Six hundred seventy-nine (679) new subscribers were added on the spot to the Philippine Good News mailing list during a recent mall exhibit conducted at SM City in Davao from May 29 to June 4. That’s an average of 97 signups per day. There were 228 more who simply picked up a tri-fold brochure but did not subscribe on the spot. Taken together, that would be close to 1,000 new potential subscribers in just one week.

The form the subscribers filled out is the blue-and-yellow “Subscribe FREE” tri-fold brochure from the Home Office featuring “Bringing Up a Moral Child” on the cover. For those who decided to subscribe on the spot, we offered them one piece of literature from our eight featured booklet titles, along with certain available back issues of The Good News magazine. Incidentally, we learned a lot about which titles were most popular with our audience. The eight booklet titles we had on display were: The Book of Revelation Unveiled, Making Life Work, Marriage and Family: The Missing Dimension, Creation or Evolution, Why Does God Allow Suffering?, Are We Living in the Time of the End?, The Middle East in Bible Prophecy, and The United States and Britain in Bible Prophecy. It was Marriage and Family: The Missing Dimension that was the most popular booklet by far, followed by The Book of Revelation Unveiled. Many have also inquired about our articles and issues dealing with marriage, sex, family, and parenting.

The GN Display Booth in Davao was located on the ground floor near the National Bookstore entrance. The booth­—constructed from several lengths of bolted two-inch (2”) angular aluminum bars (with 3/16” gage)—occupied a floor area of 2.5 meters (8 feet, 3 inches) by 2.5 meters and stood 2.10 meters high. Apart from the machine-printed full-color headers and skirting, we also selected twelve 30- to 60-second video ads from Beyond Today TV program and customized them with our Philippine cell phone number and Web site. Those 12 ads cycled simultaneously overhead on two full-color LCD panel monitors positioned at opposite sides of the booth facing mall traffic.

We are very thankful to God for the quality responses we got! The results are very good, and the cost per response is reasonable. It appears that mall advertising works well in the Philippines. God willing, we plan to go into six SM malls located in key cities in the Philippines (two in Mindanao, two in the Visayas, and two in Luzon) where we either already have a presence or would like to have a greater presence. We currently plan to do one mall every month, except in October, due to the Feast of Tabernacles. These six malls are: SM Davao, SM Cagayan de Oro, SM Bacolod, SM Cebu, SM Megamall (in Metro Manila), and SM Baguio. Our target is to obtain at least 400 new subscribers from each of the malls, with a goal of at least 3,000 total subscribers. God willing, that should put our GN circulation at or over 10,000 by the end of this year.

We would really appreciate your prayers for God to guide, direct, and bless our efforts in this endeavor.

© 2007 United Church of God, AIA - Pilipinas