Media Outreach

We’ve spent the past few weeks discussing how important it is to utilize your people as brand evangelists (Investing Marketing Dollars in your Members and Corporate Twitter vs Brand Evangelists). This past week I came across an interesting article by David Tonen.

Amidst a church plant here in the Austin area, this article affirmed our marketing efforts at my home church. Before purchasing billboards and direct mail, we’re focusing on molding our people into effective brand evangelists, while ensuring that our building and worship environment are “visitor friendly”. Neither of these two tasks are small.

All these tiny details add up to make one major experience with your brand. David shares examples of these details below:

• The church sign – what it says and how it looks tells a piece of your story.
• The church building – its style, its upkeep describes your church community.
• The church parking – creates ease or distress for visitors and hence creates a feeling before even entering the building.
• Greeters at the door – how people are greeted encourages or sets a tone for welcoming people into your community.
• The sanctuary or auditorium – creates a setting and an environment within which the story will be told.
• The church bulletin – is the table of contents the story will follow. The “program” or additional ads or announcements within it reflect a lot about the culture of the organization.
• The music – sets the mood and provides a “score” which will accompany the storytelling.
• The preacher – the main storyteller…his or her style will be the narration of the story and will determine its style and the telling of the tale.
• The creative elements – video, drama, testimonies, art, dance or other will relate the key message in different forms which may resonate with people on levels that go beyond the spoken word.

Take a step back and view your church as a whole. Are all the actions performed weekly by your volunteers and staff people an accurate portrayal of your church brand? Are there some tasks that were performed long before you developed your most recent brand strategy? David concludes his article with these thought-provoking questions.

“Think about your church. Think about the marketing messages your church is sending every Sunday. To visitors and regulars alike. Is it good? Does it inspire action? Does it represent Jesus well? What do you need to fix or refresh to represent Jesus more effectively or with greater excellence?”

Maybe your church started out asking questions like this on a regular basis. I know that personally, our leadership team returns to this conversation consistently and I still feel as though we could ask it more often. And we’ve only been in existence for 4 months!

Please share details you value to maintain your brand through everything. Look forward to reading them!