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branding your YOUth ministry

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I wrote up this posting for YouthWorker Movement & encapsulates some of my ‘short session’ from Perkins School of Youth Ministry last month.

Last month I did a session at Perkins School of Youth Ministry on “branding” ones youth ministry (the image above is my whiteboard, minus that “revitalize church” not sure what that’s from).

Brand, is a very ambiguous term. In many ways its best to understand what some brands are. Mac/Apple, has the bitten apple logo. McDonald’s has the big yellow ‘M.’ Nike has it swoosh. Beyond just a logo though, Coca-Cola has a very distinct and branded glass bottle, so much so that it was designed to be recognized even when broken (true story). ‘Your’ brand is more than just a logo. So how does one identify and move forward developing a brand in the church environment?

Well, this is how I see it happening.

Acts 2: “..because each one heard their own language being spoken..”

I have this idea of Pentecost being about the enabling of effective communicating to the masses through the power of the Holy Spirit. Read the story, that scene was a mess before the Holy Spirit came to inspire & enable the leaders. Today it is a present reality that we speak and understand in brands, that combination of who we are along with our sensory identifiers. My opinion is that we need the Holy Spirit in finding out who we are and what we are about to us and others to be able to accurately and adequately communicate to others about our ministries.

Matthew 16: “When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Then he ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

I love this scripture, in part because I feel this is all about identity and many of us, our teens especially, struggle with identity. Christ outlines those cores questions we need to answer for ourselves & our ministries. Ourselves? Yes, as I’ve highlighted in Christ’s responses, he renames Simon to Peter, which translated is “rock” and so “on this ‘rock’ I will build my church” telling me that we are integral to the identity and ‘brand’ of our ministries. Are our ministries all about us, heck no! but they are very much a part of us and many times take over traits and gifts unique to us. That isn’t a bad thing. God gifts us & enables us for ministry. We bring that to whatever ministry we enter and lead.

So, how do we go about answering the questions?

I have a process of discernment that I feel has value to help us open to the Holy Spirit and find the answers. Only after this can we move forward in doing the ‘things’ of branding our ministries.

Discernment

Prayer – Emptying Prayer, get rid of all the junk in you head about what could be, what the Baptists are doing, or what the big mega church in your area is doing. Certainly get rid of those advertising ideas from some national chain that you think are cool. (Do this first as individual, then as a group)

Prayer – Return to prayer after you are rid of all that junk and ask God to give you clarity as to “who you are?” and “what do others say you are?”  (Do this first as individual, then as a group)

Reading – Because God doesn’t give answers immediately (that’s my experience, maybe it isn’t yours). Spend time in reading, read scripture (Searching the Scriptures), art books, local newspapers and magazines, read poetry and creative writing, etc.  Stay away from church growth books are my suggestion, they don’t translate often and confuse, plus you need to go back to that emptying prayer exercise.

Conversations – Begin conversations with a myriad of people. Those involved in your ministry and those outside your ministry. Ask those people the two questions, be okay with whatever responses you get.

Visualize – At some point around here you will see some themes emerging. Start to jot them down and then organize the themes of your ministries identity. What do you want to change? What do you want to emphasize? What do you want to be about? Vizual how you might want to get there.

This becomes then a planning process where you want to go back to many of those people you had conversations with. As you present you leadings from the Spirit you will find that others will understand as well and jump in to help making this new branding a reality.

At this point you might have some specific planning options to help along the way.

  • What is your name? I can’t example that one for you
  • What is our visual identifier, ie. logo? How to create it?
  • What is our language?
  • What do we do? Mission, Discipleship, Worship?.. I’m a fan of identifying three key words, forget mission statements, they are useless and communicate nothing to teenagers. imho
  • What do we do best? Discipleship?..
  • How are we going to do this? Detailed plan for reshaping or building your culture
  • What do we want others to know us by? How to share that; email, outreach projects, community events, etc?
  • How to keep doing that? I call it the, rinse and repeat

In our workshop session on of the participants brought up how Gatorade was re-branding itself. Which brought up for me an important example of jumping this process and mis-branding your ministry. Note: I have this information on good knowledge because my brother-in-law is a national sales member to the Gatorade team. A few years back Gatorade heard that Tiger Woods was entertaining a new brand of Powerade line with his name on it. Someone in Gatorade felt, and enough others agreed, that they couldn’t allow this to happen so they rushed to jump over Powerade and sign Tiger to a huge endorsement and created a whole line of favorite Tiger flavors of Gatorade. Well, the whole line was a super flop (financially speaking) and when Tiger got into trouble it was a fortunate circumstance to break from that failed venture. Gatorade got away from “who they are” and more into who they wanted to beat. It failed for them & will fail for any of us who go that route in ministry as well.

Do you have any questions about branding a ministry?

What does Julia Roberts Have to Do with Raising My Kid?

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**This was highlighted in last month’s reflection newsletter. Sign up to get upcoming months.

I’ve been thinking

Lately I’ve been feeling totally consumed in raising our son Brooks. He’s hit that 16 month mark now and is into all kinds of things, completely responsive to interactions, saying a number of words and laughing a ton. It is more of a work out chasing the lil’ man around the house, but I’ll definitely take it.

In the midst of this fun Erin & I have talked up what are the hopes & dreams we have for him and some of the aspirations we seek to instill in him. Some big questions to ponder

So then I travel back in time to 1990 to a scene of Julia Roberts & Richard Gere in Pretty Woman, maybe you remember it.

Roberts: You don’t actually have a billion dollars, huh?
Gere: No. I get some of it from banks, investors… it’s not an easy thing to do.
Roberts: And you don’t make anything…
Gere: No.
Roberts: … and you don’t build anything.
Gere: No.
Roberts: So whadda ya do with the companies once you buy ’em?
Gere: I sell them.

