Did you even go to any of the PK events?
Look, the deal was worthwhile, but the dominant problem I found was that it took something that was WAY more suited to be a one-time seminar weekend, and tried to keep that going year-on-year, and THAT made it wear awfully thin after going two or three years in a row. The downsizing of the events should have happened a year or two before it did.
I went to three PK events. The first two were beneficial to me; the third I went because I had been promoting it to my FIL, and felt I needed to actually be there with him, not just promote it from afar. He benefitted greatly from the content of the weekend’s messages, and it changed some ways he’d been handling things in his home.
Well, after you’ve received the benefit of the content, going back the next year wears really thin if there isn’t new content, and this is where I think the whole PK stadium gig went dry, because inherent in the whole Promise Keepers DNA is a foundational set of messages. Once those messages have gotten out there, through a few years of big events, you’ve saturated your target market, so, naturally, your attendance is going to fall off — sharply — as market growth through new converts to faith isn’t able to keep filling all those stadiums every year. McCartney and the guys who kicked this thing off at the beginning didn’t seem to have a solid transition plan in place for when the ministry would take the energy from the high-profile stadium events and translate it into smaller, more local events for guys that had come into the church later on. It seemed that they were sort of blindsided by the market dynamics.
After three or four years, everybody’s heard about the PK stadium deal; nearly everyone who would want to go has gone, only the newer converts in the church are left to market to, and their ranks won’t fill up the stadiums. It just stands to reason that after a few years the scale of the events would, necessarily, be far smaller; that the stadium seminar format would not be perpetuated. But it was really apparent that a previously-determined plan was not in place to dwonshift, if you will, from having big events at stadiums, to having far smaller events in far smaller venues.
Stack the internal squabbles on top of that, and you get something that looks like it’s foundering when, in fact, it’s just struggling to clean house while adapting to an unforseen need to alter its market approach.
We know the message. It becomes as simple as keeping a piece of paper in your pocket that says “PromiseKeeper”. Read, remind, and act: Repeat as often as needed.