Three Essentials for Strategic Church or Ministry Branding « MEDIA SALT

Good article on "branding" for your church. May be a little more than some churches are ready for, but we should always challenge ourselves a little bit.
Be sure to check out Mediasalt andMinistry Marketing Coach as they both have further articles on these topics.
Jason Cooper | @cooperjason
Cooper-ation Resourcing

Three Essentials for Strategic Church or Ministry Branding

By Guest Blogger Wednesday October 7, 2009

Ministries and churches have the opportunity to reach their communities with the love and truth of Christ and to amplify their efforts through strategic brand development.
Yet at a leadership level, there seems to be a lot of confusion about branding. What is it? Why does it matter? How do we do it? Is it different than marketing? Everyday, in consulting with ministry leaders throughout the country, these and many other questions surface.
Branding concepts can be inherently elusive and difficult to define. For some leaders, there’s also resistance toward something that smacks of the questionable methods of Corporate America. This mindset reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of branding.
Once past these mental barriers, ministry leaders can begin to leverage the strengths of strategic brand development and harness its raw power.

1. Understand branding concepts as tools to do ministry more effectively.

It’s important to correctly understand and properly define branding. How many times have you heard someone describe a church logo as its brand? Yet branding is much more than a logo. A logo is just one of many brand identifiers, but not the brand itself. I talk more about this here.
Here are a few definitions of branding that illustrate the difficulty in nailing this down:

• To burn a distinctive mark into or upon with a hot iron, to indicate quality, ownership, etc., or to mark as infamous (as a convict).
• A person’s perception of a product, service, experience or organization. The Dictionary of Brand A-Z
• A distinguishing symbol, mark, logo, name, word, sentence, or a combination of these items that companies use to distinguish their product from others in the market.
• A promise to your members or constituents.
• Branding is the art of becoming knowable, likable and trustable. Duct Tape Marketing by John Jantsch

2. Stay focused on the stuff that matters.

Ultimately, good ministry branding is about speaking the truth in love in such a way that it resonates with people. It’s about loving them truthfully. These two spiritual dynamics connect them with the people of God and the heart of God. It is true that humans want and need love, but they also want to be challenged by the truth claims of the Gospel. These are the alluring twins of ministry that when combined and intentionally nurtured, connect with the hearts and minds of mortals. Ministries can’t go wrong when they stay centered here.
But speaking the truth in love, let us grow in every way into Him who is the head—Christ. (Ephesians 4:15 HCSB)

3. Distinguish between brand identity and brand story.

Corporate identities, logos, websites, marketing collateral, etc., are all part of a brand’s identity. Identities serve to express a brand’s essence and ethos. They are simply visual and tangible symbolic representations of the brand.
The brand story, is a coherent set of messages that articulate the meaning of a brand. The tighter the messages, along with the strategies and execution of sharing those messages, the more clarity there will be surrounding the ministry’s brand story.
So, you want to build a vibrant and effective church or ministry brand? Foster a spirit and environment where truth and love permeate every inch of the place. Then, articulate your brand story and develop a brand identity that beautifully reflects and communicates that spirit.
That’s good branding.
Today’s post was written by Kerry Bural, the principal of The Resonate Group, a church and ministry brand consulting and development firm. Kerry blogs at Ministry Marketing Coach . You can follow him@KerryBural.

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Are you listed on the iPhone? Check out AppChurch (@appchurch)

I have previously posted about a new iPhone app called AppChurch. It is an app that is essentially one big church directory. You can sign up to have your church listed for free, or pay for premium features.

It is easy to miss the fact you can get a free listing. The frontpage only mentions that it is free for 30 days, but notice the bottom of the screen grab below that mentions the "free plan". It is simply a basic listing that includes your church logo, name, address, website, phone, and service times (not just one field for service times, but many).

Just go to AppChurch.com and click on the "see plans and pricing" link at it will take you to the page above. Or go right to the "free plan" link.

Once there, you can fill out the basic information and upload your logo and you are in... If you want to post sermons or events, you will have to pay a monthly fee, but the listing is free. In fact, if AppChurch is to succeed, all of us cheapskates out there should list our churches so there are plenty of listings to make the app worth downloading.

