Last year I realized something… Designing comprehensive church rebrands is one of my favorite things to do, but I’m just one guy! The most work I can ever take on is a couple of new clients per month. The only way to help more churches… is to give my process away for free. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m writing down everything I do in a typical church rebrand project, adding templates and worksheets, and breaking it into simple steps anyone can follow (even if they have no design experience)! This is the first time I’ve ever mentioned this to anyone (outside of my wife), so I can truly say “you heard it here first.” Over the next several months, I’ll share behind the scenes sneak peaks of this thing. And the best part is… you will have an opportunity to shape the final product. I’ll be dropping more details in future updates, so keep your eyes peeled for the next one. 👀

On the East Acres Homestead, we have two livestock guardian dogs, Caesar and Augustus (Gus). Caesar and Gus are amazing at their jobs. They do things we haven’t trained them to do like warn our goats about coyotes or chase hawks away from the chickens. That said, Caesar and Gus are still young. Sometimes one of them will get excited and do something against the rules, like chase a chicken (it’s usually Gus 🙄). So we have to yell at them. With just our voices, we’re able to influence their behavior from a distance. Keep in mind that we’ve spent almost no time training them. Yet they stop and sit instantly when we take a stern tone of voice. Here’s the thing: Tone of voice can communicate a lot of information and influence behavior. You probably aren’t yelling at people with a stern voice, but have you thought about what your tone actually is when it comes to your church communications? If you don’t know what your brand’s tone of voice should be, you’re probably not using it effectively.

No matter how interesting and engaging your church “About” page is, nothing connects with people and builds trust like real photos of the church’s staff and leaders. Any picture is worth a thousand words, but a carefully chosen picture can say much more than that. If you are lucky enough to be in the minority of churches with a staff photographer, that part of your brand is probably going to be shaped by their personal style. For the rest of us, there are a few tricks we can use to get the most mileage out of our limited resources. Get a dedicated volunteer. This one speaks for itself, but if you can find a willing individual with a nice phone, they can focus on just doing the photography, which will probably have more uniform results. Shoot outside. Unless you have a studio set up, natural light is always going to look better than indoor light. Dress accordingly. If your church brand is more formal and traditional, wear a suit. If your brand is younger and more informal, dress casually. A good rule of thumb is to wear what the majority of your members would typically wear on a Sunday morning. Use consistent settings. If you’re shooting on an iPhone, use portrait mode with the same settings each time. If you have a digital camera, use a tripod for consistent framing and watch a video to help you dial in your settings. Curate. Shoot several photos of each person, and pick ones that are the most flattering and in focus. Staff headshots are just one way to use “on brand” church photography, but they can make a huge difference.

It’s easy to overwork the logo and pack as much symbolism and meaning as possible into the design. But here’s my hot take: Your logo should be the clean symbol that identifies your church (that positive gut feeling): not an infographic. Cultivating a healthy brand means putting in the work to connect the dots between what you look like and who you are. You might be saying, “But Braden, people will never connect the dots between the logo and our purpose/vision/mission on their own.” You’re right! The logo is just one tool in a branding toolkit, with a specific purpose (instant identification). Just because you have a hammer doesn’t mean everything is a nail ;)

Energetic logo = energetic church? Not necessarily. Strong stable logo = strong stable church? Maybe sometimes. This is an easy, one-dimensional way to think about church branding. Here’s the problem: Logos aren’t supposed to speak for themselves. The purpose of a logo is to identify; not explain. If your logo is recognizable and memorable, it’s done its job. The explaining part is up to you. Thankfully, you can use other elements of your visual brand to help you do that explanation. The purpose of having colors, fonts, photography, and everything else in your branding toolkit is to flesh out the ideas that don’t fit inside your logo.

These days everybody and their dog are expected to have a website. Why is that? The reality is that it’s hard to exist without a digital presence. Tending your brand in the real world is only half the battle. Some churches will leverage social media platforms and tools like Church Center to do their basic functions of event planning, send emails, and make announcements. This can check off the basics, but there’s a critical way your website can make your brand truly galvanizing and memorable. Done right, your website is where your logo, photography, color, and copywriting tone of voice intersect with and reinforce your vision, mission, values, and origin story. I’ll go deeper on these in future posts. The point is: all those things become missed opportunities if you don’t have a digital hub for your brand. Tend your brand digitally too.

