Campaign 'Increasing Understanding of the Real Meaning of Christmas'

 Thursday September 11 2014

As the Christmas Starts with Christ advertising campaign enters its sixth year, organisers say a newly-published survey demonstrates that it is working.

Launching the campaign's 2014 resources, Francis Goodwin of ChurchAds.net said that the results of the Comres survey showed it was effective in raising awareness of the true meaning of Christmas. He also called for more churches to join the campaign, setting a target of 10,000.

Mr Goodwin said: "When we started this campaign we were worried because 51 per cent of adults thought that the birth of Christ had no relevance to Christmas but research has shown that we are reversing this, especially among the 18 to 24-year-olds. In this group four out of 10 who saw the ads now understand more about the true meaning of Christmas."

There are 16 posters, three radio ads, 10 web banners and social media images, the campaign logo and a resource pack for churches available for use this year.

All of the resources are available free of cost for download and use through the website www.ChristmasStartsWithChrist.com for churches, church groups, Christian organisations, radio stations, newspapers and anyone who needs material to promote the true meaning of Christmas in their local areas.

ChurchAds.Net was formally setup in 1992 after it ran an experimental Christmas advertising campaign in Oxford in 1991. It has since run many high-profile campaigns around Easter and Christmas. Among the organisations involved are the Church of England, the Methodist Church, Bible Society and Evangelical Alliance.

Christmas Starts With Christ began in 2009, and last year saw it become multi-platform driven, adding a significant increase in its digital and social media presence to the traditional poster and radio advertising.

As a result, it reached five million listeners on the Vodafone Top 20 network chart and Xfm and 1,000 people using the #ChristmasStarts hashtag, reaching just over 1.3 million people.

There were 22,000 downloads of posters, 9,000 downloads of the radio advertisements and 140,000 page views of the website.

ComRes says that 67 per cent of people thought that the Christmas message was conveyed effectively and 49 per cent of people felt that the advertising made them think more about the true meaning of Christmas.

Post Tags: christmas, christmas starts with christ

Related Stories

Christmas Message from the Head of Christian Aid Scotland

Read More   >

New ALTERnativity Resource

Read More   >

Comments

There are currently no comments on this post

Add a reply

All fields are required. Email address will not be published.