CULTURE

One of the most obvious strengths I heard during our time together was everything surrounding your culture including your mission, values, and the diverse make-up of your congregation.

Your culture is such that the people who visit and stay at the church do so because of who you are instead of what you offer. That’s not to say that you don’t have quality ministry offerings, but that it’s the community itself that attracts people. This allows you to move forward with marketing and communications that is deeply authentic and doesn’t require you to change anything about yourself, which is a fantastic place to be.

TEAM

You have a team of thoughtful and talented staff/volunteers who care deeply about the quality and integrity of your ministry and by extension, the marketing and communications that promote it.

Each person on your team comes with unique gifts and talents, which they lend to your marketing and communications in a positive way. That is not to say that there isn’t room for improvement. As you’ll see later on, I do have some ideas of how to grow your team to help existing staff spend more of their time on ministering and fill in some of the gaps.

WEBSITE

You built a clean, quality, and effective website. Unless there’s something you want that it doesn’t do, this website will serve you well now and in the coming years.

There are always potential challenges with building on smaller platforms including lack of technical support, a lag in updated features, SEO capabilities, etc. If any of these challenges were to arise, your website could easily be migrated to a different platform with little to no design updates and at a minimal expense.

ADMINISTRATION

Your entire staff seems to be gifted at administration, which constitutes about half (or more) of the church marcom workload.

Often church marcom is thought of as mostly a creative area. While it certainly does have a heavy creative component, I’ve found that quality church marcom needs both administratively and creatively gifted people. Usually these gifts are not found in the same person. Judging from the provided newsletters and bulletins, Carolyn does a wonderful job at pulling together many ministry leaders’ announcements and requests and has done very well stepping into a foundational use of Planning Center as a Church Management System (ChMS). I would say the admin side of your communications is solid.

CREATIVE / GRAPHIC DESIGN

While your team has a lot of administrative talent, it seems like you may be lacking a bit in the creative and graphic design area.

The primary reason for this likely has to do with a lack of brand identity (which guides the ongoing creative process) and the church simply not prioritizing this as much as administration. Regardless, I think exploring ways to increase the creative composition of your staff and volunteer team would be very helpful, not just to make things look better, but to remove the creative workload from the existing staff, freeing them to focus more on the substance of their ministry.

VISITOR PATHWAY

Of the three critical connecting pathways, it appears that the process of reaching into your community to invite new visitors to your church is the least developed.

This isn’t to say you don’t have new visitors, but that they aren’t being reached via any intentional marketing promotion. There are many ways to improve your existing systems and platforms to reach more people. Some of these improvements are very simple, others more elaborate and costly. The key to this isn’t to desperately do everything you can to promote the church, but to be thoughtful and intentional about how you’re utilizing your resources to get the word out about the church.

SOCIAL MEDIA

It looks like you are currently using social media on a foundation level. I would encourage a more intentional and culturally relevant approach that allows you to utilize your social media in a more intentional way without compromising who you are in the process.

I don’t want to pretend that I think social media is the “end all” for church marketing. I see it as only one of the many tools that can be used to reach new people. The challenge is engaging with these tools in a way that doesn’t hinge your entire marketing success on an algorithm that you can’t control. This is why I encourage churches to form a team to come up with a social posting strategy that is thoughtful, diverse, and manageable.

NO CENTRAL MARCOM DIRECTOR

While you have a great team in place for marketing and communications, one of the things that would greatly improve the effectiveness of your church marcom would be a dedicated Marcom Director. While I understand this isn’t feasible for a church with a limited staff, I do like to point out that having a clear point person who looks after the creative and administrative goals of the church can be a real game changer for the quality of a church’s marcom.

ANALYTICS

An easy thing to start doing is to activate and check in on the analytics for your website, social media, and church center app.

This will help you get a clear understanding of how people are interacting with your communications. This knowledge can inform you of potential improvements you can make including enhancing frequently visiting pages, emphasizing certain kinds of posts, and even removing cluttered content that people don’t engage with.

EMAIL & TEXT MARKETING

Since you are using Planning Center as your ChMS, you’re in a good position to start using email marketing (via MailChimp) and text marketing (via PCO People or Clearstream).

There are many advantages to moving from basic email to a marketing platform including enhancing designs, clearer call to action buttons, embedded creative content, a branded look, larger email capacity, and detailed engagement reports (to name a few). PCO makes it easy to connect your church management system with MailChimp, including unlimited segments/tags of your total audience that correspond with your individual PCO People lists. Likewise, you can text your lists for punchy, one-off announcements.

