August 4, 2016 Promotional Items: 3 Things to Consider and Some Inspiration to Get Started
Before you get new promotional pieces at your church, consider these three things.
As we often say, your brand isn't just your logo. It's the experience that people have with your church, the way they feel when they walk through the door, the tools and materials you use to communicate with them and the healthy pride they feel for their church. One of the easiest ways to let people express that pride is through swag (a.k.a. promotional items)! If a church is unveiling a new brand, we typically see them do some small runs of T-shirts, car decals and coffee mugs and then grow into other products.
Not all promotional items are made equal. When you have your logo printed on something, here are three important things to consider:- Make sure that the logo has ample space around it / between it and the edge of the material. For example, sometimes car decals look a little awkward when the logo is too close to the edge of the decal. Having a consistent amount of clearspace around the logo avoids crowding and ensures legibility. We recommend that the clearspace minimum is roughly equivalent to the vertical height of the type in the logo.
- Depending on space considerations, feel free to "play" with the elements of your logo — in other words, you don't always have to use the full lock-up (mark+name+tagline), and often, space limitations lend to a more varied approach. I think the most successful promotional items use elements of a logo in varying ways. For instance, on a pen, I would just use the name by itself with no mark or tagline (and the space is so small, you probably don't have room for much else anyway). A coffee mug could include the mark, the name and the tagline, but it might draw more intrigue if it had just the tagline on it by itself. On a T-shirt, you could have the elements of the logo in various places – for instance, the mark on the front, the name on the sleeve and the tagline on the back. On a car decal, I would not include the tagline because from far away, it will probably be too hard to read. And, you might consider putting the mark and your URL on a car decal, again to add an element of intrigue, plus have some variety.
- Focus on having 2-3 high quality items. Based on conversations with church leaders and what we've seen in the past, church members tend to respond better to a couple high quality options rather than 7-8 cheaply made ones. Really think through the strategy of what types of promotional items you're ordering and why. It might even be helpful to do a survey with a small section of your audience to see what type of swag they prefer and will actually use.
