Redeemer Reformed Church

Role: Branding & Web design

TLDR

• Led the rebranding efforts for Redeemer Reformed Church

• Created and managed the website using Squarespace

• Created a members-only experience using Planning Center

The problems

Redeemer Reformed Church came to me with a few different problems to address:

1. They didn’t have a way for members to easily engage with one another online, aside from emailing each other

2. They didn’t have anyone managing their web presence, as it would require code knowledge

3. Their branding was outdated and only available in raster format, making it hard to reuse

After talking with the consistory about these problems and concerns, it was clear to me that we needed to create easy-to-understand solutions that could be used by anyone for the long-term future.

The question

Do we find an all-in-one solution? Or do we seek separate solutions? What’s out there? To be honest, I wasn’t a subject-matter expert on church website & member management solutions, so I got to work doing research. Quite a number of free trials later, I was able to pull together some comparisons.

As I researched and tried different tools and reached out to churches about their solutions, it seemed like an all-in-one solution didn’t necessarily do all things well. OR it did too many things in a more complicated way, which was not the direction for this medium-sized church.

The website solution

For the outward-facing website, we settled on Squarespace because of its ease to manage and its cost. This church previously had a member coding their website, and this was not a sustainable solution for the future. Squarespace would ensure that any individual could make simple edits and updates.

The members-only solution

Planning Center was chosen as the member-facing solution. Planning Center would automate many tasks for the church secretary and streamline the administrative side of the church. For members, it came with an app that would allow members to log in, post requests/announcements, sign up for events, view resources, find church members’ addresses and phone numbers, and ultimately increase engagement.

Enter branding

Because Redeemer didn’t even have a vector logo for their existing site and because they weren’t thrilled with the existing branding, they also requested a light rebrand as part of this experience. I wanted to present them with a few different concepts to see what their appetite was for change. I presented them with a mild, medium, and wild concept based on some of their characteristics.

The design concepts were presented to the consistory and a select group of members. The winning concept was the “Medium” concept. I moved forward with that direction and made slight adjustments to the logo and color palette based on feedback. I started to set up the Squarespace site but thought the church could use some fresh photos, since the existing site’s photos were from 10 years ago. We set up an informal photo shoot at the church to capture some new ones.

Once I had the photos, I was able to put the final touches on the website and light rebrand.

Planning Center

The last part of the effort was creating the internal app for member usage. While there was a lot of administrative work done behind the scenes by me and the church’s Digital Media Committee, such as importing all members into Planning Center, creating groups, creating service schedules, creating automations for the secretary, and more, the real reward was the church app for members. Now members could log in on their devices or via the website and access information that was important to them.

Since launching the app, we’ve seen regular and steady engagement from members.