YOUR FOLLOW-UP TEAM IS OVERLOADED; HERE’S WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

The key issue facing many digital ministries is the bottleneck that occurs in the follow-up process. As digital campaigns bring in a large volume of seekers, human follow-up teams—who often handle time-intensive one-on-one conversations—cannot keep up. This backlog results in delayed engagement, with many seekers waiting days or even weeks for personalized responses, leading to a high risk of disengagement and loss. Simply put, the longer someone waits for a response, the less likely they are to stay engaged in the follow-up process. 

Follow-up bottlenecks have existed since the early days of digital evangelism. This shouldn’t be surprising. It is far easier and cheaper to reach people at scale through the Internet and digital tools than it is to have meaningful, prayerful conversations with individual people who respond to our message. 

As ministry leaders have sought to tackle this problem, a few obvious paths emerge to relieve this constraint. 

Scaling Up Through Automation: Automation is best suited for ministries dealing with very large volumes of seekers who need rapid responses, and who have the resources to invest in technology. Automating response can include tools like Chatbots and Auto-Response messaging tools that direct responders into different communication teams or channels. This approach offers high scalability but requires a significant commitment to technical infrastructure and expertise.

Often, automation is suggested as a solution to deal with the quantity of messages being received without considering the implications to quality of response. People seeking to connect with your follow-up team aren’t looking for information - they’re looking for a guide on their spiritual journey. Automated responses can help provide an immediate reply to seekers, but if those people are seeking prayer, guidance, or mentorship, automated responses without a clear path to a one on one connection with a follow-up team or church community can be a blocker for ongoing engagement and spiritual development. 

Optimizing Through Segmentation: A better fit for ministries that prioritize high-quality, personalized engagement and have more limited resources is segmentation. Segmentation is like a paramedic who arrives at the scene of an emergency, assesses the condition of multiple people and then makes a decision about prioritizing treatment. Triage is another word for segmentation, and one that fits well in a ministry context. 

This approach allows ministries to maximize existing resources while limiting the number of meaningful one-on-one interactions that are lost. However, effective segmentation requires ongoing data management and prioritization.

Segmentation addresses a follow-up bottleneck by prioritizing high-impact seekers and allowing follow-up teams to focus their resources on those most likely to benefit from immediate, deeper engagement. Of course, these can be tough decisions to make, and teams can quickly become stagnant without a clear set of priorities and decision making criteria being established by ministry leaders. 

By categorizing seekers based on their level of interest, spiritual journey, or engagement with content, ministries can optimize their resources and ensure that more seekers are served effectively. Segmentation is most efficiently conducted when data gathering and CRM systems can automatically route responders to the next available follow-up team member automatically. These systems can be expensive, and most ministries don’t have this structure in place today, so these routing decisions are most often made by a team leader or manager that has established clear decision criteria. 

Unfortunately, teams will still experience responders that go unanswered and disengage, resulting in a loss of the time and resources spent to engage people with the Gospel. Many leaders, donors, and teams find this loss unacceptable. With such a large gap between those being reached, and people experiencing meaningful engagement, digital ministry teams must continue to pursue solutions to digital evangelism that provide personalized and meaningful engagement with seekers requesting follow-up. Automation and Segmentation are two ways that we can begin to solve the follow-up bottleneck, but MII believes that better systems are needed in the marketplace to fully address this problem.