Rules for Invitation

If you are starting a new community-building endeavor, you want people to show up to your events. Building momentum is essential for every new plant. Here’s some advice I learned from Jay Pathak, Sean Buckley and Ezra Wallake. Below are five really practical rules I try to follow.

Rule #1: Contact everybody you want to attend your event every week— forever. Do you want 50 people to show up? Well, let me ask you: are you contacting 50 people every week? If not, create a list of 50 people and contact them every week. Do it every week until people start doing it for you. When you contact everybody every week you are communicating that each of them matter to you, and it helps to foster momentum.

Rule #2: When reaching out to people, make it personal but direct. Text is often better than email and sometimes more culturally appropriate than a phone call. Here are two examples. “Hey man, are you coming this Sunday?” “Yo dude, you hanging with us Sunday?” You may want to ask for something. IE: “Hey man, I was wondering if you could help me something on Sunday.” “Hey, are you coming on Sunday? I want to introduce you to somebody.” I hate to have to be this specific but I’ve found that many people forget how to be a human being when gathering people to an event.

Rule #3: nothing impersonal ever. No group communication. Nobody responds the way you want to a group text because it’s public. Don’t communicate in an impersonal way. Here’s an example of an impersonal touch: “This is just a reminder text that our event is this Sunday at 10am. Make sure to invite your friends.” Boring. Lame. It’ll never work. Instead of being impersonal, try to refer back to Rule #2.

Rule #4: model it, then empower others to do it. Once you’ve shown your key people that it works, invite your leaders to help you. Teach them how to do it. Then, remind them and follow up with them to see if they did it. Ideally, you want your key people to care more about creating a welcoming and invitational culture than you do.

Rule #5: don’t build a bridge to nowhere. Why bother doing all this hard work to invite people to your community event if your community event is terrible? Don’t build a bridge to nowhere. Build a pathway to great experiences and great event or don’t bother at all. Deliver on what you promise and make sure your key leaders deliver on it too.