Branding Basics for Your Church (CBG016)

Branding is a powerful tool your church can use to reach more people and in this episode, we unpack how you can establish a strong brand for your church in the community you serve. Adam DeVizia and Chase Replogle of Beyond Creative are our guests. They have created an application called Brand Cards to help organizations establish their brand. A logo is the starting point of any good brand and we discuss with Adam and Chase what a good process is for designing a great logo to help your church reach more people.

Show Notes: 

• Adam talks of the handoff process of turning the logo he created over to the client
• Adam talks of the frustration of a client frantically calling to find out information about their logo and brand specifics years later
• There was not a streamlined solution for Adam’s agency to store branding information for their clients
• Adam and David with Beyond Creative worked with Chase to develop a streamlined tool for storing brands
• Brand Cards allows for all kinds of file types to be stored for different purposes
• Adam and Chase created a solution that works well for their agency then made it available to everyone
• Adam was creative director for James River Church a megachurch
• Beyond Creative is a digital agency creating video, design, web, and branding leaning towards non-profit work
• Chase is a pastor who started a church in 2012 and develops websites
• Pastors need to help people recognize what God is doing with the church
• The brand gives people context of what God is doing in their lives
•  Brand is showing what God is doing in a unique way through the church
• Brand is the sum of the perception of what people think of who you are and what you do
• A good brand has a consistent way to communicate the proper message about who you are
• A brand also provides the right language so people can communicate the right message about your church
• Small churches can be strategic and intentional about their brand even without a lot of resources
• The best way to start creating a brand is to get key leaders together and come up with words that describe what you want to be
• Start putting stories out there which moves the church closer to the vision
• You can’t be everything as a church because it’s hard to keep up with that
• A brand is as good as the organization is able to implement it
• Churches must be intentional or the brand will start to drift
• A brand guide is a way to layout parameters so the implementation is consistent
• Brand Cards is good for churches to use internally as well as agencies to help establish brands
• Organizations hire a designer to identify creative decisions that establish a brand
• The Brand Cards software is set up to present brand decisions in a simple way
• Designers we want the logo we have created to work as best as it can for your organization
• Adam’s logo design process is an ongoing conversation with the client
• The design starts simple then builds
• A good church logo should be simple and not try to communicate too much
• A logo should be simple and a brand needs to be built around it
• Design for the long term and try not to be too trendy
• Adam likes church logos to be masculine so it appeals to men who are sitting at home
• Chase recommends you find a designer with empathy towards what you are trying to accomplish

Top 3 things a church should do when creating a brand

Take high-quality photography to show the vision

Sermon series graphics to relate

Develop your language to drive your message home

Links: 

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