Case Study.

If you're here from Church Marketing Sucks.com, you can find the referenced case study here.

 

This is a bit of correspondence between the powers-at-be here at dog n' moon and a fellow named Michael, who was gracious enough to ask our opinion on marketing the church. It's not really a case study, but it certainly makes a case for studying marketing... er...

 

 

 

On Jul 18, 2005, at 8:26 PM, michael wrote:

Hopefully this makes it through all the spam...don't get me wrong I love spam blockers and all...but why is it is seems to junk my good and good my junk?

Anyway, I just came across your site and needless to say, I'm impressed. I really liked what I saw there, some great identity work especially. Though I currently work for a design firm (on the account side of all things) I dream of some day designing and putting real marketing pieces into action for the church...not sure if that means a church or many churches...but anyway...I do all the design for my church but I am really interested to know how you've reached other churches and expanded your reach. I'm not in a big town but I am in a town that just is full of churches that just haven't got it yet and are design challenged.

So, I guess I was just hoping to start a dialogue with you as you seem to have it going on and thought it'd be cool to hear your story, tips and maybe one of those good jokes you talk about. I'll start....

I sent this one to my pastors and our senior pastor told it before offering:

Three boys are in the school yard bragging about their fathers. The first boy says, "My Dad scribbles a few words on a piece of paper, he calls it a poem, they give him $50." The second boy says, "That's nothing.! My Dad scribbles a few words on a piece of paper, he calls it a song, and they give him $100." The third boy says, "I got you both beat. My Dad scribbles a few words on a piece of paper, he calls it a sermon. And it takes eight people to collect all the money!"

Michael

 

______________________________

 

On Jul 18, 2005, at 9:24 PM, dognmoon wrote:

Hi Michael,
thanks much for the kind words. They're certainly appreciated.

let's see- i find that my spiritual gift is more in the vein of situational humor than "have-you-heard-the-one-about-the...?" but, lemme take a few minutes and have some coffee with my wife and come back to this with a good one...

 

 

okay- not a joke- but a little humor from my day... and it gives you an idea of how humble my little operation really IS here at dog n' moon. One blueberry was all it took to put an hour-long sabbatical in the middle of my day. My wife just went to the grocery store last night and brought home fresh blueberries. I just assumed that everyone likes blueberries. Conventional wisdom would tell us that, right? I gave one to my daughter (who just turned 3 last tuesday) and she proceeded to stand in the kitchen sobbing (awkwardly because she had to keep her mouth closed so gravity wouldn't steal her blueberry) for an hour because she didn't care for the taste of blueberries. So- not being one to let my children railroad me into believing that it's okay to spit out perfectly good food, I stood over her for that hour... drifting back and forth between trying to console her into swallowing (good cop) or scare her into swallowing (bad cop). It was a newsworthy standoff- I thought I heard choppers circling overhead and the Southern California police chase freaks would've been glued to the TV set. The moral of the story? Not everyone likes blueberries. Don't just assume that they do. Cosmic moral? Don't assume ANYTHING about ANYTHING. Just when you think you're holding a sure thing, you end up staring down at a sobbing 3 year old for an irreplaceable hour of your life.

 

Now, on to the high profile world of doing marketing for churches...

 

I'm not sure if I could tell you how it all came to be that the majority of my work comes from the church. If I had to speculate, I would say it's because I have a love for the mission of the church and a part of me believes that EVERY church is my church. We can bicker all day about how old children should be before they're baptized and we can roll that over into an argument about whether baptism is symbolic or metaphorical or metaphysical or whatever. But the meat and potatoes is that I believe that we're living in a wounded world and I have the blessing of being able to help people see the Red Cross a little more clearly (I hope). In practical terms, I talk to churches about the importance of presentation and what it must look like to present outdated visuals and outdated marketing materials to a world that lives in the now. Paul says "to the Jews I am a Jew and to the Gentiles I am a Gentile" (Dognmoon International Translation) and I try to apply that principle to the way the church operates today. To a world that is driven by magazine covers, movie stars, and plastic surgery, we have to be as relevant as possible, so as not to appear out of touch with the real world. One of the most common arguments people use against the church is that we're living on a mountain top and we have no clue what the real world is like. I don't think we need to start building our marketing materials to look like Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs, but I see nothing wrong with making them look like iPod ads. We're delivering the good news to people in their native tongue. Communication is not communication if there's a message sent but no one receiving it. And if I'm just standing on the street corner shouting out the gospel in my own Christianese, those who are unfamiliar with the faith do not always understand my dialect and verbiage. I have to speak in their language, use visuals that are familiar to them, and move in such a way that it doesn't startle them.

 

When I was in the 7th grade, Jesse Jackson ran for president of the United States. He was a prominent christian figure at the time and I was living as an unbeliever in a family of unbelievers. My lack of understanding made me fear that, were he elected president of the free world, he would take the good shows off of TV and replace them with right-wing Christian fundamentalist programming. That experience was good for me because I know how the world sees me now. As churches, we can send out a message of God's marshal law- that we're here to take over your town, holding weekly pot luck dinners and shooting bibles through the windows of houses of unbelievers- or we can send a message that says, "hey, I'm a guy just like you. I try to make enough money to feed my family and make sure there's plenty of blueberries around. I'm a guy who struggles with sin. I'm a guy who loves our president one day and hates him the next. I'm a guy who occasionally loses my temper in traffic and prays that God would wreck their car before my very eyes. I'm a guy who has made loads of mistakes and will continue to make them until I die. But I'm ALSO a guy who believes that comfort comes from knowing that a God who knows way more than me has a plan for my life and has already fulfilled the task of buying my salvation for me through His son. I'm not 'Corey The Lutheran Guy'- I'm just Corey. Or 'champ'. Or 'butthead'. Or 'sir'. Or 'HEY, the light turned green, GO, dummy!' or any other names that everyday people get called."

 

You see, it is entirely possible to speak in the tongue of the people who need to hear what we have to say but speak the message of our own heart. And by "our own" I mean God's. To sum up church marketing, we're just advertising absolute truth (so as not to water down or compromise the gospel to "make a sale") in the language of our target audience. THAT is what church marketing is. Give them our message in their language and sink our pictures into the world they see. It's not subversive, we're not trying to trick them into salvation. We're making it accessible. And when that fails, and our church marketing sucks bigtime, we thank God that He still does great things with mans' constant failures. I firmly believe God's kingdom has grown and will grow IN SPITE of man's efforts on earth, not on behalf of them. God created a brilliant machine called the church, but he left monkeys in charge of driving it.

 

Gosh. I realize I just wrote a little book. "The Commercialization of God" by Dog N. Moon. Apparently this was chapter one.

I'm going to go have more coffee with the wife. Again, thanks for the kind words, Michael. And I hope I didn't bore you with philosophy when you wanted practicality. It's the right brain in me working overtime.

 

many/mini blessings,
-c

ps. i went to your site and looked through the portfolio. I really dig the last two (the Israel one and the Laughing one). Great layouts and great colors.