KING’S HARBOR CHURCH
Crafting brand unity for a dynamic vision
King’s Harbor Church is committed to seeing lives transformed. After leadership changes, pandemic strain, and years of patchwork visuals, the church needed a renewed vision and a compelling message to inspire congregant unity and participation.
Situation
King’s Harbor Church faced rocky terrain during the years leading up to its rebranding, from undergoing multiple leadership changes to navigating the COVID-19 pandemic. These challenges resulted in a confused articulation of the church’s vision and a lack of organizational harmony that hindered its ability to carry out its mission. After establishing a permanent lead pastor, church leadership did the hard work to develop a new vision but their existing brand presence was stuck in the past.
Our objective was to develop a brand strategy and identity aligned with the church’s new vision for the future, new mission statement, and core values that would result in a cohesive brand experience and increased constituent loyalty and participation.
Brand Strategy
After identifying the brand’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement, we did extensive industry research to explore the cultural impacts that would affect the brand’s growth. Additionally, we completed a comprehensive church analysis, reviewing nine local, regional, and national churches. This assessment informed our efforts to identify impactful methods of communication for King’s Harbor Church.
To fully understand the brand, we needed to hear directly from the church community, so we conducted a congregation-wide survey. Congregants had the opportunity to provide open-ended answers regarding communication preferences, ministries, brand presence, and opportunities for improvement. The survey responses helped us to identify disparities in brand perception and pinpoint what values and principles were most important to King’s Harbor as a whole.
As we collected data, we worked closely with King’s Harbor leadership to build a brand personality and voice that resonated with their mission and vision for the church. We utilized team workshops to explore attributes, archetypes, tone, and more, building common ground among ministries. We established a strong foundational brand that supported their mission while adapting to fit the unique needs of each sub-brand.
Brand Identity Design
One of the most important goals we identified through the development of the brand strategy was a need for distinct yet unified brand identities for the main church and its most prominent internal ministries. This included their children and student ministries. This approach allows individual ministry leaders to create brand communications specifically aligned to their unique audience while maintaining consistency with the parent brand. We worked collaboratively with individual ministry leaders to create brand identities, personalities, attributes, and verbal and visual messaging unique to each ministry’s audience while maintaining harmony with the overarching parent brand.
Brand Support
Once the brand identities were established, we implemented the new visual language and messaging standards in printed collateral, apparel, building signage, and more. Our goal in this phase was to create a cohesive brand expression across all media in preparation for the brand launch that would inspire constituents and invite them into deeper levels of commitment and participation with the church.
Brand Launch
We came alongside the King’s Harbor Church leadership team to create an intentional launch plan that built excitement, highlighted the church’s long-term vision, and inspired the congregation toward action. This included building personalized brand boxes for staff members that were filled with apparel and other items sporting the new brand, creating a conceptual brand launch video, and redesigning the interior of the church for a surprise brand reveal to the church’s congregation.
“It was important for us to partner with an agency that could understand us and genuinely care for our cause. The Pappagalo team not only checked this box but exceeded all of our expectations by their determination to uphold our values and express the heart of our mission in every facet of their work. Their leadership and intentional process guided our entire rebrand effort, unifying and energizing our internal team as we approached an exciting new season in the life of our church.”
Mike Dsane
Lead Pastor | King’s Habor Church
Impact
Through the development of a new brand strategy and the creation of a verbal and visual brand identity that better reflected the vision and core values of King’s Harbor Church, we brought congruity among the internal ministries. While they each maintained their own distinct purposes, the sub-brand identities supported and contributed to the overall mission of the church. Individual sub-brand archetype assessments helped us develop tools for each ministry to maintain balance between individuality and harmony. Finally, we offered solutions that helped leadership identify priority areas of action to ensure a consistent experience for all church congregants and motivate them toward deeper involvement and participation.
