How to Have an Easter Egg Hunt Part 2

Easter Egg Hunts. Love them or hate them, it’s one of the most popular kidmin events leading into the Easter season. I know it’s only February, but if you want to have a successful outreach event, you need to start planning now.

This is the second part of my two part series on How to have an Easter Egg Hunt. You can read part 1 here.

In that post, I talked about the why, ordering supplies, service planning, and recruiting.

In today’s post, we’ll dive deeper and talk about more preparation and what needs to happen on the day of. If you subscribe, I’ll share my to do list that will walk you through every step.

How to have an Egg Hunt Part 2

1. Advertise

Part of what gets a lot of people to the event is advertising. You can have the greatest event, but if nobody knows about it, you’ve just wasted your time and energy. You may or may not have the skills to create the graphics, ads, banners, and websites necessary to advertise, but either way, the earlier you start producing these items the better.

After the graphic and look for the egg hunt is decided upon, your most important ad piece is your website. This will be the central hub for participants, volunteers, and all information regarding your event. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, but it does need to be clear and eye catching.

Most of the time this is just a landing page on your existing church website, but I’ve seen other churches build whole sites.

After the site is built, you can begin ordering banners for your location and consider Facebook and Google ads.

If you go the paid ad route, you don’t have to spend a lot of money to make an impact. On Facebook, I’ve spent as little as $10 and as much as $500. Google works a little differently, however if you apply for the Google Ad Grant you can get up to $10,000 a month of free advertising. It's huge plus.

Also a lot of community calendars want you to notify them of your event at least 30 days in advance. If you’ve already done the leg work of graphics and website creation, you can list them on there as well.

If you’ve done previous outreach events and collected guest’s information, you can directly market to them. Send them emails, postcards, call them on the phone. Since they’ve already been to one of your events, they’re likely to attend another one. I wrote more on advertising for an event here.

2. Stage your supplies.

Now that you’ve done all the work the event is approaching quickly, maybe even the next day, Set yourself up for the best success. I suggest you stage your supplies for quick set up on the day of.

"Staging" is a military term that means you take all the things you need for an event and put them in one place. Staging all your supplies makes it easy to grab and go. You can make sure before the chaos and stress of the event that you have everything you need.

I usually make a special to do list for this day alone to make sure I don’t miss anything. My goal is to pretend that if the event is going to start in two hours, I have everything I need to start.

Trust me, it’ll make your day so much easier.

3. Set up and celebrate.

It’s the big day and the time when I begin to stress if anyone is actually going to come. Thankfully, by this time, I have a good volunteer team and a large list of pre-registrations. So, I say a quick prayer and get started.

I usually ask my volunteers to show up at 8:30 for my 10 am event. I offer breakfast, make announcements, assign jobs if I haven’t already and lay out the event plan.

By 9am we’re setting up and have registration and inflatables open by 9:30. People will show up early. Don’t get mad, just be prepared.

My goal on this day is to only do what I can do and let other people use their gifts to serve the kingdom. This way I can walk around, answer questions, solve problems, and mingle with the guests.

When it’s all over, celebrate! Talk about your salvations, how many people came, swap funny stories. You’ve done a lot of work and hopefully made an impact on the kingdom.

4. Follow up.

After the event, take some time to get some much-needed rest. But your work is not done, yet. You need to follow up. Most likely you had on-site registration that wasn’t put into your system. For me, getting them in my church management system was the first step to following up with them.

After they’re all in, I’ll send an email thanking them for coming, inviting them to Church, and asking them to take a survey on how they thought the event went.

I’ll also follow up with my volunteers. I’ll send them a similar email and survey, and I’ll sit down with my lead team for an after action report to see what worked and what didn’t.

Hosting an Egg Hunt is an easy, cost-effective, and volunteer light outreach event that can make a big impact in your community. However, you can’t start the week before and hope it’s a success. Start early and make a plan. God works in the planning as much as he works on the day of.

If you’d like a copy of my to do list, leave me a comment with your email, and I’ll be happy to share it.