Here are some screen shots of my churches free listing.

This is the "home page" for our church.

This shows the possibilities to list multiple services and programs.

Of course, basic contact info that are active links...

As you can see, not many churches have been listed. Only 6 in our category, with the AG and Baptists leading the pack at only 28 & 30 listings. Let's see if we can bring that up!

NOTE: I previously posted that it would not load on the iPod Touch. The recent update changed that. Now it is on the iPhone and Touch.

Jason Cooper (@cooperjason)

Cooper-ation Ministry Resourcing

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Email Marketing for FREE! MailChimp

There are plenty of options out there when it comes to email marketing. Some simply choose to use more basic options like Google or Yahoo email groups, and some choose a fully featured email marketing provider. Usually the issue is cost.

For smaller ministries, who have less than 500 email contacts, you can use a fully featured email marketing provider for FREE! Not just free for 30 days, free forever as long as your contact list remains below 500 individual email addresses.

The service I am referring to is MailChimp. While we do not personally use MailChimp in my organization (we just switched paid service providers and paid for 6 months in advance) we probably would have if we had run across MailChimp when we were looking to switch. Free for up to 500 emails and 3,000 emails each month.

My church runs about 700 average attendance in worship and we have around 400 email contacts. So this is a great option for small and medium sized ministries. 

Jason Cooper (@cooperjason)

Cooper-ation Ministry Resourcing

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Is your ministry online? "Get Your Church Online: What’s Your Address? - ChurchCrunch.com"

This looks to be a great series of article for the ministry that is still just getting into this "internet" thing. It comes from churchcrunch, so be sure to check them out and subscribe via RSS so you can get all the rest of these posts.

Jason Cooper @cooperjason

This is a guest post by Tom McFarlin

When it comes to maintaining an online presence, the modern church is not exactly flourishing. To make matters even more challenging, the church is still about four years behind everyone else with respect to technology.

Finding – and affording – good designers and  good developers is hard so it’s typically up to volunteers to step up to help contribute to the cause.

But there’s a problem: The Internet is a big place. A really big place.

When you sit down to begin building a site, there’s a lot of stuff out there you must sift through – various services, applications, technologies, and so on. Unless you’ve got a background in web development, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all of this information let alone trying to even find a starting point.

Processing all of this stuff is like drinking from a fire hose. But I’d like to try to slow the flow a little bit.

Each week, I’m going to toss out a couple tools, utilities, applications, and/or best practices that are geared towards those of you that are looking to bring your church online but lack the time to invest in all the research.

Ready? Let’s go.

Where do I start?

Forget about development. Simply finding a place to begin is an incredibly daunting task.

Do I build the site first, or should I find a good host? I don’t even know how to register a domain. What’s the best editor for creating a website? What’s CSS? JavaScript? What’s coffee gotta do with it? It looks nasty. MySQL? I didn’t even know I had an SQL! I thought Ajax was some kind of bleach.

Yeah. I know. So. much. stuff. But that’s okay – we’ll get to it eventually. There’s really no well-defined, clear-cut place to start so we’ll pick one.

Address Availability

Your website has gotta have a place to live. Sure, there are a lot of free hosts out there, but rarely are you gonna find a church site hosted at Blogspot or Tripod. A domain name is your address on the information superhighway.

That was a lame pun and I apologize.

Still, if you want to have a relevant, easy-to-remember site then it helps to have a good domain name. Here are three services – in no particular order – that make it incredibly easy to see if your domain name is available all of which feature the results in real time.

Instant Domain Search is arguably the simplest of the three. Enter the domain name that you’re interested in purchasing and it will give you the availability of the .com, .net, and .org equivalents in addition to several registrars that can be used to purchase it.

PCNames is very similar to Instant Domain Search in that it will provide results for your requested domain as well as a set of available registrars; however, this service also returns available domains featuring the suffixes for .info, .biz, .us, and .mobi.

