketing company or any other faceless method of contact.

I would actually visit the website and find the email address of the person who would benefit from knowing about BTUR. Normally, that would be the Pastor of the church. Since the play is very appealing to women, senior citizens, and youth groups, I also include representatives of those groups in my email address. So if the pastor is a woman-- all the better. I often send the email to receptionists (they run the church anyway!), chairperson of the Womens Group, Youth Leader, and Drama Leader-- anyone I find who would logically be interested in knowing about BTUR.

I was talking with my wife, Janelle, about what I was doing and she laughed. This took me a bit by surprise as she doesn't usually question how I run my business, so I asked her what she found to be so funny. She said: "You're spamming for Jesus." This made me laugh as well. What an oxymoron-- I'm sending thousands of email (normally confused with "spamming") to let people know about a very Christian message (a new perspective of Jesus' Last Supper).

To read my observations after visiting thousands of church websites, CLICK HERE.

© 2006, Kevin M Reese.  All Rights Reserved.