Your church hall is booked most evenings. The diary is full, your team is busy, and venue hire brings in £70,000 a year. Is that good? Maybe. But those things alone don’t actually tell me very much. In fact, if you’re consistently booked out, one of the first things I’d want to understand is whether you’re charging enough.
Because the goal isn’t busyness. It’s value.
Being busy isn’t the same as performing well
I’ve spoken to churches that are understandably pleased with how busy their buildings are. They’re getting bookings, people are using the space, and income is coming in. But if you’re already full, I don’t necessarily want to find you more bookings. Your administrator is already stretched, your building is already experiencing the wear and tear, and your team is already putting in the hours. What I want to understand is whether you’re getting enough value from the activity that’s already happening.
If your most desirable times are consistently booked months in advance, that tells me something about demand. It may mean your pricing needs reviewing. Perhaps lower-value bookings are occupying times that could generate considerably more, or your customer mix needs to change. There may be ways to increase income without adding a single additional event.
So how do you know if you’re doing well?
This is surprisingly difficult to answer when you only have your own building to compare against. I spend a lot of time looking at venue data across different buildings, capacities, locations and markets. I also use a commercial pricing model we've designed for assessing spaces. Years of working across different venues has given me a broad frame of reference for what different kinds of buildings can realistically achieve.
So when I see that a church is generating £30,000, £70,000 or £250,000 from its building, I’m not looking at that number in isolation. I’m asking what comparable spaces are achieving, what that location and building can command, how much availability exists and what kinds of customers it could realistically attract.
Sometimes lower income than I'd expect makes complete sense. A church may have consciously decided that venue hire will remain a relatively small part of what it does, or there may be a physical issue that's harder to spot online. However, sometimes I look at the building, the market and the numbers and see a significant gap between where it is and where I believe it could reasonably be.
What is your existing activity actually worth?
If a venue is already busy, I want to understand the quality of that business before trying to increase its volume. How much is the average booking worth? Which customers take the most administrative time? Are you selling your most valuable dates at the right price? Are you filling Saturdays with bookings you accepted years ago at rates that no longer make sense? Are repeat customers creating reliable, profitable income, or have they simply inherited historic pricing?
Revenue matters, but so does what it takes to generate it. Sometimes the opportunity isn’t to become busier. It’s to make the activity you already have work harder. That’s something I saw first-hand at St Mary’s London, where changing the way we priced, positioned and operated the venue eventually contributed to income growing from around £80,000 to approximately £500,000 a year.
Your time has a commercial value too
This is one of the things I think churches can easily miss. If you’re already busy, I don’t want to add more to your plate. I want the time you already spend on venue hire to go towards the things that create the most useful return.
That might mean increasing prices rather than increasing bookings. It could mean pursuing more repeat customers so your administrator isn’t constantly processing new enquiries. Somewhere else, it might mean deliberately reducing the number of events while pursuing fewer, higher-value bookings. Growth doesn’t necessarily mean more activity. Sometimes it means becoming much more deliberate about which activity is worth your limited time.
Potential is a choice, but it should be an informed one
Not every church will decide to pursue the full commercial potential of its building, and that’s completely legitimate. Income isn’t the only thing a church has to consider. Worship, mission, community use, staffing capacity and the wellbeing of the people running it all matter.
But I do think those decisions should be made with good information. There’s a difference between consciously deciding not to pursue an opportunity and simply not knowing that the opportunity is there.
So if you’re trying to work out whether your venue hire is performing well, I wouldn’t start by asking how full your diary is or how many bookings you took last year. I’d ask a slightly different question: given our building, market, capacity and values, are we getting enough value from the time and space we’re already giving to venue hire?
If you don’t know the answer, that’s exactly the question my Strategic Venue Audits are designed to investigate.