A while ago I was reflecting on the ways some of the world’s religious organisations succeed in keeping thousands, and in some cases, millions of people hugely loyal and steadfastly following their laid down doctrines. Religious organisations, especially in Nigeria, have become big brands with high levels of identity and loyalty among millions of followers.

While many of these religious organisations deploy strategies bordering on manipulation and a host of other unsavoury means to maintain such a strong hold on their members I have ignored those to concentrate on what these religious entities do that businesses and startups can borrow and apply in the daily struggle to amass a large critical mass of followers.

1. The Strategy of Involvement

When you look at the trends in church growth in Nigeria for example you find that older churches with extremely rigid hierarchical structures that discourages involvement of the mass members are dying off slowly while younger more vibrant audience throng to the churches where structures are in place to get them involved.

People want to have a sense of involvement in the church. Religious brands like the Lord’s Chosen Ministries understand the innate yearning of people to have one form of involvement, responsibility or the other to buttress their membership of such organisations.

The Business Angle

Today’s mass market of users and consumers are increasingly becoming active, they do not want to just watch. They want to be in on the action. Involving and engaging your target users is key. Give them a reason to be involved; get them engaging with each other, content or with themselves across your product offerings.

See why mobile OS developers see apps and app stores as integral to the growth and adoption of the OS? See why marketing efforts now seek to involve the target audience in one way or the other?

2. Pride and Kindred Spirit

Call it a tribe if you will but the essence of what these churches do is to build a huge clan of members tied with the same belief and infused with the pride of belonging to the clan.

Some of these churches understand that when the members are proud of the organization they can go to lengths to propagate the gospel on behalf of the church.

They build the kindred spirit by creating distinct doctrines and belief system; they appeal to the emotional need of their followers for trust in a higher power manifested through the overseer. They nurture this need and provide a place for dreams. They create revivals, give out pittances to the less privileged and generally work around inspiring members to develop deep pride and emotional belief in their mission (whether such members understand the mission or not is debatable)

The Business Angle

Depending on what niche your startup or company focuses on you can always find an emotional angle to exploit and create a bond with your users.

To inspire pride in your users first there has to be a clear difference in culture and service delivery from competitors. Uniqueness and top notch service delivery is crucial. On the surface your users probably are on your app or platform for a seemingly objective reason but there is always an emotional reason why they will stick with you and tell their friends about how different and useful your product is.

3. Abhorring Stagnation

These new generation churches seem to understand the law of inertia and more importantly they seem to get the fact that constant innovation and excitement is needed if they must keep the attention and incidentally wallets of their members close.

I have cousins who are always susceptible to developing admiration for a new church when they get awed by their processes, church service quality/delivery and a bit of other idiosyncrasies. And to a large extent that is the growing rule with young people of today. A conversation in Nairaland around similar issues showed that many people could be willing to leave their present church if things felt dull; they no longer ‘feel’ their pastor or they are invited to another church where they get wowed.

New generation churches understand this fundamental change in today’s audience dynamics and they don’t want to get caught sleeping. Hence they create events (I never could count the number of religious events in my area in any particular month) to get people engaged. Whole committees devote time working on ideas to make the church service interesting and introduce events to hold the attention of members all year round; they create sub-organisations, allocate duties and build sometimes complicated hierarchy of user paraphernalia to keep the people constantly involved and feeling good about their involvement. And that’s the very difficult but rewarding part: keeping your users involved and happy.

The Business Angle

The attention span on the internet is getting shorter everyday. A new user could sign up on your app today and be off in a week joining the next viable platform offering the same services. Your target market no longer wants to watch, they want to do things on your platform and their interest continually engaged. There are probably startups trying to cut a share of the market in your space and you are continually at the risk of your users leaving for something more exciting.

Stagnation is suicidal in today’s fierce tech markets; there’s a huge reason why apps churn out new improved versions, vastly improved phone models get churned out yearly, startups add new exciting features as fast as possible.

The attention of users is highly coveted in the space and to win you must abhor stagnation.

4. Excellent Customer Service

It’s difficult to grow the kindred spirit within your users if the key elements of customer service, attention and superb product are missing. A typical modern day Nigerian church grabs new member’s details and proceeds to keep the old and new members believing they are valuable. They keep the church service (product) interesting and continuously innovative. They do all they can to keep the attention of members.

The Startup/Business Angle

Learn your customer service strategy from some of these churches. Customer feedback should be inculcated as a key ingredient of the customer service improvement process. To retain new users keep the product interesting and fun to use. Create channels for encouraging and accessing feedback from users so you get hold of issues that are a pain in the ass and implement new solutions before someone else does.

Now that is what a startup can learn. That is what I have decided I and my team should be working on.

When you achieve a certain level of kindred spirit you will have soldier-users doing your marketing, defending your shortcomings and generally taking on the role of informal brand ambassadors.