Domai.nr is the mother of all web 2.0 domain searches. It will scan all of the available domains for the aforementioned suffixes as well as domains that can use the domain as part of the suffix. For example, say you’re considering purchasing a domain for a family night supper-oriented church called Lets Eat It. Domai.nr will return all available results including a suggestion for LetsEat.It. The word is part of the domain? Yep. Ultimate creativity.

There you go: three free applications you can use to begin setting up your church’s online presence. But what’s in a name? If you’ve got nothing to show for it, it’s not gonna be worth much.

Next, we’ll take a look at some of the more popular web hosts and things to consider before purchasing some space for your stuff.

[Image from B Tal]

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Free Resource: Picnik.com - Photo editing the easy way, online in your browser

I love to be able to share free resources with others! Ran across this site in a blog post and checked it out.

Picnik.com is an web app photo editor. It works on Mac/PC in just about any browser. There are a ton of free features, but the more advanced come with a "premium" membership.

If you need to make some quick, basic changes to a photo - like crop, resize, contrast/brightness, tint, etc. - picnik.com allows you to do so quickly and easily. I was pleased with the array of available FREE effects that are available.

For fun, I tweaked a rather poor shot of myself into a colorful cartoonish caricature in a matter of seconds. It is now my new Twitter profile pic. (it's not great, but that's not the point...)

Picnik includes the ability to export to several different standard formats.

Perhaps one of the best features is that you DON'T have to signup or register in order to use it. You can just book mark it and go to it when you need and no need to "sing in" in order to do what you need to do. Just upload a photo and go.

Picnik also let's you connect to several popular sites where your pictures are already stored (Flickr, Facebook, etc.) so you may not even have to upload. I didn't try this feature, but I like the idea.

In general, I'd say it's worth checking out. Great for volunteers who don't have access to things like Photoshop.

Jason Cooper (@cooperjason)

Cooper-ation Ministry Resourcing

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10 Ways to Make the Most of a Facebook Fan Page for Your Business // via webdesign.com

Great article from webdesign.com. I was pleased to realize we had done most of what they recommend. Not a fan of the "send update" function on FB though. Much prefer to use status updates for most communications. (I never check my own FB updates page)

Jason Cooper (@cooperjason)

10 Ways to Make the Most of a Facebook Fan Page for Your Business

Kevin D. Hendricks | October 6, 2009 | 0 Comments

Facebook’s fan pages are easy to set up, but not so easy to master. Unfortunately, Facebook’s system for setting up and maintaining pages is needlessly complicated and sometimes buggy. It can be a little frustrating, but that’s the price of reaching a network of 300 million people. It’s worth the effort to put Facebook to work for your business. We can help:

1. Setting Up Your Page
Take your time while setting up a Facebook fan page. The category you choose at the very beginning is something you can’t change—unless you want to dump all your fans and start over. Different categories let you display different information (hours, parking and public transit options for a restaurant, mission and products for a website), so choose wisely. This site explains the differences.

Once you’ve picked your category and set up your page you can start adding basic info (most of this information will be in the “Info” tab that isn’t visible until a user clicks on it). You can also add a short bit of copy to the sidebar on your wall, which is an important place to give a basic overview of your business.

Like every other social networking site, your profile photo is an important branding opportunity. Facebook does zoom and crop images when it displays thumbnails, so it can be helpful to properly size your image so any important details aren’t cut out in thumbnails.

Take a look at the settings before you finish and make sure you’re comfortable with the default settings. By default Facebook fan pages are designed to be interactive, which means fans can post content on your wall. This is a great opportunity to hear from your customers, but you’ll probably want to keep an eye on it.

Don’t forget to publish your page when you’re ready to go live.

2. Status Updates
Status updates could be called the heart and soul of Facebook. Much like Twitter, these are the constant stream of updates that show up on the “wall” of a profile. Each user’s homepage shows a flood of status updates from their friends—so you can see what a vital opportunity these updates are to communicate and connect. Each status update can be commented on and “liked,” which gives ample opportunity for feedback.

