Church Marketing Lab (beta)

A Flickr photo-sharing group to share and critique church marketing materials.

We want to help churches do better marketing, but we don't know everything. So rather than pretend we do, we're offering the Church Marketing Lab, a chance to share your church communications experiments and offer feedback to others.

Join the Church Marketing Lab Flickr group >>

What's the Big Idea?

The idea is to help churches do better marketing. Share your work, share your feedback, everybody wins. Share something that's already in the can and out the door, or share a work in progress and put the comments to use. It's the power of the people. Put it to work for you.

Comment Guidelines

1) How to Comment
You'll need a free Flickr or Yahoo! account to post comments and see all the posted photos (some images are public and viewable by anyone, but some photos are only viewable if you're signed in). Once you have an account and are signed in, join the group and you can post comments below each photo.

2) Be Nice
Our goal is to help churches improve, so keep it nice. Offer constructive criticism and remember that the person who posted the image is looking for advice and feedback, not a thrashing.

Submission Guidelines

1) How to Post an Image

• You'll need a free Flickr or Yahoo! account to add images.
• Then you'll need to join the Church Marketing Lab group.
• Upload your images to your account (check the Flickr FAQ if you have trouble).
• To add your photo to a group, view an individual photo and click on "Send to Group" above the photo and select Church Marketing Lab. You can also use the Organize tool (temporarily disabled).
• Mark your photos "public" if you want them to be more visible. If you're not signed in and you visit the photo group you'll only see public photos. Also, public photos are the only ones that show up in the group's RSS feed and in graphics like the one in our sidebar. So marking your photos public will give you more exposure, but it's up to you.

2) What to Post
Any church marketing or communications efforts are acceptable. This includes bulletins, postcards, newsletters, billboards, posters, banners, business cards, signage, letterhead, web sites—whatever. If you can post an image, it's good.

While any church marketing is fair game, please be considerate of the community and don't post everything you've ever designed at once. Dumping all your work at once is overwhelming, will result in fewer comments, and will push back other people's work.

3) What Not to Post
Please note that images should come from the originating church or creator. No fair submitting a neighboring church—if they want feedback they can post something themselves. This group is also limited to church marketing—we don't do ministry marketing, para-church marketing, Christian business marketing, etc. Commercial solicitations are also not cool. We will remove any images that don't fit this guideline.

4) Optimize Feedback
Tell us as much as you can about your project in the image description. Tell us about your church (give us a url!), what the image is for, any relevant back-story, if it's already gone out or is still in process, what kind of feedback you're looking for, etc. The more people know the more they can help.

5) Special Cases
Sometimes there are special cases where it's hard to know exactly how to share an image. Here's a few tips that might help:

• Web sites – Post a screen shot of the site's homepage and link to the web site url at the top of the image description.
• Multiple pages – You can either put multiple pages in the same image (put the front of a postcard on the top and the back on the bottom), or you can post them as separate images but let people know they're related by putting a "page 1 of 5" type notation in the image title.
• Video – Flickr is a photo site and doesn't do video (yet). If you can host the video somewhere else then just post a still frame of the video and link to the video in the description.
• Audio – Flickr is still a photo site and doesn't do audio (yet). Again, you can host the audio somewhere else and post a generic image with a link to the audio in the description. Yes, it's a lame work around, but it's something.

History

The Church Marketing Lab grew out of the peer review section from our Church Marketing Sucks blog. Everybody loved the peer review section, but it had one problem: It was powered by us. We had to sift through the submissions, we had to format everything, we had to post the graphics. We were hindering the community, the feedback and ultimately the improvement. So the user-powered Flickr group is a way for us to get out of the way. Now it's your turn.

Here's to better church marketing.