Alright, so this is just for fun. Someone from the Church Marketing Sucks Lab created this poster from a discussion we have going on in there. I downloaded it, printed it out on 11 x 17 paper and hung it in my office! It’s nice to read a couple here and there and laugh a little! Enjoy!

Hey all-

Hope your creative minds are buzzing right now with Christmas just around the corner!

I was wondering if any of your churches/organizations have any job openings? I know of someone who is moving to the south Florida area soon and would like to work in graphic design/communications. I can pass on more details and contact info to anyone who is interested.

Shoot me an email at jennc@visitoasis.org.

Thanks! More blogs to come next week!

Hey all – if you are able to attend a conference this year, I would highly recommend ministryCOM. It is Sept 18 & 19 in Oklahoma City. I went two years ago and it was such a rewarding experience. What I learned there and the connections I made are things I will remember forever. The conference was actually a catalyst for me to start this network. Think about it. If your church can send you, I would reserve your spot today. You won’t regret it. Check out their website for the details: ministryCOM.

How many of you are members of Flickr? If you are and even if you aren’t, would you be willing to join a Group that would consist of this email list plus anyone else who does communications/graphic/web design in south Florida? It would be modeled after the Church Marketing Lab that is alive and well on Flickr. I have been a member of this group for 2 years now and it has greatly improved my design skills as well as given me several ideas for design.  

The premise is simple: you post your designs to the “Pool” and members of the group can comment and give critique/complements/whatever. Let’s say you’re working on a 4 x 6 promo card for a sermon series your church will be doing in a few weeks. You can post your ideas, get some feedback, and keep posting your revisions to the group until it’s done! You can also start discussions (kind of like a message board) with group members to get ideas or just talk.

You can see my profile here along with the designs I have posted and have been given critique on by the Church Marketing Lab members. That will hopefully give you an idea of what I want to see happen with our group. The Church Marketing Lab group has grown to over 1800 members and I’d like to see a smaller, more focused group come out of it.

Will you join me in this group??

If you’re not a Flickr member, it’s FREE to sign up. Once you sign up, you can go to http://www.flickr.com/groups/soflacommnetwork/ and join the group and start posting your designs for critique!

Would you reply and let me know if you’re interested? If you are, go ahead and join, let’s get it started! I think it would be a great way to connect between meetings and help us all grow!

Our 2nd meeting was a great success! We had 7 people show up from 3 counties! Calvary Chapel, IBB Church and Christ Fellowship. We talked, ate and showed off our work for some constructive criticism. It was awesome!

Thanks to all of you who have come to the meetings. Please feel free to give any suggestions for future meetings.

Our next meeting will be during the summer so check back for more updates. We may even meet at a different location!

If any of you would ever like to write an article for this blog, please let me know. You can email me at jennc@visitoasis.org.

Hope to see the rest of you very soon!!

Part 3 – The Brand

So far we have discussed in Part 1 how we made the decision to change our church’s name and in Part 2, the process of choosing a new name. Now, from a communications perspective, I will share about the brand.

I was hired at the Church of Pembroke Pines (our former name) in March 2006 and had no idea what branding was all about. I had just graduated college with a major in journalism, but I quickly found that my education didn’t prepare me for all that I would face in my first “professional” job.

Before I was hired, the church had just changed logos to get by while they changed the name from “Church of Pembroke Pines” to “Church of Pembroke Pines & Hollywood Downtown”. Basically they took two logos and created one to reflect the “new name”. They were pretty bad (see below) and really said nothing about who we were as a church. It was then that I really sought out to learn more about what branding is and why organizations do it.

What is Branding?

During this transition time in our church I looked to some communications professionals who have been there, done that. One of those people is Kem Meyer, communications director at Granger Community Church in Granger, IN. Her blog is indispensable to me. I’ve never met her in person but she’s definitely up there on my “cool and amazing people to meet” list. Ok, there’s no such list, but if there were, she’d be at the top! Here’s a great definition of a brand from Kem:

What is your church brand? A brand is not what you think you are. It’s what others think of the experience you offer, not your logo or tag lines. Good brands are built through an authentic and consistent experience…it doesn’t contradict itself. Is everything linked to your brand a good, consistent experience?

