Heather Bellamy spoke with Francis Goodwin from churchads.net

The "Christmas Starts With Christ" church advertising campaign started six years ago, at a time when 51% of adults thought that the birth of Christ had no relevance to Christmas. According to a recent ComRes survey, the campaign is now making inroads into raising awareness about the true meaning of Christmas. When asked, four out of ten 18- to 24-year-olds who saw the ads now understand more about the true meaning of Christmas. To find out more Heather Bellamy spoke with Francis Goodwin from churchads.net.

Heather: First of all, can you start by telling me a bit more about the research that brought about the start of this campaign six years ago?

Francis: Yes and as you said, 51% said the birth of Christ was "irrelevant to my Christmas" and so this was a tipping point we thought and it really worried us, so we thought we'd better do something about it. In previous years - you know we've been going for 20-odd years now - we'd run other sorts of campaigns, different things every year, so we thought we'll have a focused campaign for five, ten years, maybe even longer, around "Christmas Starts with Christ", so that's what we've been doing for the last five or six years.

Heather: So what sort of campaigns do you run? What sort of adverts? Where are they placed?

Francis: We have a combination of commercial radio, posters and, increasingly, social media - things like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter - because our key target is really to reach younger people, who are increasingly not getting Christian messages either in school or at home or anywhere else.

Heather: And is that adverts placed on those mediums, or getting into discussions with young people?

Francis: There's only so much we can do personally, in personal intervention, so we do place advertising. We have 30-second radio ads, we have bus-shelter posters and, as I say, we do things on the social networks. And we also get involved, when we're invited, in discussion programmes on television and radio, debating whether it's a good thing or not.

Heather: And what's on the adverts?

Francis: On the posters there are two types of adverts: there are what we call national adverts and then there are local adverts. The local adverts can be edited, so for example you can download them from your PC and you can put your church name in it. So this year we've got three new ones: "Christmas starts when we feed the hungry: support your local Food Bank", or another one for hospices, another one for Christingles. So there are about 15 of those that you can edit for your own use - and everything from the website is free of charge, so the poorest church in the country can get involved. Our key objective is engagement with churches, to get people thinking about what they are going to do for Christmas and trying to get them to come on board with us. Last year we calculated 4,500 churches - but there are 40,000 churches in the UK, so we've got about 10%. So I'd like to see that going up to, say, 10,000 churches in the next couple of years.

Heather: You've done some more research recently into the effectiveness of this ongoing campaign. Can you give us some of those results showing how effective you've been?

Francis: We did some research in January this year on last year's campaign and we found that four out of ten younger people claimed that they knew a bit more about the real meaning of Christmas; that's up from three out of ten a year ago, so it's a move in the right direction but there's a lot more to do. There's still six out of ten who don't know anything at all - and even the four out of ten need reinforcing and need stronger messages. And obviously what we do is only a catalyst really. We're trying to get people to come to church or go to a website or read a book or ask somebody a bit more about it. We can only spark an interest in them with a 30-second radio ad or a poster or a tweet.

Heather: And so who are churchads.net? Do you create these campaigns yourself or do you work for other clients?

Francis: We don't work for anybody: we're all volunteers, we've got no central overheads or anything: all the money that we raise - and people donate money to us - goes into creating the campaigns and running them. We're all professional communicators in one way or another: some of us have a background in media, some of us in communications like public relations, some are from a paid office within the churches. We're totally ecumenical - every flavour of Christianity - and, obviously, we're all Christians.

Heather: And so with this Christmas campaign, is your website churchads.net for people to go to?