You will never be larger than your first meeting of the year.

thanks buddy! we were sync'd up on the maps idea. hope lots of campuses try that out this year if they have yet to do so.

Great thoughts Brian. I'm going to have our staff team read this post during our staff planning next week! Really like all 5 of those. Here's a few more to get you closer to 4,000:

6) If you start the first week of school, you've started too late
- At least at our campus, move-in week is THE week to reach freshmen. Freshmen move in as early as a week before school starts. And then they sit there all week with absolutely nothing to do. We do cookouts and other events all week in order to meet as many as possible and . . .

7) Get as many contact cards as possible (thru great prizes)
- All our events/outreaches the first few weeks have contact cards. We aim to do spiritual interest surveys with 50% of incoming freshmen. How do we motivate them to take the time to fill out surveys? Great free stuff – for us, Chick-fil-A Sandwiches. And we have tons of door prizes at our events/cookouts. We call around 100 local businesses and get donations (like a free round of golf, free oil change, free cut and style at a salon, free subs, etc).

Contact all your contacts before your first weekly meeting
- Text all your “interested contacts” before your first Bible study/Weekly Meeting. Google Voice can do this. Or what we did last year is had 40 students leaders get together for a free “texting dinner” where we had them text 50 people each to invite them to a Bible study.

9) Do Large Co-ed Dorm Studies in every freshmen dorm on the first day of class
- High momentum, large group Bible studies that attract 30-50 students in each dorm. They provide a shot of momentum to kick start the year.

10) Communicate to your staff team that this is not a normal season
2 reasons – 1) they need to know that they won't be working 60-70 hours a week all year long. 2) They need to know that this time of the year is worth the investment of 70 hour weeks. And they need to bring their A game. Don't schedule a hair cut at 3pm on the first day of school. And don't spend your first few weeks catching up with returning students on the frisbee golf course. Have them read this post. All weeks of the year are not equal.

Thanks for this points 4 & 5 are very good, as well as the others. We are printing this out to discuss as a team which idea we could add/ blend to make our first 4 weeks stronger here at Crusade Alabama! Thank you!

Great observation, Eric. Here's my 2 cents for anybody pondering the same thing (and this may get a little geeky…):

It seems like two big variables come into play during that first meeting. First, there are many students visiting the ministry that won't (and shouldn't) come back (hopefully because they've plugged in elsewhere). Second, an enormous percentage – nearing 100% – of our returning students will attend that night.

So let's say things go REALLY well and we retain 50% of those first-week visitors AND all our students are super-involved and attend, on average, 3 out of 4 meetings for the rest of the year. It would still be very hard to grow as big as that initial meeting, right? -and not for factors that have much to do with effectiveness.

A Large Group of 100 the first night (40 of whom are freshmen) would then drop to an average of 60 when normalcy sets in. (20 of the 40 stick around; the remaining 80 come 3/4ths of the time.) To “beat” that first night in a normal week, you'd have to add an additional 54 equally involved (coming to Large Group 3/4ths of the time) students to your ministry. Not an easy task.

(I suppose if a minister really believes his ministry is the ONLY choice for students – both among the other ministries AND among their options on a given night – then this stat might not be helpful. But if we recognize that some students will be better served elsewhere AND that there are good reasons to skip a Large Group Meeting on occasion, then this might comfort those who are discouraged by the dip in attendance.)

On the other hand, if we're counting how many new people connect to our ministry from, say, Week 4 to Week 14, THEN we're evaluating in-semester growth. Further, this whole discussion points out that it's worth deciding multiple points of measure – not simply Large Group attendance (which is the easiest), but every point along students' Path of Involvement in our college ministries.

Thanks for letting me geek out for a second. Anybody want to join me? I'd love your tweaks of my stats – including my guesses at how many might be freshmen and how regularly we can/should expect students to show up.

sure. we increased (by 2 people) btw our first and second wk last year. it's the exception not the rule.

thanks eric.

i was at ucla my first two years on staff–we had unrestricted access to the dorms, money to spend on giveaways, and LOTS of students who understood the vision and worked extremely hard to invite EVERYONE they knew or filled out a survey. we had ridiculously large first mtgs, and our numbers usually dropped by 100 or so after the first couple weeks.

if you do the first week right then there should be NO WAY you get bigger because of RESOURCE ALLOCATION.

it's simply not wise to allocate resources that way over the long haul–your students would hate you, and the campus would hate you

a huge problem i see is allocating resources EVENLY throughout the year even though there are clear highs and lows. i don't think that's what your saying at all.

the big statistic for me is the percentage of new students are we retaining during the first four weeks. if a ministry is growing and healthy then that percentage should steadily rise each year–when it plateaus it's usually a sign of too many leaders and when it drops it's usually a sign of an unhealthy/unaligned leadership team.

does any of this connect? thanks for bringing this up!

good point on the people that land somewhere else. that's so true.

wow that's super encouraging justin!

Benson,

Thanks for your thoughts. Putting numbers to it (however geeky) helped me see the kind of growth that would be necessary. I think now, while I still am working towards that level of growth, I am more okay if we don't reach those numbers again.

Also you make good points about what metrics we are measuring. It's easy to get caught up in the size of the big meeting and miss counting what really matters (number of new believers, number of new leaders year over year)

Thanks.

sure eric. stoked that you are so focused on spiritual multiplication. will be praying that goes well this year for you.