Underpayment Penalties and Church Communication

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!

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 :)

Love it or hate it, social media is the perfect place to communicate about the life of your church. Your church isn’t a museum and you probably want people to know that. An active social media profile indicates an active church. But posting photos, going live, and answering comments is something that a lot of companies have an entire team for. Thankfully, it’s not as hard as it sounds. Here are two guiding principles for a vibrant, flourishing church social media presence. 1. Consistency over Quantity How often you post is far less important than how regularly you post. Whether it’s once a week or every day - it doesn’t matter! What matters is that you set expectations and then meet those expectations consistently over time. This creates familiar patterns of communication that give people a sense of belonging and connection. I saw a church do this exceptionally well, and their engagement was off the charts! They posted a short video every week with an elder or staff member giving a 5 minute devotional (they’ve been going for 2 years now!). It’s not anything fancy, but it serves to publicly show the church’s long-term focus on discipleship. 2. Substance and Relevance over Aesthetics The truth is, almost no one is scrutinizing your images, videos, and text. While it’s good to pursue excellence, nobody is going to pay much attention to how professional your photos look or how good the lighting is in your videos! They’re giving you a couple seconds of their attention and then they’re back to scrolling. Making your content substantive and relevant is going to give you way more engagement than making it look and sound pretty.

It can be hard to know if you should tease a church rebrand in advance. An all-at-once approach might seem cleaner and easier. However, if you really want a lot of buy-in from the congregation, there are real advantages to letting certain people get a little taste of the rebrand before it officially launches. I recently worked with Walnut Street Baptist Church in Louisville, KY on a total rebrand. Here’s what worship pastor Will said about their strategy (shared with permission): Before I did the big roll-out to the whole church, I did a presentation for our staff and our deacons. This allowed me to practice my spiel, but it also let two influential groups of leaders give their immediate feedback. It also created some helpful buzz, as those leaders could tell their friends that they had seen the new branding and liked it. That helpful buzz was really important. For Walnut Street, teasing or “pre-launching” their new brand was a great way to build momentum leading up to the official launch. Where else would you apply this idea of creating buzz?