Take for instance, McDonald’s: when I see the golden arches, my brain immediately thinks, “Yes, I want fries with that!” You remember the experience you have had with that particular brand. You can apply this to almost any brand: Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, Apple, Google and more. If I had a horrible dining experience at, say, Chili’s, wouldn’t I tell my friends about it in an effort to deter them from having the same experience? Lifewise, if I had a great flight with Southwest, I would tell all of my friends to start flying with them. Your brand has everything to do with the outside world and very little to do with you.

Who is your audience?

One of the most important things I learned about brands is that it’s not about a logo or a tag line or a website. None of that matters if it doesn’t reflect and appeal to your audience. It has to fit your demographics. The key is to really research your surrounding area. Here are some questions Kem suggested asking when researching your demographics:

1. Why would people want to spend their time and attention on your church?
2. Is it relevant to their life?
3. What makes it worth the hassle?
4. What is their comfort zone?
5. What do they do with their free time?
6. What do they hate?
7. What do they wear?

We attempted to ask these questions. We observed the people that enter the doors of our church every week. As a team, we threw around the idea of possibly hiring an outside branding company to come in and help us; to be “fresh eyes”. Later we decided that a company from the outside wouldn’t know our style and culture as well as we would. Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone. I know several churches that have used outside companies and have been very successful. For us it wouldn’t have worked. There is no place like south Florida. Being a native south Floridian myself, I found it fairly easy to define our audience. Here’s a sampling of our audience (side note: this is stereotypical and does not apply to all people in our area. However, we have found that it fits the majority of our audience):

• Primarily unchurched. The majority of south Florida is unchurched, meaning they don’t normally attend church unless it’s a major holiday like Christmas.
• Multi-ethnic. South Florida is a “multicultural mosaic” (according to Wikipedia.com) of ethnicities and cultures! Our church alone has more than 70 countries represented. This is a very important aspect of our church; for every country represented, we hang its flag in our auditorium.
• Casual dressers. Most people wear sandals, shorts, jeans and t-shirts. Not many suits and ties around here! It’s hot and humid most of the year.
• Transient lifestyle. People are constantly moving in and out of the area. We have lots of Snow Birds.
• Language barrier. We knew we needed a Spanish service as one of the most common languages in south Florida is Spanish. Many immigrants and the generations preceding them still speak Spanish as their first language.
• Laid back attitudes. We have a large population of Islanders. If you’ve ever been to Jamaica you know that one of their mottos is “No problem, Mon!”
• Hard workers. The cost of living is extremely high. Most people need more than one job to survive. According to Immigration Statistics, “Miami, at 60% Immigrant, has the largest percentage of immigrants of any city in the world…” People move here for the American dream and are willing to work very hard to get it.
• Always on-the-go. With several jobs, family activities and other obligations, many people don’t have time for church. This is why we created 7 Nights of Worship (7NOW). We are the only church we know of that offers a church service 7 days a week, 365 days a year, every night at 7 p.m. This is in addition to our five Sunday morning services at three different campuses.
• Broken homes. This is a trend all over the U.S., but south Florida has many interesting home arrangements. In some homes, there may be up to two or more families sharing one house! This also includes divorced families, single parents, widows, etc.

Applying the Brand 

Once we discovered who our audience is and what kind of experience we wanted to give the outside world, we knew the name Oasis and tag line of “Refreshing” would fit the needs of our community. It doesn’t hurt that we live in Florida; what many consider to be an “Oasis”…a place to come and be “Refreshed”! 

We then began the work of making a logo to fit that theme. We used a graphic designer who happens to be Kevin McCord’s brother-in-law, Mark Brewer. He has been to our church and knows a lot of our background, plus we trusted his judgment and design work. He gave us the initial logo of a tear drop (see below). Most of our team liked the idea but weren’t crazy about the colors.

