media salt

This was originally posted when we first began Media Salt earlier this year (with a much smaller audience!). I’ve reposted it today for your enjoyment.

If you’ve worked on creative projects for your church/ministry for any period of time, you’ve probably seen at least one of your projects sabotaged somewhere along the way. We’ve compiled a list of five ways we’ve seen projects fall apart in our experience, along with some good advice on how to avoid these pitfalls in the first place.

Have “Too Many Hands in the Pot”

It’s great to brainstorm and generate lots of fresh ideas, but too often the creative process at our churches can fall victim to this issue. Since creative meetings can be a welcome break from more administrative duties, well-meaning staff members usually like to pitch in and “help out.” What typically results is that the person with the loudest voice and the strongest opinion also has the least experience/design sensibilities to back it up.

Cleve and I worked with a colleague that famously dominated many of our creative meetings with some pretty horrific design suggestions; while redesigning a major site in 2006, we were offered such helpful suggestions as “adding a few animated GIFs” and making the logo “burst into flame” to spice things up. (I’m convinced that this individual may be solely responsible for most of the bad Flash websites that popped up at the start of the millennium.)

The solution: Have a quick meeting with the necessary staff to decide on the theme of a project, and let a focused creative team take the reigns from there. We’re firm believers that most folks don’t know what they want until you show it to them; with an agile creative team, you can throw out the bad ideas early on without wasting time generating comps for a concept that’s poor to begin with.

Don’t Plan Ahead

Yes, planning is a basic concept, but it’s scary how often this one is messed up. The life of a church staff person can be easily equated with controlled chaos; this is especially true of program-driven churches where there are constantly big weekend events, mission trips and upcoming campaigns on the horizon.

It becomes tempting to neglect the details surrounding the next big campaign in order to focus on more pressing issues and try to avoid another round of go-nowhere meetings; what happens is those far off deadlines suddenly aren’t so far off anymore and the creative staff is left burning the midnight oil to pick up the slack.

The solution: Plain and simple, no matter your workload, always make sure that at least some thought is being put into an upcoming campaign well before the looming deadline. Initiating a few meetings and administrative planning tasks is much less annoying than working 80 hour weeks in a panic.

Don’t Respect the Deadline

We’ve all been there: you’ve spent the entire week tweaking and polishing a piece when only an hour before it’s due to the printer, the higher ups decide they want something different. In a frenzied panic, you find a cheap stock photo online, slap some text on there with a drop shadow, and are stuck with a crappy graphic for the duration of a campaign.

Many times this is purely a result of a poor understanding of the creative process. To those outside the design world, finished artwork is merely the result of a few clicks of the mouse, a Photoshop filter and maybe some clipart (shudder). What those folks don’t see are the hours poured into a color scheme along the lovingly applied blurs, subtle shadows and other tweaks that take dozens of hours to move a piece from good to fantastic.

The solution: Make sure deadlines are on paper, thoroughly explained to everyone involved and initialed in agreement. Our creative team has made it a point to have a concept approved multiple times as we move toward a deadline to reinforce the finality of the chosen concept. Perhaps most important of all, explain the real-world negative impacts of not meeting those deadlines; normally the extra fees and rushed artwork will overrule a flighty decision.

Copy the Way Another Place is Doing Things, Just Because

This one’s a doozy, especially with web design where usability and best practices evolve constantly. It’s easy to fall into the trap of copying the layout or graphical styles of larger or more established churches and ministries; many people assume the popularity of these entities mean they’re also leading the pack in effective web design and visual communication.

This is not necessarily the case; a good portion of the largest churches in America right now have pretty mediocre websites. In fact, it’s been our experience that some of the best sites and most engaging visual communication come from fresh church plants. There are plenty of great untested design strategies to go around!

The solution: Design around what is best with your congregation in mind; don’t be afraid to try a dramatically different graphical style or a layout from uncharted waters. Be mindful of accessibility and usability, but beyond that, don’t be afraid to try out some new solutions to common problems. Maybe then we can copy off of you! (Just kidding.)

Make it Look Like That Movie/TV Show/Brand Name/Slogan

Let’s face it… this one has been done to death over the last 8 years. For far too long, Christians have merely been creating poor imitations of culturally successful things, when we should be producing more creative ways of engaging our culture. These days, cheap knockoffs are predictable, and frankly, annoying.

The solution: Be innovative for a change. Don’t be afraid to try something that grabs the culture’s attention (the “7 Days of Sex” campaign from earlier this year comes to mind). All of the cheap communication technology we have now has cleared the way for some really innovative new campaigns and viral marketing. Don’t forget: creativity is invigorating to your audience!

Do you have a project that ended up shipwrecked? Let us know how it went down and what you’ve changed to avoid it in the comments below.