How To Rebrand a Small to Midsize Church

An important step in your journey toward thriving church communications is to discern your brand. The word “branding” may stir some superficial images of Social influencers, sneaker companies, or diet soda, but don’t let that deter you from engaging in this important step.

When I’m talking about branding and the church, I think it’s important to define what it is and what it isn’t.

For instance, branding in the church is generally NOT about creating a look and culture that’s going to make your church famous. The goal is not usually to go worldwide with your church brand.

Instead, when I talk about branding for small to midsize  churches, I’m talking about the process of communicating your existing culture to your local audience. This process involves numerous steps, which ends with a brand identity.

More Than a Logo

For many people, branding and logo design mean the same thing. While logo design is certainly an important part of the branding process, it really is only a part, and for me it’s not even the first or most important part.

The first step to building a church brand starts with evaluating and clarifying your foundational directional statement; I’m talking about your mission, vision, and values. These three key elements are so much more than token statements you put on the church website. These are the directional statements that (should) determine the entire course of the ministry of your church.

Why are these statements so important and what do they have to do with branding? To answer this question we need to briefly walk through each of these elements.

Build Your Foundation

Core Values: 

Your core values are the unique elements your church cares about most. Naturally, it would be easy to list things like Jesus, the Gospel, Love, and so on. While these can be core values, I would argue they shouldn't be because these are actually better defined as beliefs, or at least unpacked in a list of your church’s beliefs. 

Values, on the other hand, should be those unique things that you care about most, which shape your mission and vision. The most effective values are those things that emphasize what your church does best. 

A church I worked with recently was an incredibly welcoming church. I don’t just mean their people are friendly, but they just had a gift and strategy in place for making sure every person who walked through their doors felt known and loved by having ministries in place to receive them. So they named one of their core values as radical welcome. This one value alone went on to reshape their vision and mission statements in profound ways.

Mission: 

Your mission statement answers the question, “what are you doing.?” It should be unique, memorable, and authentic. Here are a few examples of mission statements from some random churches:

Rescuing one another from cultural Christianity to follow Jesus every day.

Imperfect people, risking it all to make Jesus real one life at a time.

Inviting the distracted and disinterested to realize their role in God’s story.

All of these examples reflect churches that know what their core values are and have found a way to clearly and succinctly communicate it in one sentence. 

Vision:

There is some debate in the church leadership world about the exact role and value of a vision statement. The problem is they often seem too big for one church to realistically accomplish. While I believe God can accomplish anything, I do think it’s important to have clear attainable goals and a church’s vision statement is a great place to express that.

So as you create a vision statement, I would recommend trying something new and creating some short-term goals that the leadership and church body can move toward and measure their success. 

Insider vs Outsider Language

An important note about the vision, mission, values statements. These are all created for insiders; meaning they contain language that a new or seeking person either would not fully understand or care about (yet). That doesn’t mean they are unimportant. But it does mean you probably shouldn’t put these statements front and center on any of your marketing materials. 

Instead, I would encourage you to craft some separate statements that communicate the same core ideas, but in a way that uses more accessible language and focuses on the person you’re actually trying to reach. So if you’re trying to reach people who feel alone and unloved, then craft your language to speak to that person and their specific life situation and what they are looking for.

Your Target Audience

As you made your way through your vision, mission, values, and outsider language statements, a recurring theme you likely noticed is the importance of deciding on your target audience. This is always one of the most challenging conversations for churches because it forces them to admit that maybe their church is better at reaching some people better than others.

I just want to affirm reality and encourage you to embrace this reality. There are some people your church may not be as good at reaching. For instance, if your church is filled with older generations, it will likely be harder for you to reach young families. Not impossible, but certainly harder. And that’s okay. Because it’s also likely there are people your church is uniquely positioned to reach and in all likelihood, this should be your target audience.

Why is understanding your target audience important? Because it will determine just about everything about your brand, pushing you at every stage to create content that will reach your target audience. This allows you to craft and hone your message with certain people in mind, which gives you a greater likelihood of reaching them.

This concept isn’t new. It’s pretty much marketing 101. But it is relatively new to church leaders because for so long we operated from a “if you build it they will come” mentality. If you plant and grow a healthy church, then you can reach everyone. But I think those days are gone and we have to be more intentional.

Design Your Logo

Now that you have your foundational statements and target audience clearly in mind, you’re in a better position to determine if you need to redesign your logo. 

When I first started helping churches with their branding, if a church hadn’t redesigned its logo in 5 years, I just assumed they needed to rebrand and recommended one. I don’t think that anymore.

Rebranding in the church is no small thing. I’ve seen that after helping dozens of churches through the process. It is a deeply personal, spiritual, and emotional process for many leaders and congregants. Not only is it time consuming and expensive, but churches have this whole group of people in them that (likely) have strong feelings about the current logo. Maybe it was the logo when they were saved. Maybe it was designed by someone’s son or daughter. Maybe they just don’t understand why a new logo is even important.

So if you do determine it’s time to create a new church logo, here are some steps I would recommend taking to improve the likelihood it turns out a success.

Step 1: Form a Team

While doing the logo design with just one or two people will be easier and faster, it also is more likely to fail. When you create a team to guide and inform the logo design process, you are able to bring in leaders and different people groups into the process, which gives the congregation more trust that their perspective was taken into consideration.

Step 2: Clarify Roles

While I do think having a team helps with logo design, I also think it’s important to be very clear about the role of the team members. Logo design is inherently a creative process, and it’s very hard to make creative decisions as a group. This is why when I’m consulting with a church, I encourage teams to delegate the decision makers(s) and the support team who give their input. 

Step 3: Create a Design Brief

There are a number of ways to design a logo, but all of them begin by creating a “design brief.” This is a written description of what you know you want in a logo. The more clarity you have here the better. This gives the graphic designer(s) direction on things like color, font, style, imagery, and more.  

Step 4: Choose a design method

I could write a whole chapter on the pros and cons of various logo design methods, so I’ll save you the time and get right to the point. The best way I’ve found to design a logo with churches is to do a two-phased approach.

The first phase involves flushing out your ideas in an inexpensive logo design content. There are many websites that host these contests (I would recommend 99designs.com). How it works is you submit your design brief as a contest. Then a handful of designers all compete to win the contest. During this process, you may stumble upon the perfect logo and be able to finish here. However, it’s more likely that during this phase you will simply get clarity on what you like and don’t like.

Then in phase two, you use an actual professional graphic designer, preferably one who specializes in logo design, and use your newfound clarity to give the designer crystal clear direction on what you’re looking for. This will allow you to negotiate a lower design fee because you won’t need to see tons of designs, just 2-3 versions of what you know you want.

You’ll want to bring all of this information into a branding guide, which will serve as a reference for all of your ongoing branding efforts.

Apply Your New Brand

Once you’ve finished the foundational statements, marketing statements, and logo design, you’re pretty much ready to apply your new branding across the board. 

I don’t want to act like this process is quick and easy. Depending on how you use your logo, this will include changing your logo on multiple printed and digital platforms. You’ll want to budget a fair amount toward this to make sure you’re thorough and don’t leave your old logo or language behind on some forgotten platform.

Once you’ve updated your printed and digital platforms, the real work will begin staying consistent and staying “on brand” with all of your content creation.

Next Steps

I hope you found this blog helpful and given you the direction you need to take those first steps toward creating and maintaining thriving communications in your church. 

Every year, Clearpath partners with churches just like yours to help them create thriving communications. Here’s a few action steps you can take when you’re ready:

Action Steps:

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