Church Branding for Beginners

Our teams meet with churches all over the United States. Did you know that many of the churches we meet with don’t have a unique brand for their parish!?

We hear it all the time — “We need to reengage our youth and get them back into Church!” and “We want to make our church a place that attracts more young families.” When our design team asks parishes what their goals are, one of the answers is inevitably, “We want people to know that we are a welcoming community,” or “We want strangers to feel comfortable here.”

Now, imagine that you and your family JUST moved to a new town. You’re looking for a great restaurant to make into the weekly family brunch spot and your neighbors keep recommending a place called Grandma’s Kitchen. What’s the first thing you’re going to do? You’re going to pull out your phone and look up directions to the diner as well as look for information about it online. If the logo you see for Grandma’s Kitchen looks outdated, if the menu looks like it was typed up and printed in 1995, or if their website is lacking clearly delivered information and is outdated looking, you will likely skip the place and keep looking. THE EXACT SAME CONCEPT applies to church communities! If your branding is outdated or unprofessional looking, visitors will skip your parish and move on with their search. Do we have your attention? Good. Let’s talk about church branding.

Branding commonly refers to the distinctive design your church uses to display, promote, and advertise yourselves. Your brand is present everywhere and on everything your church has a hand in. This doesn’t just mean a church logo! Branding includes a logo, fonts, specific colors, and can even include specific ways that you present these things. All of these items should be collected into a “brand book” or, in your church’s case, let’s call it a “brand bible!” Where should these elements of your parish’s brand bible be frequently found?

For a cohesive look and feel that is consistent across all your parish communications, your branding should be found in:

Use this checklist to see if it’s time for a refresh — if you check anything on this list, it’s time!

1. If you can’t really pinpoint if you even have a logo or if you notice that what would be considered your church’s logo or branding looks dissimilar on different items. For instance, the name of your church at the top of your bulletin looks a lot different from the sign out in front of your property or the logo on your church’s Facebook profile photo.

2. Your brand was created way before your church even had a website or used email or, if you haven’t had a branding refresh in the last decade.

3. Your community has grown and changed, and you find that your branding doesn’t reflect your current vibrant parish community.

4. You are merging with another parish and need to help the communities come together with a fresh look.

5. Your parish recently recovered from a natural disaster or other tragedy, and you need a fresh look to help everyone move forward into a fresh start.

6. Your parish recently decided to open or close a parish school and needs branding to reflect this change.

7. You poll your parishioners, and they say that the brand needs to be … updated.

First, find a designer who is skilled in creating brandings for churches. They should know about logos, fonts, color pallets, and be able to incorporate your unique parish community into the design! We have a team dedicated to this at LPi that you can contact here!

Next, consider thinking about the following questions before meeting with your designer. Having the answers to these questions already fresh in your mind can enhance your meeting experience and ensure you don’t miss anything important to your community when you are helping the designer plan a branding for you!

1. Is there something unique about your church that you want reflected in the brand?
2. What are some of your parish’s strengths?
3. What are some descriptive words that describe your parish?
4. Are there any existing brand elements like colors, fonts, logos, or icons that need to be included in the design?
5. Do you have a mission statement that could be reflected in the design?
6. Is there anything about your church’s history or traditions that might be important to include?

Lastly, consider who will be deciding on the final branding design. Often, designers will provide a few options to choose from after meeting with you. At LPi, our designers commonly give churches 3 or 4 designs to deliberate over! Will you be polling your parishioners to rate their top choices? Is it up to the parish leadership team to decide? Is the pastor the one making the last call? Whoever it is, make sure they have ample time to decide as well as all of the information about the new brand and what information went in to creating it.

Check out our Facebook page to see frequent posts about how proud we are of the branding redesigns we are doing for other churches! There are also a plethora of samples of complete branding packages we’ve done on our website. Like what you see? Jump start your rebranding process and contact us today using the form below! You could have your very own fresh brand, style guide, and branding bible before you know it!