We’re restructuring our Come & See Program strategy
Our job here at Vocation Promotion is to get good candidates to your discernment retreats.
But it seems that lately there have been some snags in our approach.
Our Come & See program began in 2013, and we have been enhancing and improving it ever since. But Candidates seem to be more difficult to recruit now as compared to a few months ago. Now we are re-evaluating and restructuring the program in an effort to bring more qualified candidates to your retreats. We have come up with our most important effort to improve our program.
Immediacy is important
Quick followup is needed. When a candidate asks a question, we need to respond to them. The important thing here is immediacy. It helps when the candidate gets a response to their question right away.
There are several ways that the candidates show interest. One is on the vocation quiz itself. Here’s an example.
One candidate, Richard, age 19, from Louisiana, writes on the quiz, “Does the community have its own seminary?” If the quiz shows that he is a good candidate with no red flags, it would be good to write him an email answering his question.
Yet another candidate showed on a poll that she was interested in learning more about a retreat coming up in about six months. I sent her an email thanking her for her interest.
Let’s look at another candidate, Marisol. She is age 20, from North Carolina. She responded to a poll, or survey, in one of our newsletters. She clicked on the response, “This mini-course has given me a lot to think about. Thanks much.”
We also see that Marisol joined the list three months ago, she is a five-star candidate, and that she has opened 100% of our newsletters. I think she deserves an email or phone call.
Individual contact is so important. I have to admit, we here at TreeFrogClick have been letting some of these people slip between the cracks. We are now developing a system of regularly following up on the best candidates who show real interest in your community.
We will contact these persons from our office individually on a regular basis. I understand that some of our vocation directors would like to do it themselves. That is even better. We need the vocations director to spend at least a few hours each week on followup.
There are two sources of information where you can find information about your candidates. One is on the vocations quiz spreadsheet. The other is on the newsletter list. I will also admit that it is somewhat difficult to dig the good names out of the Mailchimp list. That is why we prepare for you our list of Best Candidates every month on a spreadsheet, so you can look over the names and individually contact them.
We have other enhancements planned as well. Stay tuned.