We got some more ideas from the same graphic designer and others but we still weren’t satisfied with them. Our team kept going back to the drop. We liked that it was iconic and was simple. We felt like it described as Oasis without being too obvious. We started playing with more colors and landed on these (see below).

From these we ultimately chose these colors (see below). We even went so far as to name the colors, and with some research, defined what they mean to us. To further define our brand, our Communications team created a Style Guide (free download: oasis_style_guide.pdf). It is not heavily enforced but it is there to help our staff when they need it.

As a team we felt that our branding should have some pecking order: first the name, then the logo, tag line and finally the website. Everything we print has our logo on it to reinforce our brand. We constantly put it out there. I should say, however, that we aren’t “brand nazi’s”. We have a couple of ministries that don’t use our logo…in fact they have their own logos and have chosen to brand themselves. Here’s an example of a ministry’s logo that works well with our brand:

Our Children’s ministry logo:

Stick around as I will share next week in Part 4: The Announcement about how we shared our new name and look with our church family.

Our Name Change Series continues as Kevin blogs about Part 2: The Name. Check it out! I’m writing the next two, so stick around!

Check out part one of our name change series over at Kevin’s blog.

Over the next few weeks I will be posting a series of articles on the process of our name change and Rebranding here at Oasis Church written by myself and our Admin. pastor, Kevin McCord.

Here are the topics we’ll be covering:

• Name Change Part 1: The Decision
• Name Change Part 2: The Name
• Name Change Part 3: The Brand
• Name Change Part 4: The Announcement
• Name Change Part 5: The Reveal
• Name Change Part 6: The Fall-Out

For more info, go to Kevin’s full article here and stay tuned for rest of the series!

Here’s all the info about our 2nd meeting. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions!

Hello all! 

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas season and a Happy New Year so far! J Like me, I’m sure you were all swamped with work over the holiday season. Maybe things have slowed down now…maybe they haven’t (Easter is just around the corner!). Nevertheless, I hope you all are recovering from the busy season! 

Well hopefully you will be encouraged to know that we are having our 2^nd Communications Network meeting (and our 1^st in 2008). The date is set for Saturday, February 23^rd at 11 a.m. The location is the same: Oasis Church in our Community Café (directions below). If you need a refresher about the network or have some time to kill, check out our blog. I confess I haven’t updated it as much as I would like, but there is still some valuable info on there! Check out the new “resources” page…especially if you couldn’t make it to our first meeting. 

Please pass it on! I couldn’t think of and don’t know of every church and ministry in the tri-county area; I need your help! If you, someone in your church, another church or ministry or even a friend of yours would like to join our network, please forward this email to them! Because of the nature of this network, I would prefer that this person be someone who is actively working in ministry (church, non-profit, etc.) doing communications, marketing, PR, graphic design, etc. 

This meeting will be a little different from our last one. We will have a spread of small appetizers and drinks, get to know each other a little better and then we will have a chance to present some of our most recent pieces (old or new) for critiquing! Don’t worry, no one will be bashing your stuff! But get ready to show off some of your greatest work as well as some that didn’t turn out exactly how you wanted. We are all on the same team and we want to help you not ‘suck’ (think www.churchmarketingsucks.com!). I think it will be a great way to learn a lot from our victories and mistakes. You can bring your stuff in any format you like (print, on your laptop, etc). Let me know if you need anything really high-tech and I will do my best to help you out! J Let’s limit the pieces to up to three each person/ministry. We should be done around 12:30 p.m. 

For a map and directions to Oasis Church, go to visitoasis.org and click on ‘Maps’ on the right side of the page.12201 SW 14^th StreetPembroke Pines, FL 33025. We are located on Flamingo Road, one block north of Pembroke Road. When you arrive at the church, enter through the double doors that have “Community Café” printed on the them. 

Please RSVP as soon as you can by replying to this email. Feel free to contact me if you have ANY questions (see my contact info below).  

Thanks so much for your time and I look forward to seeing some of you again and meeting most of you for the first time! 

Serving Him with you,   

Jenn Collins
Communications Director
Oasis Church
Direct: 954-433-4838 x215
Fax: 954-433-2004
www.visitoasis.org