CONNECTING & MEMBERSHIP PATHWAYS

These are two pathways you have fairly well dialed in. The next step is to implement these pathways into your Planning Center People Workflows in order to create more accountability and automations.

There’s a lot that goes into this process including solidifying each step of both pathways, creating a balance of technical automations and relational alerts, and then equipping each person involved in the process on these systems.

CHURCH CENTER APP

You’ve done a great job so far with Church Center, but I think there’s a greater opportunity to use the app in a bigger way.

Church Center was designed to be a fully functional app that allows the congregation to view and manage every aspect of their digital engagement. It also allows you to custom design many aspects of the app to reflect your priorities and brand. If you were to continue to grow your use of Planning Center, you could use the Church Center app as the central place where people view events, registrations, group communications + resources, giving, and more. It would take a creative build-out process as well as an intentional re-launch to help the maximum number of people use the app.

TEAM

As mentioned earlier, I think the administrative part of your team would greatly benefit from equal creative talent coming alongside it.

You have a few options for this kind of creative help. The first is to hire or contract with a graphic designer to create ongoing graphics for ministries and events. (Clearpath does provide these services) The second is to subscribe to a graphic design supplier that provides stock graphics with simple updates. Third, you can identify someone in the congregation or staff with raw creative abilities and provide equipping for them to fill this ongoing need.

DIGITAL + PRINTED COMMUNICATIONS DUAL WORKLOAD

While your multigenerational demographics is a positive and healthy thing, it also makes for a more challenging communications strategy.

While many churches find themselves transitioning from printed materials to digital platforms in most areas, you have the need to maintain all printed material while you add digital options, which doubles your work and makes your “calls to action” sometimes unclear. I don’t propose doing away with printed materials because that would go against who you are; however I would recommend finding creative solutions and compromises that will keep the workload under control.

HIGH NUMBER OF THE NON-TECH CONGREGATION

This point is similar to the previous but deserves its own mention because when a congregation has a significant number of people who are not technically inclined (and even anti-tech), it can threaten the progress of digital communication.

This is why it’s important to listen and receive people’s frustrations with new technology and provide creative workarounds without allowing it to derail making digital communications the primary method of communication.

WIDE TARGET AUDIENCE

One of the most basic principles of marketing is identifying your target audience. Because you don’t have a clear target audience, this will make it difficult to create a focused brand and build systems that speak directly to that target audience.

This is not to encourage you to de-emphasize your current wide target audience, but instead to get more creative with how you identify your audience. Instead of thinking about your target audience as a demographic (age, finances, family, etc), I’d encourage you to think about what problem people are trying to solve when they visit your church and how the church helps them solve that problem. I think this will root your target audience in a more helpful context.

LOGO DESIGN PROJECT

The first step is the most substantial would involve forming a logo design consulting team, equipping that team with knowledge about logo design, a 2-phase design process with multiple revisions until we’ve created the desired logo.

CREATE BRANDING GUIDE

Once the logo is complete, we’d create a branding guide (PDF) that would act as a resource for all future creative projects. This guide would detail out the fonts, colors, and general creative direction for most creative designs.

CREATE GRAPHIC DESIGN TEMPLATES

We would then create some different graphic design templates in Canva, which could be used and reused to create ongoing graphics for all ministries. This way, ministry leaders would be able to quickly create graphics that fit the bulletin, announcement screen in the lobby, planning center, and social media without taking too much time. If you did want to explore using Clearpath for ongoing graphic design, this step would not be as necessary as we’d be taking care of this ongoing need for you.

UPDATE PLATFORMS AND PRINTABLES

Finally, each platform, printable, and sign would need to be updated with new designs/logo in order to begin to reinforce the church logo.

PLANNING CENTER: WORKFLOWS, LISTS, INTEGRATIONS AND FORMS

First we’ll want to put some work into building out your Planning Center People systems, including creating strategic workflows, automated lists, setting up email and text integrations, and building contingent capable forms that act as a launching point for a variety of processes.

MAILCHIMP & TEXT DEVELOPMENT:

Next comes the creative and functional development of both Mailchimp and any texting services you decide to use. This could include recreating any of your current printables in Mailchimp.

CHURCH CENTER: APP DESIGN AND STRATEGIC RELAUNCH

Finally I would recommend building out your church center app to function as a fully functioning engagement app and present it as the primary announcement and engagement tool for the church. This process would be a combination of branded graphic design, printed onboarding instructions, and equipping for the staff to maintain the app.