Pave Where the People are Walking
My friend Justin Waples shared this video with me, and it’s good enough to share with you:
Designer Tom Hulme introduces us to the concept of desire paths, or the natural “point A to point B” walkways that develop over time. (Seriously, the above video is worth seven minutes of your day. Watch it.)
For those of us in church leadership, we’re surrounded by desire paths. Whether it’s a first-time guest trying to make an initial connection, a long-time member attempting to join a new small group, or a casual attendee trying to navigate the website, we all desire the lowest-friction routes.
There are a few of Hulme’s statements that stood out to me, and make me consider the impact on guest services world:
“The only way you’ll know if the designs are good is to see how they’re used in the real world.”
The two ways we try decide whether our not our first-time guest processes are working are simple: we observe and we ask. We observe the process in real time on the weekend: are our figurative pathways accessible? Are our literal pathways intuitive? Are there combustion points we need to get rid of?
And we ask: through first-time guest surveys each weekend, we ask the big questions about what was helpful and what was not.
“People are resourceful. They’ll always find the low-friction route.”
Your 16 week newcomers class that covers your church history, the apostle’s creed, and your stance on supralapsarianism is great, but I’m going to bet your retention rate is abysmal. We can bemoan people’s lack of commitment or their laziness, but they often won’t let our hoops become their problem.
Rather than making connection complicated, let’s simplify it. You don’t have to lower the bar in order to remove barriers. You can build meaningful connection points while keeping them clear and (somewhat) easy.
“Build the buildings and then wait to see where the paths form.”
This makes me think of how we train volunteers for new initiatives. Our current Guest Services training is – in my opinion – both comprehensive and compelling. But it didn’t arrive to us that way. We spent years designing and refining it. We examined what was already true of our team, and built the training around that.
[Related post: How Should I Think About Volunteer Onboarding?]
