I’ve been talking about the concept of becoming a goer with a friend lately and have decided to put a few concepts in line prior to taking this to a larger audience. You, the faithful few who follow my blog will get to see it first.
Church Marketing, Churchianity, Emerging Church, Leadership, Ministry, Reformission, The Environment, Web Development, community
Our buddies over at Church Marketing Labs (aka Church Marketing Sucks) have dug up a super neat-o presentation on mixing business and ministry. The CEO of Kanakuk Kamps has posted an interesting presentation on achieving the proper balance between non-profit servitude and tough business moxy.
I’ve been chatting with numerous church leaders lately about consistent messaging and it has become apparent that many misunderstand the meaning of “brand” and the importance of having one. This is one area in the ongoing saga of attempting to impact the world around us with the message of the Gospel by increasing the skill of churches in communications and marketing.
The difference between a logo and a brand comes down to consistency and purpose. A logo is generally defined as a graphic mark representing your organization in a way that is unique, distinguished and hopefully, meaningful. A brand has the same purpose but consists of more than just your logo and carries over into all elements of your organization’s identity, be it naming, logos, phrases, etc. Remember Bruce Almighty’s catchy phrase “and that’s the way the cookie crumbles…”? That’s branding. He created a phrase that identified himself as unique, and used it consistently to place a mark on his news address. Apple uses “Think Different”, Nike says we should “Just do it” and so on. Everything they do is embrazened with a specific color palette that is consistent with their identity. Look at the Apple web site. It’s soft, white and has clean shadows and lines… a lot like their devices, huh?
Think of everything you create for your church. Weekly bulletins, postcards for men’s ministry, posters for Awana’s, and so on down the line. How can you tie all of these things together with a consistent message so that whenever your members and the community see them they say “hey, that’s from so-and-so church”? That’s branding.
We at miletwo::network are convinced that part of the church’s drive to becoming relevant in this culture is its response to environmental responsibility and sustainability. On April 22nd we’ll be releasing a Going Green guide with some simple ideas for churches to implement as part of their environmental responsibility initiatives.
Barna group has release new statistics for 2007 tithing here. According to Barna, not much has changed in the last few years. Among the various sects that make up the term “Christian,” giving is down across the board. Evangelicals still give the most, but giving is down across the board as a percentage of mean income.
For more information on managing church marketing and how the church reacts during recession, see our post titled Tough Times? Market Compassion.
What’s the more important opportunity as Jesus marketers, the chance engagement with a stranger who’s not interested but that we might be able to reach with a well crafted message, or the neighbor who calls the church or goes to the web site looking for help or information?
Continuing our series on applying the principles learned from Andy Stanley’s book titled Communicating for a Change to church web development projects, we come to this section titled Internalize the Message. What do you think it means to internalize the message? To borrow from the underlying theme of this site, which is church marketing, you have to first believe the message before you can communicate the message and you pretty much have to know what you’re going to say before you start to speak.
It’s interesting to me, how much of a secular author’s rants on marketing apply to our activities as saints. Seth Godin is spot on again in a recent post titled “Would we miss you?“. He of course asks the question with respect to business/client relationship to demonstrate the importance of being exceptional in what we do. I can’t even believe how much more important the work that we’re doing is from an eternal perspective, and yet for most of us our efforts in ministry are so terribly “back burner.”
No, seriously. Blogging, especially around a particular topic, requires constant observation of relevant content. News, other blogs, wikis, scraps of paper laying on the counter… all of it is relevant.
A recent missive by marketing guru Seth Godin reminded me of the importance of establishing a marketable brand in our communications and marketing outreach efforts. I think it’s the reason why churches with names like Mars Hill, Rock Harbor, and The Open Door are succeeding in reaching the community in ways that First Baptist of Lalaland never will. It speaks directly to how unmemorable names with common english words are, using words like: community, zone, church, first, whatever.
Church Marketing, Churchianity, Emerging Church, Ministry, Reformission, miletwo::church
