Ideas to promote trunk or treat can be applied to any church outreach event: fall festival, VBS, movie night, and other programs that reach out to the community. Trunk or treat can be an effective way to reach the community because many parents are looking for Halloween events for their kids and if you get a compelling message in front of them many will come.
Before we get to the list of ideas to promote trunk or treat I want to mention some of the things that you can include in your Trunk or Treat.
- Cars with trunks filled with candy and members dressed up to hand the candy out. (the minimum requirement)
- Music. If you have a praise band or other musical talent at the church ask them to participate. If you don’t have those resources at your church look to the community. Music will tend to make people stay around after they have collected all the candy kids can eat.
- Food. It does not need to be anything fancy. Hot dogs and hamburgers, chips and drinks will work. Free if you have the budget or charge a couple of dollars to help cover the cost.
- Movies either outside or inside the church. A family-friendly Halloween movie works well.
- Inflatables give the kids something else to do after they have collected their candy and also encourage parents to hang around. If funds are tight, see if there are any businesses within your church or in the community that would rent the inflatable in exchange for a sign and some literature at the inflatable.
- A sign-in table. Important!! Don’t miss this part. Make sure that you request the names and email addresses of all people who are coming to the event. Make it an option but the sign should say “if you would like to know about other events going on at our church give us your email address.” Add those addresses to your email marketing program and you can easily keep in touch with them.
Ok, we’re ready for ideas to promote trunk or treat in 2019
- Get the word out to members and ask them to invite neighbors and friends. It can be as simple as putting a couple of announcements in each bulletin and asking members to invite their neighbors and friends who have kids.
- If your church has a preschool make sure they receive flyers at least twice.
- Facebook and Social media. If your church is involved in social media get the word out and ask members to repin and like your posts about Trunk or Treat.
- Facebook Ads. For under $50 you can reach everyone in your community that is on Facebook. You’ll need a Facebook Page for your church to make this work.
- Contact your school to see about putting a flyer up or sending home with the kids.
- Put flyers up around local businesses
- Craigslist. Post something under community events.
- Newspaper ads.
- Radio and TV. See if they will do a Public Service Announcement for your event.
- Create a video announcement and put it on YouTube. If done right the video will show up in two search results: Google and YouTube, which is the second largest search engine. Here are a few quick tips on getting YouTube videos to rank. 1) Make sure that in the title you put Trunk or Treat and your city. 2) In the location where the video was created put your city. 3) In the description include the information on your trunk or treat and include the city. 4) The keywords include “trunk or treat city” along with other keywords such as alternative halloween party, city and alternative halloween festival, city. Post the video to your Facebook page and ask people to watch and share it. If you do this your video should show up in the top search results on both Google and YouTube.
If you use part of these ideas to promote trunk or treat you’ll have plenty of children attending.
Other ideas to promote trunk or treat
Finally, you might want to consider handing out a Gospel Tract. There are a number of companies that make them now. Memory Cross has a number that presents the Gospel in a fun and creative way while engaging the children. If you would like to know more about Memory Cross tracts for Halloween click this link. I’ve put a video below that shows how it folds.
And of course, we are inviting you to join our #31Tracts31KidsChallenge campaign for this year. Let's use the power of social media to spread the news about this campaign and eventually spread the Gospel to each of our community this halloween season.
I hope this post has given you some practical ideas to promote trunk or treat this year. If you have any other ideas to promote trunk or treat post them below.