Why Should Your Church Create a Unified Visual Identity?

I hear this statement a lot: “We are a church, not a brand.” But as we learned in a previous blog post, a brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization … including a church.

We also learned a key ingredient that goes into creating a positive gut feeling is “consistent recognition” of your church’s involvement.

What is consistent recognition?

Now I’m not talking about breaking out the megaphones and announcing to the world, “Look how awesome we are! We did this for these folks, and we did that for those folks. We are pretty great!” Or other forms of blatant self-promotion.

In fact, please don’t do this. No, just no. Ha!

But the point is it’s critical for people to know who is behind your specific initiative because over time, it builds trust. And trust is critical.

Let Me tell you a story

I will never forget going over to my Grandma’s house when I was a kid. Without fail, every time I was there, she had an endless supply of chocolate. She had chocolate of all kinds. But there was always a very special box of chocolate. It was wrapped in a fancy red paper, and underneath was an immaculate shiny white box. When you lifted the lid, oh the sweet aroma.

It was Grandma’s private supply of Fannie May Dark Chocolate Buttercreams. I don’t have adequate words to describe just how good they are. And it didn’t matter how big the mountain of chocolate was at Grandma’s house. We skipped it all to go straight for Fannie May!

How did I know which chocolate to look for? The packaging always looked the same, and I knew if I spotted it, I was in for a special experience.

In the branding world, we call that a visual identity.

What is Visual Identity?

According to this Forbes article,

"While a brand identity is comprised of many qualities, visual identity is arguably its most important." ("Five Aspects of Visual Identity That Many Companies Tend to Overlook")

Why should a visual identity matter for your church?

Imagine a church in your community decided to help an elderly woman by raking up leaves in her yard. You drive by and see the woman sitting on the porch while a group of kids works hard cleaning up her yard with incredible diligence. Without any visual cues, you might think, “Wow, what an incredible group of kids!”

Now let’s replay this scenario. Imagine you see that same group of kids raking the elderly lady’s yard … except this time, you see a van parked out front that is painted a unique color. There in the yard, you see kids wearing T-shirts that are the same unique color as the van. As you pass by, you see the name of the church supporting this effort.

Now a connection has just been established between the action (raking the leaves) and the organization who is responsible for it (the church). Now you think, “What a fabulous organization. They have a lot of incredible kids!” That church just established a nugget of trust with you. How you would describe that church to a friend was just altered … forever. 

Imagine a few days later, you drive by the church, and that same unique color is on their signage out front. Now, in addition to connecting that trust with the name of the church, you’ve automatically connected it to your location as well.

This is why a unified visual identity for your church is so important.

In our next post, we’ll discuss what goes into creating one. Make sure you don’t miss those future updates by subscribing! 

And if we can be of help, we would love to work directly with your church. Just contact us and let’s have a conversation.