[Sound of telephone ringing. Sound of fork hitting plate.]<\/p>\n
[Me muttering:] “Who the #$%@! is calling me on the landline? I put that number on the do not call registry. Normal people use cell phones…. Hello?”<\/p>\n
[Scratchy recording of a man’s voice:] “Hi, this is Chris Gabrieli, Democrat for Massachusetts Governor, and my campaign to get results– ”<\/p>\n
[Sound of phone being slammed down.]<\/p>\n
When the telephone rings in the middle of dinnertime, and I pick up the phone, and I hear a recorded voice of a political candidate, I will be less likely to vote for him or her. Not more likely, but less<\/em> likely.<\/p>\n On the other hand, when the telephone rang last week, and it was a young woman from the Religious Coalition for Freedom to Marry (RCFM), and she immediately identified herself by name, and politely asked to speak with me, and then told me that RCFM supports Tony Cabral in his re-election bid for state legislature based on his principled stands on marriage equality in Massachusetts, I listened carefully. She knew that I was interested in marriage rights issue. She knew I would be interested in hearing about Cabral’s voting record in the state legislature. I am now more<\/em> likely to vote for Tony Cabral than I was before.<\/p>\n I am increasingly intolerant of scatter-shot advertising and marketing. If you haven’t done your research, if you don’t know what I am likely to respond to, your marketing is more likely to annoy me than anything else. Nor am I the only one who feels this way. Do I need to add that those of you who are involved in marketing your local congregation might want to take note of this social phenomenon?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [Sound of telephone ringing. Sound of fork hitting plate.] [Me muttering:] “Who the #$%@! is calling me on the landline? I put that number on the do not call registry. Normal people use cell phones…. Hello?” [Scratchy recording of a man’s voice:] “Hi, this is Chris Gabrieli, Democrat for Massachusetts Governor, and my campaign to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-and-culture","category-marketing-church"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}