Design thinking for Christian institutions…

Sorry again for the lack of posts. I’m still working on this, and this, and a support video and school…and it’s COLD up here! This morning dipped down to about -20 degrees celcius (is that spelled right? That just looks wrong.)

Anyhoo…a friend up here at the seminary passed an InTrust magazine to me the other day. I just got to sit down and read the thing.

There’s a really interesting article, written by Sharon J. Anderson, entitled Prophets Make Profits: A Message to You from the Huckster’s World. In it, she looks at six advertisements, picked randomly out of Christianity Today, and analyzes them for their content and thrust, especially with an eye on Generation X and what they desire in a seminary.

She not only analyzes each ad, but also makes recommendations on how to make the ads better. I agree on most of her assessments, and I think you will, too. It’s a great resource for rethinking your advertisements, focusing them more on experience and passion, which would help most Christian organizations with their message.

Here’s a link to the article page. You can download the article in pdf format.

More soon!! (I hope)

This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2003 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

5 Responses to “Design thinking for Christian institutions…”
  1. Phillip Swindall Says:
    November 1st, 2003 at 10:13 am

    Doy, I downloaded the PDF, even printed it out, so I could take a good long look and read… it has some great content, however, I kept noticing that the writer went for a more humanist bent to just about every re-do suggested. The design suggestions were great, but the text re-writes and headline suggestions seemed to be more human oriented than God oriented… which raises a HUGE red flag in my mind. After all, prospective Seminarians SHOULD be responding to a call from God, right? They are already spiritually oriented, so, why not go for the spiritually oriented message? Why not tell them how God can help them accomplish what He has called them to do at Seminary X (well, that’s Southwestern…. may not be possible there - KIDDING!!!! Its an OLD NOBTS joke) Those are just my preliminary thoughts….
    By the way, you have to register to download the PDF. Big whoop, I know, but, if I’d have known that ahead of time, I probably wouldn’t have gone to the site. And I DEFINITELY wouldn’t have had I known they were gonna ask me for a $5 donation for the download! Which raises an interesting situation…. can you sell a student catalog on a Seminary website?

  2. Doy Cave Says:
    November 3rd, 2003 at 12:04 am

    I didn’t get the same vibe from her suggestions…I thought she was pointing seminaries more to “passion” for God and for His work…pointing more to the calling. She was being practical in a lot of places, and there were places where I disagreed with her redesign (and there were a couple of places where my red flag went off, too)…

    All in all, though, I thought it was a pretty good resource.

    I didn’t know about the donation…. They’re a non-profit, I think, so I guess that’s why they term it, “donation.” We did that with The Gatekeeper, you know…we asked for donations, but could never call them subscriptions…

  3. Phillip Swindall Says:
    November 3rd, 2003 at 12:51 am

    Really??? I didn’t know that about the Gatekeeper! (Then again, I didn’t download the Gatekeeper that often!) Oh well… I think I’d be more grateful for the opportunity to get a catalog right now, versus having to hope and pray the US (and if they are as negligent as ours, the Canadian) Postal Service gets it to me on time and in one piece! That, to me would be worth, say, $5 for a download fee. BTW, found a server yet? I think I’m moving to 1and1.com… free for 3 years!

  4. Dave J. Says:
    November 3rd, 2003 at 1:04 pm

    A local christian school here in Michigan, Cornerstone University, is running ads in the local paper that are decidedly different. They are highlighting the professors and making them sound qualified and interesting…like showing the drama professor acting in a Shakespeare play and listing her performance experience.

  5. Doy Says:
    November 3rd, 2003 at 2:29 pm

    Dave, I think you bring up a good point about focus…or at least bring it to my mind, anyway. One of the weaknesses of that article was that the writer attempted to paint all schools with the same brush. There are those schools students will turn to because of renowned faculty — others will turn to schools because of their location.

    I think in either case, the school can “hard sell” what makes them unique, and then make sure that in advertising themselves, they’re falling in line with what God’s called them to do.

    I don’t think you can paint all institutions so broadly. I don’t know that she was attempting to do that, but I do know the “passion” part doesn’t necessarily work for everybody…theoretically, anyway…