7 Inspiring Church Pinterest Strategy Ideas for Community Building

[00:00:00] Speaker A: While it might not be the first social media channel that every church should consider, Pinterest does pose a really interesting opportunity for churches. And in this conversation, we're going to unpack some of the opportunities that your church might have using Pinterest. Let's do this. You're listening to the reach, right? Podcast, the show dedicated to helping your church reach more people and grow. Hey, guys, I'm Thomas. [00:00:27] Speaker B: And I'm Ian. [00:00:28] Speaker A: And today we are talking about Pinterest for churches, something that is new to us here. We've done 200 is our 201st episode of the Retry podcast. We've talked about Pinterest exactly zero times on this podcast up until right now, and I think it's going to be a good conversation. Ian, you and I, we talked about this. We don't actively use Pinterest, either one of us here, I know that you, at one point, you had an account. Is that right? [00:00:57] Speaker B: I think, yeah. When it first came out, it was just more of a thing like, hey, let me check it out. Even though I've heard this is for ladies who want food recipes. [00:01:04] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so I think that it's. I mean, I know you set it up. I don't think I might have set one up, like, a long time ago. I don't think that I did. I know my wife uses it heavily still, too. [00:01:17] Speaker B: If I looked into it now, I'm sure I'd have to have a whole new setup and login and all of that. So you've probably been over a decade. Yeah. [00:01:24] Speaker A: And so I think it's going to be interesting, though, because I do think there are some opportunities, and we have seen some churches that have had success using Pinterest. And so in this conversation, we're not going to come at it from a user's perspective. We're going to come at it from a marketer's perspective and hopefully unpack some things that we see that churches are doing on Pinterest. And we've seen this, that are, they're actually getting some results in these areas here. So it's not going to be chock full of our own personal advice on how to use it for your personal benefit. But I think just for, for a church and how to market with it, I think it should be an effective, a helpful conversation, I hope. [00:02:02] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. That's it. So why don't we jump right in? I'll start us off here with the first one. The first of seven here is create inspirational boards. And so the board is kind of like where you're going to pin everything to, right. So it's. It's kind of like where you're posting and a safe place to share ideas and content. Right. So, yeah, you want something inspirational. And so this could be, you know, something that. Where people can build off of, you know, scripture references for their faith stories, those types of things. So inspirational boards would be probably a good place to start for a church since churches want to inspire people to faith. Yeah. [00:02:46] Speaker A: Think of it as like, it's your way of curing, curating content from around Pinterest that you find helpful. And I think it's really a good place for a church to start with. Something like this is that if you are just finding content that you think would resonate with your audience at your church, your boards will start to become something that people rely on for that kind of content there. So, yeah, that would be a first step, I think, when you're just kind of getting rolling things is starting to make some boards because that's probably the easy part. You know, doing the actual, you know, creating the content on Pinterest and doing actual, you know, actual making your own things to pin. That's where a lot more work comes in, but that's what comes up to the next point here is highlighting events and activities that are happening at your church and things, I think, especially around youth, children's and women's events, I think that's your best opportunity. You know, I think that Pinterest is obviously very heavily skewed towards women that are using it as opposed to men. So I don't necessarily recommend your next men's men's event, that you'd make a Pinterest a major focus at it. But for these kinds of events, I think getting your photography on there, especially the creative elements. So let's say for Mother's day coming up here, you have a big photo booth that you're going to do at your mother's day. That's the perfect kind of thing to wind up on Pinterest. I think you'll gain a lot of interest because that's one of the first places that I may not have, like, accounts, but I'll dig into that. Or my wife, I know she does a lot of the photo booths at our church, and so that's the first play that she starts, is she'll get onto Pinterest and take a look at what their, what other churches and other people have done to make great photo booths and, yeah, a great resource for something like that. [00:04:28] Speaker B: Oh, that's good. And the next thing is encouraging collaboration. The third thing, and this is what we actually encourage every church to do with any social media. But social media should be social. It should be where people engage and communicate and bring ideas together. So this is also a place where you want members. We say this all the time, like for Facebook and Instagram and everything else, sharing stories, testimonies, experiences, you know, and making sure that people are engaged with one another. You want to make sure that you're commenting on people that are sharing these things here. So obviously, it's not just a place to post, it is a place to collaborate and communicate as well. So. [00:05:11] Speaker A: Yep, yep, that's right. That's good. Next one is connecting it to your sermon series. I think that's really another opportunity that you have there, kind of like your events and activities. I think sermon series, these are one of the things that churches generally do that's in the creative realm. A lot of churches do it if you're not borrowing it or you're paying for a service that's doing your sermon graphics, I think, you know, pinning each sermon graphic that you would do if you do a series on a book of the Bible or a topical series, you know, I know at our church we make graphics, and if you have a designer on your church, it's a really great idea. So taking those and just kind of getting it out there and sharing the wealth and making it available to other churches and people looking for sermon series graphics, I think it's a good way to build an audience on here and actually helps with your overall online reputation. So I think sermon series graphics and other, maybe a bumper, if you do those kinds of things in your sermon series, those