When a church tells me there isn’t enough demand for its space, I’m usually sceptical.
That doesn’t mean every church has a huge untapped market waiting outside its doors. But people still need places to gather. The UK events industry is worth more than £60 billion, and VisitBritain’s latest business events research found that an estimated 1.08 million conferences and meetings took place in the UK in 2024 alone.
People are still having birthday parties, running classes, holding meetings, organising conferences and bringing communities together.
So often, the more useful question isn’t Is there demand? It’s where is that demand going instead?
Can people actually find you?
Word of mouth is brilliant. If people are recommending your space, that’s a good thing. But if almost all your bookings come from people who already know you, I’d also ask how someone who's never heard of your church is supposed to find you.
Sometimes venue hire is buried three levels into a church website. Sometimes it’s a paragraph on an old page with a telephone number at the bottom. The venue isn’t appearing in relevant directories, local searches or the other places its potential customers are looking.
You can have a great space, but if your reach is limited, your enquiries will be too.
Are you making it easy to say yes?
Finding a venue is one more thing your customer needs to get done, and there’s usually some risk attached to getting it wrong. They might be organising an event for their boss or their child’s fifth birthday, but either way they want enough information to feel comfortable making a decision.
That means every unnecessary difficulty can make it harder to say yes. Poor photographs, missing information, a long enquiry form or a phone number answered only on certain days all add work and uncertainty. Meanwhile, another venue may have shown them exactly what they need to know and made it straightforward to enquire.
What happens once somebody enquires?
Marketing people call this a sales funnel. In practice, it’s simply the journey from looking for a venue to actually booking one.
People can fall away at every stage.
If hardly anybody finds you, you probably have a visibility problem. If people find you but don’t enquire, look at how you present the venue. If enquiries arrive but rarely become bookings, the problem may sit further along the process.
Response time is one example. Harvard Business Review research found that companies contacting an online lead within an hour were nearly seven times more likely to qualify it than those waiting even an hour longer. It isn’t venue-specific research, but the principle matters: interested customers don’t necessarily wait around.
If every enquiry needs to wait several days for somebody to check availability or approve it, you may be losing customers who were perfectly willing to book if they had just heard back a little sooner.
Your current bookings aren’t necessarily your ceiling
Low bookings tell you how your venue is performing under its current conditions. They don’t automatically tell you what kind of income your building could achieve.
Sometimes there really isn’t enough demand to justify significant investment. But often, potential customers are simply being lost at certain points in the journey.
That’s why it’s worth understanding the problem before deciding the potential isn’t there. A Strategic Venue Audit looks at your current venue hire, the market around you and where the strongest opportunities lie, so you can make informed decisions about what is worth changing or investing in.
Because sometimes the answer isn’t finding more demand. It’s getting much better at reaching the demand that’s already there.