6 essential components for better church branding

by Mark MacDonald
Church Branding Strategist and Consultant

Church branding components are the essential ingredients to helping a church be known for something relevant and needed so that they might impact their community and connect people to the gospel.

Being known for the right things is critical to having someone consider attending your church.

The following church branding components help shape the perception of an organization, such as your church, that might not be properly understood by those outside its walls:

1. Personas. Effective communication rises and falls on how well you know an audience. Trying to reach everyone, the message becomes so general that most ignore it. You end up reaching no one. Instead, choose a growing group near you. Don’t be too restrictive; instead, have a primary and a secondary persona you want to reach. They should represent a large component of your community. And because your members are part of your community, you should have the personas in your church. Describe your personas stereotypically by concentrating on needs, concerns and goals. Love them.
2. Brand Thread. Discover a simple, usable statement that declares your brand story by offering a solution to your personas’ needs or concerns or providing paths to a goal. A thread positions you differently than nearby churches and states the benefit of attending. You become known for this unique solution by weaving it through ministries and communication; the thread gets attention by being beneficial and needed. Ultimately, your beneficial thread needs to connect with the scarlet thread of the gospel.
3. Logo. Because we live in a visual world, you need a graphic representation, or a “controlled wrapper” around your thread. A church needs a simple, unique, professional symbol combined with your church and thread as a tagline. You’ll need horizontal and vertical versions, as color and greyscale. How do you know the logo’s right? Your personas should love receiving a gift with your church logo on it. It needs to represent you well.
4. Color Palette. The logo uses 1–3 colors to establish your colors: a primary color (about 60% usage), a secondary color (about 30%) and a tertiary color (about 10%). That 60/30/10 ratio creates an effective color palette, so when someone experiences your brand, they readily associate the colors and their combinations. Consistent use of your colors should start to represent the church even without the logo.
5. Font Palette. Similar to controlled brand colors, you’ll need 1–3 fonts used in a limited way so they also represent your church. These fonts should be used in the logo, on service slides and throughout print materials. Even your website and emails can use similar web font variations to match as closely as possible.
6. Brand Fences. Create a short document to list the rules (e.g, your color palette, font palette, etc.) for controlling how the brand expands across the web and social media, in print materials and/or in other communication methods. This allows your church to have similarities across all platforms. If you’re not consistently controlling things, you probably don’t have a brand.

EDITOR’S NOTE–Mark MacDonald is communication pastor, speaker, consultant, bestselling author, church branding strategist for BeKnownforSomething.com and executive director of the Center for Church Communication, empowering 10,000-plus churches to become known for something relevant (a communication thread) throughout their ministries, websites and social media. His book, “Be Known for Something,” is available at BeKnownBook.com.