are all really good opportunities to share on Pinterest. [00:06:09] Speaker B: Yeah. Another one is what it's already known for, is sharing DIY projects. So, you know, it's funny, the first thing we said, and it comes to mind with Pinterest, at least for me, is recipes and those. But it's all, it's been about DIY projects. And I know that my wife personally has gone to Pinterest. When we are looking at it like a project around the house or a DIY thing or something that we need an idea for. [00:06:35] Speaker A: Same thing for your church. [00:06:36] Speaker B: You know, you can, you can create relevant content. Maybe it's like a youth ministry prop or a children's ministry, you know, fun craft or game. You can find this kinds of stuff there. You might be surprised what you find. And of course, once you find those things, not just from what other churches are sharing, but obviously from what your members are doing, maybe your members can offer input. Maybe you have that DIY superstar mom that has ideas for the youth and kids and things that they can share there. So good to be able to get some DIy and inspiration there. [00:07:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I know there's a lot of good stage craft type ideas that are on there. So setting up your church stages and those kinds of things, especially if you're trying to do it on a budget, I find there's a lot of good content on there for users, but I think it's a great thing for churches to be producing content. If you have a unique way that you set up your stage or, you know, I know people are all into the whole pallet wall thing. I don't know if you've seen that at churches where they use pallets all over this. [00:07:41] Speaker B: Yes. [00:07:41] Speaker A: It's going to be kind of the mullets of stage design. I think it'll kind of go out of favor here, I guess. I don't know, maybe mullets are back. [00:07:48] Speaker B: They are back. My son plays baseball anyway. Baseball thing. [00:07:52] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. It is a basic. He doesn't have one. [00:07:54] Speaker B: Thank God. [00:07:55] Speaker A: Yeah. Do thank God for that. Yes. So, yeah, but I think that that's a great place to be looking and to be creating content for people to consume about the projects that you're doing at your church there. So next one is assembling educational content. I think this is especially great for educating children. So, you know, if you're doing some kind of a, a project or some kind of a curriculum in your kids ministry, especially if you're writing it yourself or kind of making these themes there. Great content to put onto Pinterest to kind of get the word out there and then just share the love with other churches and other parents that are trying to create resources and things, and we'll talk more about that in a second. But parents that are trying to educate their kids or teach them more about the Bible, what a great place to go for that. And if you can create content on Pinterest that helps parents educate kids and teachers bring education to their kids, I think that's a really valuable use of Pinterest for churches. [00:08:57] Speaker B: Yeah, you're right. And that's a good segue to our last one, which is providing family resources. And I think this is a really cool opportunity. It's funny, it made me flashback to think about the pandemic, how I bet some churches did a good job leveraging Pinterest during the pandemic. When families were looking for ideas and things to do at home that align with the values of their church. Right. So, but this, again, not only the educational stuff you mentioned, but this could be like, you know, games for families to play, activities. Maybe it's Bible, you know, games, crafts. You know, it might be Bible study ideas for parents or just, you know, I admit at times, you know, as a parent myself, we kind of have the usual things we do. And how cool would it be if my church kind of provided some family fun ideas that maybe even brought us closer to the Lord in the meantime? Because I run out of ideas sometimes. So, you know, obviously churches are focused on families, so I think it's good that we end with this one because churches want to reach families. Once they reach families, they want to be a resource to them. So some of those things, activities, devotional stuff, all of that could be very beneficial. [00:10:10] Speaker A: So I'm an executive pastor at my church, and I know with working with our children's director and our youth director, their big challenge is they recognize that they only have a few hours a week to pour into these kids and children that they come to when they come to church there. But parents have so much more time. And so Pinterest, I think, is a great solution for getting resources into parents hands within your church, especially in the more creative realm, and giving them ideas on how to better disciple their own children. You know, obviously, if our expectation is that our youth and children's directors will do all the discipling, well, your kids are going to wind up coming up short with that. So giving parents resources exactly the right way to do this. So anything else to add, Ian, as we close up? [00:10:55] Speaker B: No, no. Like we jokingly said at the beginning, we're not Pinterest experts as far as for personal usage. But, you know, we know I've come across churches a time or two that are really into pinterest. I've heard it over the years. And so hopefully this is. And maybe if your church hasn't used it and you were, you've been doing a good job with the social media channels you've been leveraging already, maybe this is one more you can add to the repertoire. So. [00:11:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I think the thing to remember is that it's not probably the first social media channel that every church should run to. It's probably not even the second or third. [00:11:30] Speaker B: Right. [00:11:30] Speaker A: But if it's something that you personally, as a church leader, are using and it's something that you actually like and could see yourself jumping into, I think it is a great opportunity for churches, and probably one of the best things about it is that it's not really saturated with church content like a lot of other channels are at this point. So very a very small percentage of churches are currently using Pinterest, and so a lot of times that leaves one of the biggest opportunities for us. So dig in though, if your church is using Pinterest, I'd love to hear about how you're using it. Drop us a comment down below. If you're thinking about using it and this has been helpful for you, hit the subscribe button. Thanks so much guys, for being a part of the retried family and we'll see you next time. See ya.