Get ready for a more streamlined experience! Starting today, Tend Your Brand is becoming a concise weekly digest of 6 valuable branding insights. That means no more daily emails. 😅 Each Monday morning, you’ll get a list of that week’s posts from TendYourBrand.com (still published daily, but only sent out once per week). We all have busy schedules and one inbox item is easier to manage than six. Plus, a weekly digest format allows you to quickly pick topics from the week that are actually relevant to you. Things that haven’t changed: Posts will still be very short and focused (<1 minute read) Content is still packed full of useful branding tools and strategies Intermittent GIFs and Office references I hope you enjoy the new format, and don’t forget to tend your brand!

Part of my process when I help a church to rebrand involves giving them what I call a “branding toolkit.” This is basically a set of logos, colors, fonts, patterns, textures, photography, etc. they can use to quickly create digital graphics or print pieces that look and feel like their church. In the past, I’ve handed this toolkit off as just digital files, stored on a hard drive or in the cloud. It worked, but it was a little clunky. Then I found out about Canva Brand Kits. These were a game changer… and the best part is, churches get Canva Pro for free. (Canva didn’t sponsor this or anything like that, in fact I despised it for a long time because of how simplistic it used to be... it’s a powerhouse now) With a brand kit, your whole visual identity is a living, breathing system. Your colors are live swatches rather than just hex codes. Your fonts are set up as different styles and apply with just a click. I think I’m behind the times on this, but I wanted to share it in case you or your staff haven’t taken full advantage of brand kits. Have you tried it? Hit reply and let me know how it went.

Last year, my wife started selling old-fashioned lye soaps and shampoos made from goats milk. To distribute and label them, she had to make some decisions about packaging. Clear plastic shrink wrap is easy and practical. It turns each bar of soap into a self-contained unit that wont get damaged or worn, shows the entire bar, and makes shipping so much easier. Makes perfect sense, right? After selling countless bars and getting a lot of customer feedback, she realized that her packaging was actually working against her. People were buying her soap because they wanted a more home-grown, organic, less commercialized experience. She was using packaging that was plastic, shiny, and sterile. It was communicating the opposite of her brand! When she made the switch to brown craft paper, she immediately saw a positive response from our customers. “It looks so eco-friendly!” “I love that I can smell it in the store!” Is there anything you’re doing that’s unintentionally sending the wrong message?

Have you heard the term "visitor journey?" A good rule of thumb for churches is that a visitor should have no less than 5 brand “touchpoints," or places where they can interact with your brand. The best way I've found to identify those touchpoints is to think about your visitor journey. What do they see? Who do they talk to? How long do they spend in each place? This is critical to get right for larger churches, but it also applies to a church plant reaching their community for the first time. Here’s a starter outline of a visitor journey: Visitor finds you online (do they see photos of your people, building, or logo?) They drive up to your parking lot (do they see the same people, building, and logo?) They walk inside (do they see wayfinding? A welcome banner? A greeter with a name tag?) They sit down in the sanctuary (do they see at least one announcement slide that is relevant to them? What about in the bulletin?) I’ll let you continue your list from there, but here's the thing: If you can’t remember what your visitor journey looks like, your visitors probably aren’t remembering your church either.

Especially in the ministry world, we tend to think of a brand as a logo, color, or font... something flashy and new to get people's attention. But this is completely backwards. Brand is the gut feeling people have about your organization. Branding is how we shape and cultivate that gut feeling. By being intentional with your look, feel, and tone, you're associating those things with your church: everything it does and stands for. Hopefully, that association is one of trust and goodwill. Your logo, colors, and tagline are just a few of the ways that association can be made, but these things are not inherently a “brand.” They're tools for the purpose of making a repeatable association. That's why its so important to regularly tend your brand. With patience and intentionality, eventually you will see progress. Your church will start to identify with your brand because it signifies their shared history, values, and purpose. That’s when you can start to reap the benefits of your people’s trust, unity, and zeal.

