Last week, I wrote about the four things I think churches need to consider when starting venue hire: Potential, Parameters, Process and Presence.
This week, I want to make that practical.
These aren’t questions you necessarily need to have perfect answers to. They’re prompts to help you work out what’s possible, where the gaps might be and what you need to think through before you start taking bookings.
1. Potential: work out whether venue hire makes sense
Before deciding where to advertise your church, work out what you’re actually trying to sell.
- What types of bookings could your building realistically accommodate?
- Is there genuine demand for what your building could offer?
- Do you understand what your space is worth?
- Could venue hire generate enough income to justify the work involved?
- What makes your building useful or distinctive?
- Do you have the capacity and resources to pursue it properly?
What matters is the relationship between your building, local demand and what your team can realistically manage.
This is also where an outside perspective can be useful. Our Strategic Venue Audits look at your building, local market, pricing, existing activity and operational capacity to work out where the strongest potential actually lies.
2. Parameters: decide your boundaries
It is much easier to make these decisions before someone offers you money.
Think about:
- Which days and times are realistically available to hire?
- Which church activities and uses are non-negotiable?
- Where could you be flexible if the right opportunity came along?
- Are there activities you wouldn’t allow in the building?
- Are there restrictions around things such as alcohol, music, noise or catering?
- How far ahead are you comfortable committing your building?
- What size and complexity of booking can your team realistically manage?
Your venue hire should fit around the life and purpose of the church, rather than gradually making everything else fit around venue hire.
We work through this with churches as part of our venue hire packages, helping you define what you want venue hire to achieve, what needs protecting, and what a workable model looks like before building everything else around it.
3. Process: work out how bookings will actually run
This is what prevents venue hire from becoming 47 things your administrator has to remember.
Ask:
- Who owns the enquiry and booking process?
- How will you track enquiries, bookings, and payments?
- What needs to happen between an enquiry arriving and an event taking place?
- Do you have the right terms, insurance, risk and safeguarding arrangements?
- How will access, security, cleaning and building management work?
- What happens when something goes wrong?
- Could somebody else run the process if the usual person wasn’t there?
You don’t need an enormous operation. You do need a process that doesn’t depend entirely on one person remembering what happens next.
This is also why training forms an important part of our work. Our venue hire training can equip your team to respond to enquiries, follow up effectively and conduct site tours, while our CRM training looks at how you can use systems and workflows to manage bookings, automate repetitive tasks and save time.
4. Presence: make it easy to book you
Finally, think about how people will actually find and choose your venue.
- Is it immediately obvious what you’re offering and who it’s for?
- Do your photography and marketing show the potential of the space?
- Can customers easily find the practical information they need?
- Is it easy to make an enquiry?
- Are you visible in the places your target customers are actually looking?
- Do you have a plan for generating enquiries rather than simply putting a page online and waiting?
You don’t necessarily need an elaborate website. You do need to make it easy for the right customer to understand what you offer and why they should choose you.
We can take care of this part too, from professional venue photography and bespoke websites to our website and brochure design collections, which give you a professionally designed starting point that can be personalised for your venue.
What did your answers tell you?
If you could answer most of these questions confidently, you’ve probably got some good foundations to build from. If several made you stop and think, that’s useful too. Those are probably the areas worth looking at before you start pushing for more bookings.
And if you’d rather not work it all out from scratch, our venue hire packages bring these pieces together, depending on what you already have in place and where you need us most.