Advancing Your Brand Through 2.0 Technologies

This was a great workshop, a bit of a review, but I learned plenty.

First thing, what are 2.0 techniques?  It's all those new internet tools, mostly FREE (yay!), that you can use to enhance your organization.  Think Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogs, Podcasts, GoogleDocs, Wikis, RSS Feed...

Second, you do not have to be under the age of 30 to use 2.0 technologies!  

The best part about using 2.0 techniques to advance your particular brand is that they can not only be effective, but COST effective.  You may have already found that print advertising whether through direct mailings, newsletters, brochures, etc...they just don't deliver the impact you'd expect from the cha-ching coming out of your bank account.  

The bottom line that mainline protestant denominations today have been avoiding is that people have MANY choices today.  Marketing, once thought of as antithetical to our faith, is absolutely necessary.  When it comes to religions, our society has a plethora of options.  In most urban areas, Christian church-shoppers could attend a different congregation each Sunday for several years and not exhaust all options.  How can a genuine seeker, looking for meaningful depth of faith and others to share that with, how can a seeker differentiate one from the other?  Marketing.

The goal of your church in marketing is dependent completely upon your unique mission.  This cannot be stressed enough.  Nothing, no website, 2.0 technology, new worship style, cell group minstry....nothing will make an impact if there's no core meaning behind it.  For instance, the United Methodist Church's mission statement is "Making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world."  Take into account the platform's identity and how your identity interacts with it before using it-but don't be afraid to change your mind.

Please see my posting on Branding Therapy to get more direction on how to go about defining your church's unique mission.

Once your mission has been defined, the task is deciding how to express it throughout all your interactions as an organization.  In my humble opinion, this requires a tightening of the reigns.  No more publishing a bulletin or newsletter or email just because "we've got to get it done."  The best option is to distribute less material to your congregation and community that aligns with your mission.  The easier, but much less effective mode of operation is just haphazardly sending out information that does not clearly align with your mission and muddies the waters of communication between you and your community.  

Caution: while 2.0 technologies are free, not all 2.0 techn ologies will be effective for your mission.  Here are some questions that will help you decide which technologies are for you:

1. Who wants your information?  

2. Define your target audience for each medium you're looking to use.  Does it reach young or old?  New or long-term members?

3. Where can the information for this medium come from?  Does it have to come from the church staff or will it be more effective if the medium is fed by volunteers?

4. And the most important question:  How does [insert 2.0 technology] communicate [insert your mission]?  For example:  How does a Facebook page for the United Methodist Church communicate Making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world?

A word about protecting your brand.  After putting so much into the careful crafting of your brand, it's insulting and extremely detrimental if someone outside or even from within your organization begins to claim your brand.  This usually happens innocently, perhaps even from one of your enthusiastic members trying to be helpful.  For instance, during this workshop the speaker put several grabs from blogging websites up on the screen.  She had googled many religious organizations looking for "official" blog sites.  Shockingly, none of those she had grabbed were recognizable to us--the people responsible for what would be the "official" blogs of our organizations!  Looking at the grabs she had taken, the authors behind them were not consciously trying to sabotage the organization's brand.  In fact they were trying to enhance it!  However, more harm than good is done when information, look, and mission are not communicated consistently through all "official" forms of the organization.  Take care to work with members of your group.  If someone is interested in hosting a blog or Facebook, this could be an awesome opportunity for faithful work!  Just make sure that the mission is clearly given to that person so that they can effectively communicate as a part of the organization.

The brand must constantly be lifted up.  The mistake that churches sometimes make is getting sick of the brand and throwing it out just as the wider membership begins to grasp it.  The staff and core leadership of the church will be SICK of your brand long before the rest of your church will be!  Keep with it!  A brand must constantly be repeated in order for it to be grasped in the consciousness of your congregation.  If it is not consistent, it does not exist.  Your brand simply gets lost in a web of other messages and is not differentiated from any other message.  Repetition of the same is what makes your brand important.

What do you think of all this?  Useful?