Have you ever tried growing a garden? My wife and I have tried many times. Last spring, we thought "This year will be the year." But what happened? We forgot to tend it. Sure enough, we walked outside one morning and realize "Oh... we haven't checked on the garden in 3 weeks." We tried to save it by dousing everything with the garden hose, hoping something would survive and "catch up" on its water needs. Even if you don't have gardening experience, you can probably guess that we didn't see a crop last year. You can't water once a month with gallons at a time! Just like cultivating a garden, building a healthy brand takes small investments of purposeful attention on a regular basis. Your brand requires tending. With patience and intentionality, eventually you will see progress. People will start to identify with your brand because it signfies their shared history, values, and purpose. When people see your logo and colors used consistently on their church bulletin, you're watering. When you review the tone of voice in your website copy, you're adding fertilizer to the soil. I don't want to push the analogy too far, so I'll stop there :) But that kind of patient consistency goes a long way toward building up familiarity, then trust, then action. Just for fun, here's a relevant quote from Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute. Michael: What is that thing that Dwight always says? Paper is the soil in which the seeds of business grow? Dwight: It’s not the soil! It’s the manure! Paper is the manure! On-time delivery is the soil! Aah! [runs into office]

Last time we looked at how most churches and ministries are probably not over-branding. People are forgetful and have lots of other things going on. To cultivate a brand that bears fruit, we have to cut through the noise repeatedly, with clarity and consistency. But how do we repeat ourselves without being annoying? The last thing you want to do is give people a negative feeling when they interact with your communications. The key to this is to say the same thing in different ways, over time. If your church has a tagline, or a "thread" like Mark MacDonald outlines in his book Be Known for Something, then you have your message - what to say. Now the trick is to repeat that message in different ways and in different places. Let’s say your tagline is “Alive To Christ.” First, you can put this tagline on your social media banner, website, and logo placeholder slide. These are semi-permanent places where new visitors and members will be introduced to that phrase. One Sunday a month, take 60 seconds of announcement time to explain what it means to be “Alive to Christ” and connect it to a ministry opportunity your church has in the upcoming month. If you livestream your worship services, you can even turn that clip into a social media post or a short reflection for community groups. Next you could design “A2C” mugs or a t-shirt that says “Dead to Sin” on the front and “Alive to Christ” on the back. These are just a few examples, but I think you get the idea. There a million different ways to say the same thing. Do you have a tagline or thread at your church? Reply here and let me know what yours is :)

After finishing a rebrand project, I used to caution clients against using their new logo on everything, warning them about the dangers of "brand fatigue." I've changed my perspective on this now. It feels counterintuitive, but your brand should be 99% repetition and 1% novelty. As a ministry leader, you'll get tired of hearing your core values long before your audience even remembers one of them. You'll be dreaming in only your brand colors before anyone even notices that there's an intentional palette. In fact, there was a study done to see how well regular people could recall major brand logos from memory. The results were pretty shocking. If regular people struggled to remember the TARGET logo, then your church probably doesn't have to worry about "over-branding." That said, there's a simple principle that can help you give your church more brand "touchpoints" without going overboard and getting on anyone's nerves. I’ll talk about that in the next one. See you there!

Hi, my name is Braden East. I've worked on creative teams doing brand and web design at both local and international ministries for nearly a decade. For a long time, I've wanted to start an email list for pastors and ministry leaders: the type of people I help in my work every day. In 2025, I'm finally doing it. I'm calling this email Tend Your Brand. The meaning behind it is simple: Your brand is like a vine (any biblical analogy enjoyers?). Without attention and care, it can grow out of control, interfere with other goals, or just die out completely. Too often, ministry leaders get one of those outcomes and give up. "It's just gimmicky marketing." "It's too much work." "It's not helping us." But your brand is not an invasive species. It’s also not a burden - at least it shouldn’t be. When you start seeing your brand as something to tend and cultivate, it starts bearing fruit. If something (your brand) could multiply your outreach efforts and give people a sense of belonging, why wouldn’t you focus on it? I believe the answer is that most ministry leaders just don’t have the right tools and strategy. This email is where I'll share those tools and strategies that can help you get your brand under control and turn it into something that bears much fruit. If that sounds interesting to you, click the subscribe button and I'll see you there! P.S. Because we’re all busy and have short attention spans, I’ll keep them under 1 minute read.