Mapping Your Multisite Journey. Plan, prep, launch, & grow.

“How do I launch more campuses better, faster, cheaper?” This is the question that we hear. A lot. To help churches answer this question, we’ve come out with a resource that walks through the details of HOW to do this “multisite” thing. 

A little summary of the tool about Mapping Your Multisite Journey:

Mapping your multi-site journey is a thirty thousand foot view of the process that a church takes to go from, basically, here to there. And that means from the vision of whatever the church is intending to become with regard to multiplication, and then going to launch and thriving in that launch. It includes the planning stage, the preparation stage, the launch and land stage, and then the thrive stage. Which is the most exciting, because that’s where we get to see the church being the church and getting out there, and we see them maturing and the lots coming to know Jesus.

So that’s probably one of the biggest reasons why we have come up with this launching your multi-site journey, map and guideline, is that when churches have a great experience the first time, they are excited about doing it again a second, third, fourth, twenty times. We’ve got clients that are on their 18th, 19th, 20th launch. And so they’ve perfected it, we’ve gotten to partner with them. We want to be able to offer that wisdom to you guys so that you have a great experience on that launch number one. Where not just you the leader, but your entire congregation is super excited about doing the next one.

In this post we focused on the planning stage. And to recap, the planning stage is internal, it’s for the leadership team. It’s where the vision really begins to take shape internally. So all of the leaders get on the same page, they hammer out what that vision looks like, and they hammer out the strategies that they want to use to make that vision come to life. The bottom line for the planning stage is an old adage, “Fail to plan and plan to fail.” So if you really are careless in that first stage of planning, and just kinda rip through it thinking you’ve got this, and it’s no big deal, and you don’t nail everything down, just plan to fail. Because it’s gonna be really hard. We know God is gracious and he can pull us out when we do fail, but I think God makes us smart and wise so that we can plan so that we can succeed with his vision for us.

In the second phase …

the old adage is, “Plan your work and work your plan.” So you’ve spent a great deal of time hammering out the plans and the strategies for what that vision is going to look like when it becomes a reality. And so now, you’re putting all of that into practice. And this is where the assignments come in, the deadlines come in, and you’re bringing more stakeholders into that circle and helping them understand what the vision is going to look like when it becomes a reality. So in that piece, instead of just thinking about what the vision is now, the leadership team has to cast that vision out and share with people what it’s going to look like when this is a reality. And that’s usually done by the lead pastor. And it could be done by a series, a preaching series. It could be done by a video. It could be done a lot of effective ways. And we’ve actually captured some great ways that churches have cast that vision to their congregation. Another piece of that is beginning to look at communities. So now you’ve thought kind of romantically about some places that God might be leading you, but now you’re actually going into communities and looking at some of the demographics. And looking at some of the detail about, this is demographically and geographically who God has made us now. And is there another community that God might be calling us to?

We have a brand new partnership with Gloo where we are now able to help you guys on a much more detailed and intimate level finding what that next community will look like. It really breaks down each of your individual surrounding areas and tells you, “Hey, here is, if your culture and your demographic is this at your main campus, and you want to try and reach that in another city.” We can go into new cities and do a complete breakdown of income, of divorce rates, of major struggles now that they’re having, that you can actually do a sermon series around. You can, “Hey, that’s the city I want to go to,” and it’s specifically how to target them. So it’s just really cool.

And we’ve got a dashboard that breaks out the whole idea of going into a community pretty methodically. And so it would be really helpful to have that tool as a church begins to look at where God wants them to go. Another key phase, piece, to this is, the second stage, is the redesign of your organizational structure. Organizational structures are meant to be changed quite often. And when you go multi-site, you’re definitely gonna have to change the dotted lines and the solid lines and who is doing what. And quite probably bringing on new team members who have to catch that vision. If your vision is doing anything more than just two campuses, there really is that need for that organizational structure to have it internally and the earlier you start to do that, the much easier it’s going to be for you to launch more campuses more quickly beyond that, too, if you start making those organizational structures in advance.

It’s important that you have a champion and an implementer to keep track of what is going on organizationally. A couple more things that you’ll want to be paying attention to in this stage is the generosity campaign. When you cast that vision, you’re going to be asking other stakeholders, typically the congregation, to get engaged. And the generosity campaign that you will want to have not only involves financial support but also support of themselves. Perhaps the best resource that they can give is of themselves.

In this stage we are also wanting to start thinking about facility selection and finalizing a budget. We have a lot of resources on these topics to help you. And of course, our team would love to have a one-on-one conversation with you to help in any way we can. 

Click HERE to download Mapping Your MultiSite Journey Checklist – and If you ever have any questions, contact Jeff Beachum (jeff.beachum@portablechurch.com) and he’d be happy to walk through this document or any of the other tools that we have.

We just love helping churches be successful.