Millions of people will use AChurchNearYou.com this December – and 80% of visitors to the site are there for the first time. You can use AChurchNearYou.com to promote your services and events this Christmas – all for free.
If you haven’t already, now is the perfect time to list your services and events, using the tag ‘Advent’ or ‘Christmas’. You can also use other relevant tags like ‘Christmas Eve’, ‘Christmas carols’, ‘Christingle’, ‘Nativity’ and even ‘Mulled wine’ or ‘Mince pies’ to help people find the right service for them.
A step by step guide to listing your services, is available here
What’s changing?
AChurchNearYou.com will again have a makeover for Advent and Christmas in line with this year’s ‘Follow the Star’ campaign. Your feedback from last year has been heard and this year, you can choose, through the Marketplace, to opt in or out of displaying the Christmas branding on your church site. Other changes this year include:
- An extra field when creating a service or event labelled ‘Choir singers’ that allows you to add how many people you estimate will be singing our new composition of The First Nowell, plus a ‘#JoinTheSong’ tag for you to tag the service or event where the carol will be sung. This will allow us to estimate how many people and churches will #JoinTheSong nationally this year
- On your church’s services or events page, there will be a panel highlighting your tagged Advent and Christmas events, as well as a separate page specifically for those events
- At AChurchNearYou.com/christmas visitors will be able to refine their search using a drop-down list of seasonal tags and a date filter to find Advent and Christmas events in their area more easily than ever before
- Improved search results for Advent and Christmas services and events with a ‘share’ and ‘add to calendar’ buttons
- We are automatically tagging any one-off services or events happening from 24 December with a ‘Christmas’ tag, to help your community find services
- Finally, to save time, remember you can list your services and events at benefice level and choose which of your churches they should display on.