It’s important to understand the place of status updates. The average Facebook user has 130 friends, which means quite a few status updates will come and go on their home page in any given day. The bottom line is that one or two status updates won’t change the world. You need to have consistent and quality updates to connect with people. And it doesn’t hurt to repeat an important update—don’t assume because you posted it once that people saw it (just don’t go overboard either).

Feel free to double up on your status updates. Facebook can automatically publish your updates to Twitter, and a number of applications can import Twitter updates to Facebook (though sorting out the best method can be complicated).

3. Applications
There’s an unending supply of applications to give more utility to your Facebook page. You can add extra tabs that contain unique content and post extra information in the sidebar of your wall. The applications can do things like post your Twitter feed, hold contests, conduct polls, play music and more. Not all of these will tie into your status updates, which means you’ll need to find ways to make sure your fans find them.

One of the standard applications you’ll want is Static FBML, which lets you add basic HTML. It’s very basic (javascript and iframes aren’t allowed), but you can add images and other extras to customize your page.

4. Importing Blog Content
You also have the option of importing blog content to your Facebook page. The easiest approach is to import the RSS feed of your blog using Facebook’s Notes. The upside is that it’s simple and easy, plus users can read and comment on your entire post in Facebook. The downside is that users can read and comment on your entire post in Facebook without ever visiting your blog. Depending on your end goals that may be a problem.

There are also a number of third party applications that will import blogs. Some will display them in boxes on your page, which is less helpful because you’re relying on users to go looking for those boxes. Other applications (like RSS Graffiti) will import the blog content and post it as a status update, which delivers the content directly to your users.

5. Choose Where People Land
One thing you’ll notice is that each fan page has multiple tabs for content. You can add as many as you like and there is an option to change the default tab people first see when they view your page (Edit Page: Wall Settings: Edit). So you could build a custom tab introducing people to your brand instead of just sending them to your wall. Some folks have even experimented with using this functionality to show unique content to non-fans.

6. Communicate
One of the bonuses of the fan page is that you can send updates directly to all your fans (personal profiles can only send a message to a maximum of 20 friends at a time). These updates appear in a special tab in a user’s inbox, which mean they can be easy to miss. But these updates can also be targeted by location, age and gender. That’s a huge bit of demographic targeting courtesy of social networking.

7. Share More Content
Just like a personal profile, a fan page can add all sorts of extra content, like photos, videos, events and more. Default fan pages also come with a discussion board built in. Be sure to take advantage of these extra goodies and post some content, even if it’s just something fun. Make sure something appears on those extra tabs—if you don’t want any content there, consider removing the tabs so users won’t wonder why they’re empty.

8. Get a Custom URL
The first challenge when you launch your Facebook fan page is to secure a custom url. By default the link to each Facebook fan page is pretty ugly. But once you get 100 fans you can add your own custom url (http://www.facebook.com/yournamehere). You just need to cross that magic threshold.

9. Spread the Word
And the best way to cross that threshold to 100 fans is to spread the word. One quick way is to become a fan of your own page. That update will show up in your profile and other folks might see it and check it out. You can also suggest your page to friends and add the page to your favorites. From there you can go beyond Facebook and add a ‘fan box’ to your website that promotes your Facebook page. Consider promoting your Facebook page in other channels like a blog, e-mail newsletter, link on your website, etc. People can’t become a fan on Facebook if they don’t know you’re there.

10. Examples
Finally, it’s always worth checking out a few examples to see how some of the best are doing it. Take a look at some of these major Facebook pages to see what’s working for them:

• U2
• TOMS Shoes
• Apple Students
• Ford
• Mashable

You can also search for your competition and see if they have a presence on Facebook and if so what they’re doing. Also check out these five inspiring examples for more.

Now you can make the most of a Facebook fan page for your business.

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Separate your personal accounts from your organization's accounts.

I have previously written about the importance of documenting your organizations online assets. It is so important to keep track of the many usernames, emails, and passwords that it takes to manage the day to day operations of a ministry's communications.

There is one other key things to remember. Be sure you separate your personal online identity from your organization's identity.

Here is what I mean. So many online services, especially the free services that ministries tend to rely on, require the use of an unique email address for the username. When starting out, it is tempting (and very easy) to use your personal email address (or even your ministry email address) for these services.