So this wasn’t one of the talks surrounding sex in the movie.. It’s about business, but more importantly, about the creating and there is a grand soul to creating.

If you remember the scene, or go watch it again, Roberts character puts on this innocent face that looks at Gere’s character with a puzzled, “but why?” Why doesn’t he make something? To her, in her childish innocence to business, creating something is the ultimate goal & endeavor.

I love the creation story found in the book of Genesis. Many folks read it & take some literal reading to and move on. But how cool to think about this being ‘the beginning’ of a story of people in a relationship with God. But in “Pretty Woman” ideas, God spends a lot of time imagining and creating. Really like to that we were created in his image, an image that can imagine & create. We are like that, we can do it.

I hope to raise a son that is not afraid to imagine and to create. So many of us give up our creative selves to critics or forms that define what good art or a good idea is. My hope for Brooks is that whether it is music, art, design, community building, faith, mission, management, whatever it is he does he is confident in self to creatively make and approach all situations. Hope I am able to un-build myself to live that way as well & maybe that will help.

Gere’s character, in his transformation during Pretty Woman, makes his big step when he breaks from his business model to state with the old business ower, ‘We are going to make something.’ Does not matter what it is, but he knows it saves him to re-associate with his creative soul.

How do we get there?

I really do not know. But I’m trying some things out and getting inspired by a few people. Some of you might have seen Sir Ken Robinson give his TED Talk, it has gotten its share of views. He challenges the killing machine that is the education system. His talk is 20 minutes that has change my approach to ministry and teaching. There is a new endeavor that he’s a part of that has some great videos with a like minded message.

shalom
-gavin

Surviving to Thriving in Youth Ministry #psym11

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I’ve been at Perkins School of Youth Ministry this week teaching a number of topics. One of my classes is on the web, one of my ‘short shops’ was on “Brand YOUth Ministry.” The big one for me was teaching a class on moving from surviving in youth ministry to thriving in youth ministry.

At the core, there is a lot of self reflection, discernment and then team building to set the culture and vision before all the planning and implementations. Then it is a matter of “rinse & repeat” of the planning and communications.

Here’s the outline of our class that we worked through. If you haven’t used a Prezi for a presentation, do yourself a favor and play around with it. They are fun to create and are a nice break from a keynote or powerpoint.

 

Surviving to Thriving on Prezi

You can also see what others experienced at PSYM by checking out the twitter search.

How Good is Your Church Facebook Presence?

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I get to call some really creative people all over the world my friend. I’m so blessed that way, but not so far away is a super group of creative types that I hang out with as our Hendersonville Geekbreakfast. Once a month we all meet up for breakfast, talk some shop, make fun of somebody and plan collaborative projects. The in between times we’ve become a real solid group of friends. One of my ‘geek’ friends is Jason Elkins. Jason has started doing some really cool things with his media company, Transparent {social} Media, on facebook. They are helping all kinds of businesses, and churches, leverage facebook for to reach their clients in an open and relational marketing.

I asked Jason a couple of questions

1. Where do you see most churches going wrong on facebook?
I see most churches going wrong with Facebook in the way they view communication. It’s not a one way street:

1) They are utilizing Facebook like a traditional media outlet. They think of it like a flier or pamphlet with information that they are getting in front of their congregation. In fact, it’s a platform for communication/interaction and engagement. For example, instead of posting your favorite bible verse, perhaps you should ask your Facebook audience what their favorite verse would be.

Instead of saying “we had a great time at the youth event”, you are better off asking “what did you think of our youth event?” or “How could we make it better next time” or “Tell us what you loved about the youth event”.

“Praying for our congregation” is good. “Click ‘Like’ if you need a prayer today or send us your prayer requests” is better.

“Listening to Skillet” is good… “What is playing on your iPod right now” is better.

Announcing service times/cancellations/upcoming events is a great use, but engage with your audience.

2)Two things you can do with Facebook now that are new/unique:

1) Incorporating a podcast of your sermons online is a revolutionary feature in Facebook. Using a custom tab combined with Soundcloud (a hosting application) you can serve up your sermons on Facebook and people can share them with their audience. Because of the way we are developing these pages, an administrator can upload the latest sermons to Soundcloud and they will appear on a custom tab.

2) Other things a church could do on a custom tab would be to incorporate an introductory or testimonial video, show pages of a sermon or a book, take donations for a mission/tithe and incorporate a form to build an e-mail list. The Lifebook page is a good example of utilizing all of these features. 

thanks Jason for taking the time!

Here is part of an example of Transparent {social} Media’s latest work on a church here in middle Tennessee.

They set up the standard fan page, but tweaked out the welcome to have a matching graphic layout to the ‘profile pic.’ It doesn’t show up, but my cursor is floating over the sermons active link page. I think that is pretty cool.. but it gets better..

At the bottom it has email / contact info capture capabilities. You don’t have to wait for the person to show up in the pew to fill out this form. They can do that over facebook. Not to mention, your parishioners can donate through this facebook portal. Pretty darn cool. They have the rest of the page tweaked out with those things that are pertinent to a church body.

So how are you using facebook for your church? You might want to contact my friend Jason and see what all is out there.

Waking Up Our Young People

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Ken Robinson first caught my radar some years back when TED started putting their talks online. Mitch Joel suggested Ken’s talk. I’ve used his talk in many teaching environments for youth, adults & other educations.

This RSA video is a great fusion of the visual with the oratory. It is also a different talk than what Ken gave at his TED talk, which was great to digest. The video is just over 10 mins long, but totally worth it!

Definite tip of the hat for this video to Mark Riddle.

How are we engaging the soulful creative character that is within the young people? It appears we are not doing it very well.