Written by Ian Welch
When talking about your school’s brand, we are really addressing its visual identity and how it communicates to parents, students, and the community. A brand can tell people who you are, what you do, the quality of education you provide, even the reputation and impact you have in your community.
The term ‘brand’ can make some people feel uncomfortable, since business-marketing principles don’t always align with the mission of a Lutheran school. A Lutheran school isn’t looking to create shareholder value or bring in vast amounts of revenue by harnessing a brand. Rather, branding is used to help a school understand and create a unified look and message that will, in turn, assist in communicating the school to parents and the community.
The following is a list of the basic principles of a brand in the context of a Lutheran school with a few applications of each.
Branding visually defines who you are.
It’s not just about the logo. Branding is, “when people look at us what are the key things we want them to see about us?” Even the colors of your school will say something about you to a degree (Bottomley & Doyle. 2006).
Photos are carefully chosen to post on your website, Flickr, or Instagram. Videos on YouTube can have bumpers that harness the school colors and logo, drawing a connection to your branded materials and media.
The logo is something simple and memorable that people will recognize as they are communicating through social media, your website, or email.
Branding clearly states your mission and values.
Branding forces a school to internally ask important questions, and then decide how to relate those answers in a clear and concise way to the community. What is our mission? What are the values we offer to our community? How do we articulate these things clearly? Does this make sense to a person who has never been to our school or is new to the area?[1]
A simple tagline placed prominently on your website, Twitter, and Facebook pages will help parents understand a little about you and may even become a rallying cry for parents, teachers, and students.
Branding helps to intentionally communicate your mission and values.
Whether you have a defined brand or not, those outside the school will already have a perception of who you are. It’s a matter of whether that brand is perceived as relevant to them or not. By having a specific brand, you are being intentional about visually communicating who you are.
Branding will help you to choose the most important information that your school should share on your website. Sometimes this will apply to Facebook and Twitter, but social media will mostly be used to connect your school to parents and the community—generating awareness for the school and encouraging involvement of the parents.
Branding is unique to you.
A designer will look at census data, demographic studies, your school’s history, and other important documents. They will look at the other schools in the area and what would distinguish you from them visually, while still adhering to your school’s mission and keeping that at the forefront of all decision making.
Telling a compelling story of your school is another way to use branding. Brand identity, through the use of slogans, pictures, and videos, will tell the story of your school from the perspective of your students. These unique stories can be featured as profiles on your website and features on Facebook and Twitter.
Your brand comes from what you already do.
Logos, mission statements, tag lines, and newsletters are simply ways of expressing who you are and the values you offer to the community and your parents. What you already do as a school establishes your brand. Every visual interaction you have with your community, from your logo, your website, or even social media must match what you do.
The connections that a teacher makes with parents through emails, texting, and phone calls will also carry over to what they can do on Facebook, Twitter, or newsletter services like MailChimp. Branding will give all those areas a consistent and familiar look and communicate the same message across all platforms.
Using sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram will give you the added benefit of being able to interact with anyone who mentions you by name, which will generate even more awareness for your school (Kim, Sung, & Kang. 2014).
It can take quite a bit of time and effort to create and implement a brand for your school, but there are quite a few benefits in doing so. Not only will you have a consistent look across all your materials and online presence, but you will be implementing a focused and unified approach to how you communicate to your parents and community.
Ian Welch is a graduate of Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary and a full-time graphic designer. He is the Worship Coordinator at Risen Savior Lutheran Church in Chula Vista CA and assists Lutheran churches and schools in planning and creating logos, brands, and liturgical art.
References
Bottomley, P. & Doyle, J. (2006). The interactive effects of colors and products on perceptions of brand logo appropriateness. Marketing Theory. March 2006 vol. 6 no. 1, pp. 63-83. [http://mtq.sagepub.com/content/6/1/63]
Kim, E, Sung, K., & Kang, H. (2014). Brand followers’ retweeting behavior on twitter: How brand relationships affect brand electronic word-of-mouth. Computers in Human Behavior. 37, pp. 18-25. [http://www.slideshare.net/scotoss/computers-in-human-behavior-2014-brand-wom-on-twitter]
[1] Lutheran elementary schools that are a ministry of a congregation will find great value in their church’s mission, vision, and core values—especially if the church already has an established brand. The WELS Commission on Congregational Counseling (CCC) helps congregations plan and develop these kinds of planning tools.
I suspect this ‘branding’ concept has a great deal to do with my becoming irritated whenever I would see our Lutheran Grade Schools using their sport mascot as their school identity.
“Jerusalem the Golden (L) Grade School Jumpin’ Giraffes”!
On tee shirts, sweatshirts, jackets, binders, backpacks, banners, websites, coffee mugs, and statuary outside the school doors!!
Yup, that’s who we are and what we do. Woot Woot!
(I assume there is no real Jerusalem the Golden Lutheran Grade School with Jumping Giraffes as their sports mascot. I hoped for a make-believe scenario to show my point.)
I enjoyed reading your post Ian, thank you. I especially appreciated how you note differences in mission, values and brand. It can be very helpful for organizations to distinguish their mission and values from their brand. Usually there are important subtle differences. Mission is who you are, what you do and what your core is. A brand allows you to communicate well with prospective stakeholders and distinguish your offering in a crowded world.
For the sake of discussion, I like the example of the old WELS jingle “Come to the WELS” which was inviting, warm (now maybe corny), and provided the “why” you should come in the next line. It used the innate metaphor of water, life, and the Word. I thought of it again this week when I read the story of Jesus with the woman at the well and when I heard that people were so excited that water, maybe life was on mars. While the jingle connected clearly with the audience and distinguished WELS organizations in a positive manner, the brand was certainly not communicating mission or values. Brand is an outward thing and how you interact with potential stakeholders.
My favorite book on the topic is “Brands and Branding” by Rita Clifton et al. put out by the Economist group.
This is something to think about. Dr. Art Schulz, taught us many years ago, that you may not like the term PR, but you have PR whether you like it or not. You do need to communicate to everyone what you are about and what you value.
Thank you, Ian, for your article. I must admit I was skeptical that what you were describing branding in the way a marketing agency would think of branding. For most of the article you seemed to be talking about creating visual commercials for people to see. That’s advertising. Granted, people would be seeing you from a number of different vantage points and in a variety of venues and platforms. But it still advertising. And, as it turned out, that was also how the article ended. But there was one really salient message that made the whole article worth reading. You wrote, “Logos, mission statements, tag lines, and newsletters are simply ways of expressing who you are and the values you offer to the community and your parents. What you already do as a school establishes your brand.” Logos again are part of an advertising campaign. But they begin to get at the process that leads to discovering who you really are as an organization. Branding is so much more about having a clear philosophy of Christian education, knowing what your Christian identity is. What others see or hear is quite secondary. What others see or hear is all store-front and advertising strategy. But if you know who you are and why you exist, the rest will follow. And you are absolutely correct then in saying that our schools need to spend the time (and money) that will take them through the branding process so that they relearning who they really are and why they exist. KJK