How I’m Tending My Brand

brand vine strategy mission
Braden East

Today I want to exhort you. Keep up the good work! I’m encouraged to keep pressing on when I hear stories or see online that you’re tending your church brand.

Here’s how I’m trying to follow suit!

Writing Daily

I’ve been a lot more intentional about this, and people are noticing.

Writing daily has helped me collect lessons learned in my work and articulate my unique philosophy around church branding.

This has also given me content to pull from for social media posts. I’ve been able to easily share a combination of quick quotes from this newsletter and finished rebrands without having to switch into writing mode for every post.

Understanding My Audience

I’ve started paying attention to which of my brand’s touch points are having the biggest impact.

To do this I have some website analytics running and some questions I ask now on introduction calls.

This helps me focus my writing and website copy on what’s relevant and engaging for my audience and clients.

Community Participation

This year I’ve made it a goal to give back to pastors and churches wherever I can.

Part of that effort has been interacting and responding to posts in a Facebook group called Church Creatives. This is a wonderful community of 80,000+ pastors and church staff who appreciate the value of creativity/ design for churches and ministries.

The second thing I’m doing is distilling my branding experience into free resources that pastors can use to align their branding with their vision, prepare for a rebrand, and make a bigger impact. More on these in the near future.

That all seems like a lot, but what’s made it manageable is a daily cadence and habit of tending my brand, even if it’s just 10 minutes of jotting down some notes or reacting to a Facebook post.

So take it as an encouragement: You can do it too!


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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]
Gut Feelings
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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.
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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.
What Your Logo Says About Your Church (part 1)
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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.
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