UU Growth Lab members,
This month's live strategy session replay is now available for you to watch! If you missed "Stress Testing Your Membership Pathway" or want to revisit any parts of it, you can watch it in our member area here.
In this session, we took a deep dive into the visitor-to-member journey as a dynamic system, exploring how small shifts at each stage can have an outsized impact on newcomer retention and congregational growth.
A central theme was the challenge of less persistent visitors. When people are no longer compelled by social expectation to stick with a religious community, even minor friction in the pathway can cause them to quietly walk away.
This means we need to be even more mindul of their process, needs, and how to offer support. As always, I like simple easy to impliment approaches that work regardless of congregational size.
We also used a brand-new UU Growth Lab Visitor Dynamics Visualizer — an interactive tool that lets you adjust parameters like outreach levels, newcomer persistence, and the success rates of each stage of the journey, and see the impact play out in real time. Members will be getting access to that tool as part of our monthly training.
⚠️ Photosensitivity / Epilepsy Note: The visualizer tool used in this session features moving visual elements similar to a video game. If you have photosensitive epilepsy, please be aware before watching.
This visualizer is a simple teaching tool. If you play with it, which you are welcome to do, try the COMPARE mode and try keeping everything the same except changing the NEWCOMER PERSISTENCE level. I think people today are in the 1 or 2 level, meaning they have a low tolerance for anxiety, anything awkward, uncomforable, inconsiderate, and so on.
The "Visitor Dynamics Visualizer" link and the Google Document referenced in the session are all available on the replay page.
This video explains the visualizer:
|
This is not a video of our Zoom, this is explaining the visualizer I mentioned. ;-)
I'm currently working on the on-demand version of this training, incorporating Q&A highlights and additional insights from the session.
After discussing the issue of persistence, I'm working on clarifying and designing specific strategies we can use to mitigate even further. And note that I know we can't make everything perfect for visitors, but we can make our systems more intentional and consistently what newcomers need.
Watch for that announcement coming soon. It will be available to members along with live session replays, previous monthly trainings, and an audio version via our member-only training audio podcast.
Peter Bowden
The UU Growth Lab
Responses