Do These Things BEFORE You Announce a Church Rebrand
Your Questions Answered
As an elder or pastor of your church, it can seem intimidating to phase out a brand that your congregation has grown to know and love, and replace it with something new.
When the time finally comes around, there are a million and one considerations to make for rolling out that rebrand to your church!
You might be asking questions like:
How long do I wait before I make the announcement?
Should I tease the new brand beforehand?
What should have the logo and what shouldn't?
These are questions I'm going to answer for you. By the end of this post, you should have a game plan in place to announce your church rebrand in a way that fosters positive energy and gains tremendous momentum.
You've spent months working with a designer or agency to craft and refine the logo, colors, fonts that are going to represent your vision for the next ten years (hopefully more!). Once those things are finalized and approved, you need to set a launch date, but when?
Tomorrow?
Next year?
While you might feel impatience or pressure to quickly launch, remember this saying: "Slow is smooth and smooth is fast." More important than speed is the collective familiarity and positive energy you're cultivating about this change.
The specific date you pick to roll out your church rebrand is going to depend on two main factors:
Smaller churches may not have much in the way of merch, letterhead, or building signage. They may or may not have a website. In the design world, we lump all these items into a category we call "brand collateral" or "collateral" for short.
For a small church with only a weekly bulletin and a Facebook page, the updates to their brand collateral will probably be quick and seamless. This would allow them to set a launch date much closer to finalizing their rebrand, even within a week or two.
For larger churches, this process may take longer because they have more collateral to update. Building signs can take weeks to get printed or manufactured, the website needs to be redesigned, and merch probably needs to be created.
We'll talk more about where the logo should live in a minute.
The other thing that could affect your lead time is church events. Many churches I've worked with have chosen to wait until an annual event or gathering to announce the rebrand. This is a strategy that can help make the launch extra special, because it associates the new visual identity with a unifying event your congregation already loves.
Brand launch event at Heritage Church
One church turned their launch into an event they called the "Rebuild Celebration". It gave church leadership a chance to share their vision for the future and what the new brand means for the church. They explained the thought that went into the logo, and showed the logo animation before a time of worship. They also printed pop-up welcome banners for their annex.
The underlying idea with all of these strategies is to make the transition seamless, quick, and foster positive energy around the new brand.
This is a hard one, because there are real advantages to letting your congregation get a little taste of the rebrand before it officially launches. We'll talk about those in a second. However, there are some dangers as well.
Ultimately, the goal is to build momentum leading up to the announcement, launch, and roll-out of your rebrand in order to help your people adapt to the changes and adopt the new look.
If you decide not to tease elements of your new brand identity in advance, you'll need to warm up your congregation to the themes and threads that make your church what it is.
Remember this: Your vision as a pastor or elder is going to be what unifies the body of your church toward a common goal that is bigger than a logo or a new color scheme.
There are two basic steps to doing this well:
Use a month or more before the launch to teach on your collective identity as a body and your vision for the future.
Throughout this warm-up period, your goal should be to explain your thought process behind the decision to rebrand, and what you're excited about.
For this approach, you should still use the strategies outlined above, but you'll also get the benefit of having something tangible to give people as they anticipate the official launch.
The first thing to keep in mind is that your pre-launch and ultimately your launch should be planned and purposeful. If you are going to give people a sneak peak at the rebrand, you should do so incrementally. Don't randomly start using the logo in its final form.
Security nametag for Walnut Street Baptist Church
Instead, plan out a list of particular places you'll introduce the new brand, with a schedule of when and how each teaser will drop.
For example, maybe your pre-launch game plan looks something like this:
I've actually seen clients use both approaches successfully, so it's up to you to decide if and how you want to give your congregation an appetizer (the sneak peak) before the meal (the official launch).
Some things don't need your logo at all! Often, simply using the fonts and colors from your church brand is enough to unify the look and feel of the experience at your church, for both members and visitors.
Over-stating and over-populating the logo on everything can be a bit overwhelming, so take it slow, and err on the side of caution. Brand recognition takes time to build up, and the last thing you want to do is make your audiences tired of seeing it everywhere they turn.
It doesn't matter how good your rebrand is, it can be overworked and induce "brand exhaustion" - not a good outcome.
How do we avoid that? We can split your rebrand roll-out into two fronts: Internal and External. Knowing who these audiences are can help you determine which one is the priority for communicating your new brand, and how to speak to both.
As a church, your internal audience is your congregation of church members. The internal audience sees parts of the branding that are only visible from the inside, like worship bulletins.
An internal rollout of the rebrand is going to involve updating these elements. Everything that your church body interacts with on a weekly basis will need a unified look, from announcement slides to foyer decorations.
P.S. I have a MASSIVE checklist I use to help churches update all of these exact things. I call it the Rebrand Roll-Out Checklist and you can get it here if you're interested.
An external rebrand rollout can involve anything that people in your community will see, whether or not they are church members. This can include the sign in front of your church building, social media content, and billboards around your local area.
Branded street posters for Christ the King Presbyterian Church
Work with a vendor or creative agency to print and produce the materials that will show off your new branding and make a visual impact. Use your brand guidelines (usually provided by the agency or designer) to answer questions about things like sizing, color and pattern usage, fonts, etc.
I hope this was helpful to you as you think through each part of launching a new brand identity for your church. If there are other question you have that I didn't address here, just email me at braden@restore.graphics and I'll try to answer them.
P.S. Are you rediscovering your church's identity or considering a new visual direction? Take my free assessment and get personalized recommendations for how to align your brand with your vision.