For example, we use Posterous.com to podcast our MP3 sermons and to post our weekly bulletins to Twitter and Facebook. Posterous, in particular, requires a unique email address in order to set up an account. So, in order to setup my organization in such a way that doesn't permanently link it's online services (and therefore identity) to my personal identity, we created a generic email address to use specifically with Posterous.com.

To further clarify, I didn't use my personal email (jason@gmailhotmail...) or my ministry email (jason@calvary...). We used a generic email (communications@....) to setup the service. Furthermore, we used this same email for our Feedburner account.

This ensures that should something happen to me (I quit, get sick, change roles, move, die, lose all my fingers in a tragic typing accident, etc.) our ministry organization can continue to do what we are doing now without having to change everything.

If you don't know how to create new email accounts for your ministry domain, or can't, don't worry. There are plenty of free online email providers that can be utilized (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.). I prefer Gmail as it can be configured to access the account via the web, POP, or IMAP.

Jason Cooper (@cooperjason)

Cooper-ation Ministry Resourcing

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All these usernames and passwords - how do I manage them? The importance of documenting.

If there is one single tip I could give someone who is helping their organization gain a presence on the internet it is to document everything.  Especially when it comes to the services, listing, and usernames/passwords that you create for your organization.

Many people enter these positions as volunteers. But that is no excuse NOT to do your job with the excellence expected if you were on staff.

Here is why.

1. You will reach a point when your memory saturates and you begin to forget.  When you first start out and you are only worrying about a couple things (like FTP settings, Google Docs, etc.) it is easy to go on memory.  But eventually you will lose that ability to remember everything with ease.  So WRITE EVERYTHING DOWN. 
2. You may someday be out of the picture.  You may manage these different online presences for your organization for your entire life, or you may be out of that position tomorrow.  You don't know.  It is irresponsible to leave your organization scrambling should your presence disappear for whatever reason.  Set your organization up in a position to continue even if you disappear tomorrow.

Simply start a document, perhaps on a service like Google Docs so it can be shared with a team, and write down all the different logins and passwords, including URL's, for every online feature or service you use.  It can be that simple.  

Also, don't forget to update it! 

Jason Cooper (@cooperjason)

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Simplifying audio podcasting for your church - so easy anyone can do it! Part 1

I have written in the past about an easy way to podcast your ministry audio using posterous.com. You can use their feed directly or burn it with a service like FeedBurner (now part of the Google empire).  It is unbelievably easy to setup and use.  All by emailing the MP3...

Previously we uploaded our sermon mp3's to our website and people had to come to our website and click the sermons they wanted.  Not so anymore (although it is still available there as well)...  Posterous.com and FeedBurner give us multiple "delivery" options.

Delivery options are necessary in the changing landscape of the internet.

In the process I have discovered that there are side benefits to using a service like Posterous for your audio podcasting. (video is currently limited by email size limits)

1. MP3's now "delivered" (you don't have to go to our site) via iTunes or Zune or other audio/podcast readers.
2. This "delivery" includes just about any RSS reader as well.  Google Reader, Bloglines, Outlook, Mail, etc.
3. Linking with FeedBurner also allows the ability to subscribe via email (something we haven't begun offering yet, but will).
4. Posterous.com "autopost" let's us update Twitter & Facebook automatically when sermons are posted.  Twitter gets a shortened URL linking back to our Posterous.com page and the audio can be played directly from our Facebook wall post without leaving Facebook.

In the future, I could see us not even uploading to our own website at all, and just using some combination of these third party solutions.

This is so easy, that anyone can do it - even smaller churches with no budgets!

I love the ease of using Posterous.com and Feedburner!

In the next post I will briefly walk through the steps of setting up these services. (Again, for beginning users, not you advanced users who already know.  My passion is to help the uninitiated take baby steps forward.)

Jason Cooper (@cooperjason)

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Over 100,000 Apps Now Available on the App Store

Can you believe it! This is crazy fast growth. The following is directly from the Hot Apple News RSS feed. 

