Here’s an excerpt from our interview with North Brisbane Salvos, whose leaders Donna and Craig Todd and their team, reach hundreds to thousands of local community residents through initiatives such as this.
Read the conversation below.
NCLS: Can you say a little bit about the sign out the front? How did that come about?
DT: There was an awful sign there, one of those wind-up ones that you put the letters on, and we’ve always hated it. We wanted to make that corner a bit more special and then I guess with electronic signs becoming a bit more prolific, I think it was my husband who said, I think we should look at getting an electronic sign. Then we can control what we put up there and sell advertising space.
So, he went and spoke to a school nearby that had a lot smaller electronic sign and the guide dogs have one and we got some ideas. Then we also had a private donor who gave us some money to help our church with evangelical things that we do.
We told the donor that these are some of the things that we wanted to do, but this was a bit out of the price range, because the electronic sign was $95,000. They ended up giving us $85,000 to pretty much pay for most of the sign. Our church had to fork out a little bit more for getting electricity out there and a bit of a guard, a bit of steel. But the majority of the sign was donated by an anonymous donor.
NCLS: That enables you put up advertisements or messages or bible verses, but also sponsored advertisements for local businesses and that’s another little income stream?
DT: Absolutely, yes. And it’s quite affordable, we are very familiar with what other places are charging and so ours is a lot cheaper to advertise here. We’d rather have all the spaces filled and have some income, rather than it just be vacant. And we’ve chosen to run it ourselves and do all the artwork and that ourselves, so it may or may not be quite as similar as other places, but we have control.
