On February 26, UCG Philippines ran its first ever newspaper ad on page 5 of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the most widely-read broadsheet newspaper in the country, with a weekday circulation of 270,073 and an estimated 1.5 million readers. Within a few hours, responses began pouring in. We originally planned to run the ad on Wednesday, February 25. We timed this to coincide with the People Power Day in the Philippines or the anniversary of the EDSA Revolution which happened 23 years ago. Since this would be a national event, we expected many people to be in tune with events or reading the papers around this day.

We decided not to include our mailing address in the ad so that we could more accurately track the exact number of responses (using only cell phone text messaging [which is very popular in this country] and the Web). The main method of response was via cell phone text (SMS) messaging, where we created a fully-automated system that automatically fires a pre-designed text message to each person within seconds of receiving the request. We also created a new website, www.gnmagazine.org.ph to accommodate web requests or more inquiries about the Church or the magazine.

The purpose of this ad was to introduce The Good News magazine to the general public and offer them one of 30,000 back copies we have on stock at the office. While we are very thankful for the 517 who responded (as of press time), it fell far short of our expectations in terms of numbers. However, we believe we have gotten a higher quality of respondents to this ad. We are in the process of printing a few thousand copies of this ad as a flyer to utilize on bulletin boards, etc. If the flyer is posted on a bulletin board or a place where others have the opportunity to view it, perhaps it will help generate more responses. Thank you for your prayers for the ad. We pray God will cause fruit to be born through this ad. UNA

© 2009 United Church of God, AIA - Pilipinas