Jason Cooper.  

Over 100,000 Apps Now Available on the App Store

Apple today announced that developers have created over 100,000 apps for the App Store, the largest applications store in the world. iPhone and iPod touch customers in 77 countries can choose from an incredible range of apps in 20 categories, including games, business, news, sports, health, reference and travel. App Store users have downloaded well over two billion apps, continuing to make it the world’s most popular applications store.

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Overwhelmed with multiple communication points???

Have you ever been overwhelmed with multiple communication points?  

You know, by the time you create the event or program graphic for video, web, print, and then write the copy for all those places, and then push the info out through email marketing, facebook page, twitter, church bulletin, website, and on, and on...you are tired of tweaking for each individual point of communication.

Find ways to simplify.

One step we have taken has been to link our Facebook page with our Twitter account using the Twitter app on Facebook.  We don't have a huge Twitter following (actually, it is tiny), but we anticipate more in the future and want to be ready.  Linking the two has streamlined at least that one aspect of communications for us.  We find that people use one or the other (FB or Tw) and not normally both, so we don't worry that it is not unique content at this point.  

If our Twitter following grows and changes, we might adjust, but right now FB is more productive!

What have you done to streamline?

Jason Cooper (@cooperjason)

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What do you think? "Email Newsletters are Dead." (@MEDIASALT)

For us, we still use email marketing, and will continue to do so, but we have gone from multiple “articles” and “announcements” in a single email newsletter to single event (and therefore single message) emails.

We know that people glance at what is on their screen when they click on an email, skim quickly and move on. Many only look at the subject line. Long emails lose attention quickly, with the stuff at the bottom being ignored completely since it is usually off the preview screen.

Single event/message emails seem to overcome some of these factors. The subject can be specific to the event/message, and the reader can know whether or not they want to read it simply from the subject. This would not be true of "newsletters". The danger, of course, is that you could overwhelm your subscribers with too many emails when you go with this approach.

The article below prompted my thoughts on this. What do you do? Do you still use email? Or have you moved to RSS, Twitter, Facebook, etc.?

Jason

Email Newsletters are Dead.

By Eric Murrell Wednesday June 10, 2009

At least I like to pretend that they are. The fact of the matter is that I hate email newsletters with a burning passion. People mostly ignore them, they’re a pain in the butt to design and I think it’s just a dumb way to get information to your audience these days.

I realize that this is a strong opinion to hold, and one that not everyone agrees with. Lots of thriving ministries place a big emphasis on email newsletters, and Cleve even threw together a great list of bulk email services that he’s had success with.

With that said, I’m trying to move our church further away from email newsletters with every project I take on. Here’s why:

RSS is More Effective

News feeds are finally gaining mainstream popularity due to the abundance of personalized start pages and feed readers that are built into just about everything these days. RSS feeds push information out immediately, can be integrated into countless programs/devices and require no extra effort on our end.

Facebook is the New Start Page

It seems like almost everyone I know starts and ends their time online by checking their Facebook page along with their email. Since our Facebook page automatically pulls in our RSS feed, fans immediately receive the latest news without having to take additional steps to subscribe.

Feedburner Has Email Subscriptions Built-in

If visitors really want to get our news in email form, Feedburner makes it super-easy to get our news updates in your inbox. Check out our subscription page if you like.

Newsletters Aren’t Effective Any More

Do you regularly read the email newsletters that end up in your inbox? I know I don’t. Even if I sign myself up intentionally, I’ll skim the first message I receive (maybe) and will then ignore all of the rest. They even begin to annoy me over time, requiring me to unsubscribe or just block the message as spam. Just like ads online, my eyes are  in the habit of ignoring the newsletters in my inbox.

Am I saying that email communication all together is a bad idea? Not at all. I understand the importance of occasional email blasts for special events and promotions. I just feel that the weekly newsletter format is an outdated way to push out your information online.

So there… I’ve layed out my opinion on the matter. I would love to hear your side of the story; do you have a rockin’ email ministry that’s extremely sucessful? Are newsletters still necessary in today’s online world?

[Image © Pepo]

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