Essential Guide for Planning and Promoting Your Fall Festival
Keep reading for our top 13 church fall festival ideas, and essential tips on planning and promotion.
How to Plan For Your Festival
Rigorous planning may feel like a bore, but it is one of the most important steps. For a smoothly-running event, get acquainted with the ins and outs of your plan months before your church fall festival occurs.
Decide on Timing and Location
First things first, where and when? Liaise with local schools to ensure your plans don’t clash with another fall celebration to maximize those in attendance. Be considerate when choosing the location, as a wise choice could benefit your church and a local business. Send a note out to see if anyone wants to collaborate.
Recruit Extra Volunteers (If Needed)
Consider how many volunteers you need to pull off all your fall festival church ideas. Do you currently have enough? If not, it is time to recruit new volunteers so they are confident and settled by the fall party. You can’t host a party alone, so make sure your church has all the helping hands it needs with these recruitment strategies.
Choose a Fun Theme for Everyone
What better time to dress up than fall? Nobody loves a theme more than kids do, so let the young minds of your kids' ministry have a say in the theme you choose this year. Get them as excited to participate as possible! Your harvest festival ideas for churches themes could be anything, from Disney movies to an era of time.
Plan Fun Fall Festival Activities
A party is only as successful as its entertainment, so build a repertoire of exciting games and activities for kids and adults alike. Here are some top harvest fest ideas for church activities.
- Pie eating contest (adults only)
- Potato sack races
- Checkers and tic-tac-toe with pumpkins
- Pumpkin throwing contest
- Ring and apple toss
- Themed face painting
- Bowling with pumpkins (tip: minimize waste and use them for carving after)
- Apple bobbing
- Trunk or treat family edition
- Pop-a-Pumpkin darts game
- Pumpkin carving or painting
- Throw the beanbag in the pumpkin
- Candy corn ring toss
Focus on Outreach
A community event where everyone is welcome is a valuable chance for outreach. Keep this in mind and try to get contact details from every new face you see to expand your church community. Some church fall festival outreach ideas include giving away freebies like pens and notepads and ensuring welcoming volunteers are at the event.
How to Promote Your Festival
Of course, outreach only works if you have new faces to approach at your church. Promoting your church fall festival ideas is the only way you can expect newbies to show their faces. Gain a buzz around your event by promoting it far and wide with these five tips.
On Your Website
Having up-to-date information on your website is absolutely essential. If potential visitors get word of the fall festival but can’t find any details online, guess what? They won’t show up. As your website is the central hub, you must promote the event well with high-quality images from the year before.
Social Media Campaign
Are your church’s social media pages thriving? An Instagram or Twitter campaign will get news of your fall festival event into the community. Plan a strategy for your social media posts to create excitement around your church fall festival ideas. For tips on how to develop your online community, check out our buzz-inducing blog.
Pass Out Invitations
Do things the old-school way by manually handing out invitations to people you encounter in your community. You could station a volunteer in a busy shopping mall to hand them out where they can or give each church member a stack to send out within the community. A physical invitation featuring all the details will be much more heartfelt (and effective).
Promote In Local Shops
Design an eye-catching poster to promote the event that includes your church harvest festival ideas for fun and activities. Then, stick it up wherever you can around your neighborhood, from bulletin boards in schools to the window of your local cafe. Passers-by will notice news of the exciting games planned for the day and may consider swinging by the big day.
Offer Up Freebies
If there’s one thing people love, it’s free stuff! Gain attention for your church's fall harvest event by offering free gifts to lucky winners. This could be a fund-raising raffle or a meal ticket for two chosen for an attendee at random. You could even incorporate wins into your games with ‘guess the weight of the pumpkin’ and pick a winner for the best carving.
Conclusion
Think outside the box with your fall festival ideas for church and make this a day to remember. Fall festivals at church are a time to give thanks for the food God blesses us with and celebrate the changing seasons. But most importantly, it’s a time for fun. Choose church fall festival ideas that allow your community to unwind and have a good time together.