Last year I wrote here about how we killed our Easter Egg hunt. Instead, we brought in volunteer photographers to take family portraits to lure people to specific services. It was the first year we’ve done anything like this and it was very successful. It was a rainy Easter weekend and we look forward to seeing how everything goes on a sunny Easter weekend.
What new and innovative things are you doing this Easter to both draw new families and lure regular attendees to less attended services?
In years passed we have done an Egg Drop rather then the traditional egg hunt. This involved a plane flying over our property and dropping empty plastic Easter eggs. It has been a HUGE hit. Well, the FAA finally brought an end to that. So, this year we just went to a more traditional Easter egg hunt. It was a big success. Immediately, my wife and I began to think about how we could take this to the next level. How we could turn this into a major blow-out. Our simple eater egg hunt was quickly turning into a 2-3 hour event on the Saturday before Easter. Then I received a phone call from one of the leaders in out church. This call was completely unsolicited and unexpected. In this call, this leader was very complimentary of the way we had done the egg hunt this year. She was very excited about how it had gone, and what we had done. To my surprise her main point of excitement was the fact that we separated the age groups into different areas of the property. This was about the 10th time I had heard the same comment about the age groups. This made me think that maybe the answer is to Keep It Simple Stupid. Now, I am not opposed to putting on a big event on Saturday, but I think that this would be mainly aimed at outreach, and that we would keep a nice simple egg hunt on Sunday.
The idea of a simple Easter Egg Hunt with separate areas for different age groups, all running near each other, at the same time may not be new or innovative, but the idea to avoid over complicating things when simple might actually be better might just be a new thought for some folks.