Yes, you can use AVL to establish your church brand! In fact, it’s required! Since church branding is about controlling what your church is known for, AVL controls the senses around that church brand.
In fact, it’s AVL control that solidifies the church brand, and allows it to “stick” longer in our memories.
A church can be known for so many things! It’s imperative you’re known for the right things (a solution to your audience’s needs or a path to their goals). Discover a thread that unites all the ministries. And is simple, unique, desired, and usable. Start here if you can or encourage your Pastor to!
Once the branding thread is established; control everything associated with it. Your logo, messaging, and context (where AVL is critical)! Here are 4 ways to use AVL to establish your church brand:
- Content control. Let’s be honest. Many think church branding is basically the logo. They’re wrong. It’s really the emotional aftertaste after experiencing something in its totality. It’s about content but your AVL control of atmosphere is critical. Visually, concentrate on target audience and create a script that connects to needs, concerns, or goals. Say their name and speak their pains before offering and showing solutions. Control keywords in metadata and scripting. Is this out of your AVL control? Then coordinate with the communication team. Control the sound and lighting experience for consistency to match your thread story and visual brand content.
- Font control. For lower thirds, captioning, and titles; limit and control words (see 1st point) and your fonts. Most church brands need 1 or 2 fonts to represent their controlled font palette. The text font should be readable at a small size from a great distance; simple, sans-serif, open (not condensed) works best. When fonts are layered on imagery, have a consistent way to allow readability (ie. transparent color overlay block behind, outlined stroke, or shadow/glow behind).
- Color control. Using AVL to establish your church brand requires the control of color too. Every brand color palette typically needs a primary (60% of color), secondary (30%), and possibly tertiary color scheme (10%). Your colors need to work together easily and extend into your color gels, overlays, and video atmosphere. But it’s not just actual colors! Emotional “coloring” of church brand story needs to be controlled so everything consistently feels like your church too!
- Sound control. When establishing a church brand, every human sense you can control in the AVL department (sight, sound, smell, etc.), must be done consistently so the wholistic experience “feels” like your church. That consistency starts to be associated with the brand thread. Is your church known for being loud? Calm? Energetic? Peaceful? The emotion of the brand story must be controlled from the moment someone steps from their car to when they return to drive home. Control the sound! Use sound to unify the experience and to (sometimes entirely subliminally) have them leave with the sound (or music bed) solidifying the brand story. Much like Disney does. Except our story is much more important than an amusement park!
Mark MacDonald is communication pastor, speaker, consultant, bestselling author, church branding strategist for BeKnownforSomething.com and Executive Director of Center for Church Communication, empowering 10,000+ churches to become known for something relevant (a communication thread) throughout their ministries, websites, & social media. His book, Be Known for Something, is available at BeKnownBook.com.