Phew! It’s over! What started in October with fall festivals and culminated with Christmas activities and services is now officially over. It is all over! You can relax now.

Or can you? As much as rest and relaxation seems appropriate and necessary, there is also a real opportunity for your church now that these activities are over. In fact, right now is the best time to capitalize on all that hard work you did the past few months. After all, hopefully you made a lot of new connections with a great amount of people from around your community.

So, how do capitalize on the last few months of hard work? How can you follow up with them effectively so that they can stay connected and continue a journey to hopefully discover Christ as their Savior? After all, you need to be careful. You don’t want to creep them out and turn them away.

Action steps you can take to follow up:

1. Have a follow up opportunity. The great thing with the fall and holiday events is that there was always something great to keep bringing people back to. But just because Christmas is over doesn’t mean that there isn’t something next you can bring people back to. Either come up with a fun event that is very general, or look at all the new people who filled out information cards at the past events and strategically create a next event for them to come back to. Maybe it is a preschool playtime because you had a bunch of moms of preschoolers come. Or maybe it is a student ministry centric event for all the new teens you met. Whatever it may be, create a follow-up opportunity sometime soon to keep them coming back.

2. Send them a thank-you note via snail mail. Say what?!? What is snail mail? As funny as that may sound, the reality is as our digital inboxes continue to get more and more full, our home mailboxes on the street has less in them. Take the time to write a handwritten thank-you note to those who came to your events the last few months and mail it the old-school way. Handwritten notes tend to show people you care because you took the time to write it out rather than simply emailing or posting a response on social media. It could go a long way to connecting with new people.

3. Send a follow up email directing people to a landing page with ways people can connect. Hopefully, you have met new people in your community over the past few months who may not have even known about your church or ministry. But now, after you have established a great amount of goodwill in your community over the past few months by doing certain community events and activities, they may be open to doing more. That is why, if you can establish a landing page on your site to direct people who attended these events to what else you have going on in your church, you might be able to connect them to your church more effectively.

Hopefully this past holiday season was a great season for your church and your ministry. After you take a breather, start plotting out what is next. After all, now is the time to put all that hard work to good use and utilize the new emails and contacts you have gotten over the past few months to keep them connected and engaged in what is happening in the life of your church.

Now, if you are reading this post thinking, we didn’t get any new contacts or information from people, and we don’t have a follow up event to draw people back to, have no fear. This is just great information to know for future Christmases AND, remember, Easter is only a few months away so you can apply all the above to Easter coming up and really hit a home run there.