Media Outreach

In the last few issues, we have been discussing the role of branding in the church. The last issue discussed in detail the true meaning of branding:

Communicating who you are in everything you do, all the time.

We asked you to consider a few ideas about who you are as a ministry, what your strong points are, and what perception people have you. We challenged you to take an honest look at your organization and determine if there are any steps you need to take to clarify your vision and to enhance your marketing efforts. As you convey who are through all your branding, it is important to have an identifier for your brand in place.

This brings us full circle, back to the idea of a logo. Now that it is clear that branding is about the accurate communication and purposeful action of conveying your identity to your community, it is time to discuss the role of a logo in this.

A good logo acts as the identifier for your brand. When you use it on billboards, commercials, mail outs, newsletters, and your website, you are marking those things as yours. You are associating them with the brand you have established. It is similar to God marking His children.

• We are recognizably His.
• This goes beyond just who we are and our personalities; it traces back to who He is and what He stands for.
• It gives us authority because of who is behind us, and a logo marks your event marketing and outreach efforts with the authority of who you have established yourself to be in the eyes of your community.

With this idea in mind, it is important to remember that a logo represents your ministry. So having no logo or a hastily created logo can detract from the value you are trying to convey. Whether you have a poorly designed logo, which conveys your ministry as unprofessional, or a logo similar or identical to some other organization’s logo, which indicates that you are not unique, a bad logo can be severally detrimental to your branding efforts.

As you look at your logo, you can address the concept brought up by the first question listed last month. What kind of impression does this make? As you evaluate your current logo or look to designing a new logo, there are some elements you want to consider.

• Is it professionally designed? – Some ideas that sound good may come out looking like a child’s drawing without a competent designer handling the details and ensuring that the end product represents the vision with excellence.
• Is it useful no matter what the situation? – A logo that is unrecognizable when shrunk down to fit on a business card, disappears entirely on the wrong color background, or doesn’t survive the conversion to black and white, is not worth having. You need something that you can use on a billboard, a commercial, your website, and the pens you hand out during the church service. It needs to be able to go from color to grayscale and change size without losing its distinctiveness.
• Does it represent your ministry? – This may seem like an obvious point, but countless ministries use a cross or bible in their logo. While this does convey the idea of Christianity, it doesn’t really say anything about what makes your ministry stand out from all the rest. Use your aspects of ministries, the community you are reaching, and the elements that set you apart to find the perfect representation of your organization.
• Is it unique? – This ties into the last point. If your logo looks exactly like the logo for the church down the street or is similar to the local bakery’s logo, you are not setting your ministry up for success from a marketing stand point. Remember, you want to convey to your community that this door hanger or pamphlet is from such and such church, the ones with the awesome youth events. You don’t want them to wonder which church this is from or wonder why the baker is so concerned about single moms.

In addition to following these concepts as you evaluate your logo, you will also want to consider some technical elements. To learn more about this, tune-in tomorrow.