Tony Morgan's got my head spinning on some posts he's been doing on church marketing. The goal two years ago with the change in our Grace Church website was to carry the torch that our previous web designer initiated. Molding the website from a "Grace member tool" to a "first time visitor front door" was the initial goal. When we revamped the site, we took the next step gearing the site to communicate the answers to the questions every first time visitor wants to know.
- What's going on this weekend when I visit?
- What do you offer my kids?
- What do you offer my youth?
- What do you offer midweek?
When these questions were answered, we then took the menu options and created them to communicate the "next steps" at Grace. If you're someone who wants to go beyond the weekend, what steps should you take? The answer was our "Core Classes (called Cross Training)" then "Small Groups", "Volunteering" and "Events". These are major connecting points to the church.
We've made in my opinion some great strides in focusing our communication from an individual ministry priority to more of a church-wide communication strategy, eliminating a "noisy" type of website. But more needs to be done. We need to be efficient and effective at meeting the web-site visitor where they are at. A good website, and really communications in general, joins the conversation already taking place vs. creating one assuming that the community will want to join in. What do people really care about when they visit a website? And how do people prefer to see that info? "Google" homepage (less clutter & noise) vs. "Yahoo" homepage (cram as much info on one page as possible).
Tony Morgan has a great post on not branding "sub-ministries" without making it clear they are ministries of the church. Some bold stuff here that rocks the world of ministry leaders. Check out the snippet below then read the full post here:
In case you follow this blog in a feed reader, you may want to check out the comments on this post regarding branding. This is a great conversation. I'd like to go back and respond specifically to Jared's question. Jared, first of all, what you're witnessing is the freedom Perry has given me to shoot straight on this blog. You get my honest take of ministry and life. It isn't just the company line.
You'll never see me publicly question Perry's leadership or vision, but I will reveal, from time to time, some areas where we've acknowledged we need to improve. One of those areas is how we handle branding. Another example where I've admitted we have fallen short and need improvement is our web strategy. I'm not going to try to sugarcoat it--our web presence is poor right now, but we're taking steps to get it right.
Specifically, on the topic of branding, here are some additional thoughts to respond to your observations...
- It makes sense for us to brand a series over the church itself. That's no different than Fox branding American Idol ahead of the network. People are interested in following American Idol--they're not interested in following the Fox network. That's why we brand "The Man Series" ahead of NewSpring Church.
- It also makes sense to brand certain environments that reach unique target audiences like children and church leaders. Trying to encourage and equip leaders through the Unleash Conference attracts a larger audience than if we tried to promote the same experience under the umbrella of NewSpring Church. It's the same principle that has led some churches to drop denominational references in their name in order to reach a broader audience.
- We're making a concerted effort, though, to make sure we don't promote any sub-brands without making it clear that it's "a ministry of NewSpring Church." We haven't done a good job of that in the past.
- We're also trying to thin out all of the unique sub-brands we've used in the past. For example, we decided that "Fuse" and "Ignite" were meaningless to the students we're trying to reach, and, we didn't want to start branding those ministries ahead of NewSpring Church itself. With that in mind, you may have noticed that references to "Fuse" and "Ignite" have faded in recent months. (And, by the way, student ministry attendance is up.)
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