Ministering in a Design-Driven World: Branding Part 2
An article in Forbes today talks about how design is now a pivotal part of any organization’s identity.
The article speaks to the Church. Churches are accustomed to poor design in their publications. They work with poor equipment and volunteers much of the time. The church newsletter, dotted with cheesy clip art, is fairly standard even among large churches. It’s almost a universal branding—and the branding message is not a good one.
Your members will accept this approach to design. But is it working beyond your church membership? Is it helping you communicate with the world — a world that is increasingly influenced by design.
Don’t despair. Good design is accessible even to design amateurs.
Facebook makes design simple. All you have to do is upload photos. Everything will fit into the design template. There is still an art to finding, choosing and using photos. Taking your own photos is so easy today, there should be nothing stopping you.
But Facebook is Facebook. One design fits all!
Blogging formats offer the same professional design capabilities with more variety. Start your blog by choosing a theme — there are hundreds to choose from. It will be easy to create a clean and functional web site using a theme (template).
Ask your members to spend an hour taking photos of the neighborhood for you to use on your congregation’s web site, blog or Facebook. Make a contest out of it to get more people involved and add to the fun! They don’t have to be “church” photos. They can be street scenes, store fronts, parks, schools, gardens, fields, sports, architectural features or public events. This will communicate to the unchurched that your congregation cares about the neighborhood.
Be cautious about using images of people without their permission. You can do this by artful cropping. Watch your local TV news for tips. Whenever they take school footage for example they tend to show backs of heads or images of kids walking or playing with heads totally cropped. If the people are your members and they say OK — go ahead and use full images.
Clip art has come of age. There are great sources of photos available for free use if you add a photo credit at the bottom of your post. Try Photopin or Flickr.
Learn to use a photo image editing program. (Type “free photo editing software” into your search engine.) Most computers have a basic application pre-installed. Start by learning to size and crop your photos. Then learn to add type or adjust colors.
It’s time to say good-bye to the amateurish church newsletter. People expect more today. And it isn’t hard to give it to them. It helps to brand your church as progressive and forward-looking, not stuck in the past with out-dated communication skills.