Church branding components are the essential ingredients to helping a church be known for something relevant and needed. In order to impact a community and connect them to the gospel.
Being known for the right things are critical to having someone consider attending your church!
These church branding components help shape the perception of an organization that’s not properly understood:
Personas. Effective communication rises and falls on how well you know an audience. Trying to reach everyone, the message becomes so general most ignore it. You end up reaching no one.
Instead, choose a growing group near you. Don’t be too restrictive; instead, have a primary and a secondary persona you want to reach. They should represent a large component of your community. And, because your members are part of your community, you should have the personas in your church. Describe your personas stereotypically by concentrating on needs, concerns and goals. Love them.
Brand Thread. Discover a simple, usable, statement that declares your brand story by offering a solution to your personas’ needs or concerns; or paths to a goal. A thread positions you differently than nearby churches and states the benefit of attending. You become known for this unique solution by weaving it through ministries and communication while the thread gets attention by being beneficial and needed. Ultimately, your beneficial thread needs to connect with the Scarlet Thread of the gospel.
Logo. Because we live in a visual world, you need a controlled “wrapper” around your thread so it starts to represent it!
A church needs a simple, unique, professional symbol combined with your church and thread (as a tagline). You’ll need horizontal and vertical versions, as color and greyscale. How do you know the logo’s right? Your personas should love receiving a gift with your church logo on it. It needs to represent you well.
Color Palette. The logo uses 1–3 colors to establish your colors. A primary color (about 60% usage), secondary (about 30%), and tertiary (about 10%). That 60/30/10 ratio creates an effective color palette, so when someone experiences your brand, they readily associate the colors and their combinations. Consistent use of your colors should start to represent the church even without the logo.
Font Palette. Similar to controlled brand colors, you’ll need 1–3 fonts used in a limited way so they also represent your church. These fonts should be used in the logo, on service slides, and throughout print materials. Even your website and emails can use similar web font variations to match as closely as possible.
Brand Fences. Create a short graphic standard document to list rules for controlling how the brand expands across designed communication materials. This allows your church to have similarities across all platforms.
If you’re not consistently controlling things, you probably don’t have a brand!
EDITOR’S NOTE – Mark MacDonald is communication pastor, speaker, consultant, bestselling author, church branding strategist for BeKnownforSomething.com and executive director of the Center for Church Communication.
