First Church Communications Team

Meeting Minutes

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Members Present: Bill Bartscher, Bennett Griffin (Chair), Harold Jones, Jerry Niebaum, Michelle Parmley, Patti Winn. We were joined by Tom Brady and Candice Ranney.

Branding: Tom handed out a list of keywords that identify FUMC that he received from the congregation after his request in “Tom’s Tidbits” July 14. He received approximately 35-40 responses. Using the keywords list as a guide, we brainstormed on slogans for the church. The big question facing us in this task is do we go with the National Conference’s slogan “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors,” do we continue to use our current slogan “Uplifting Hearts, Transforming Lives,” or do we come up with something completely new? The advantages of each of those options were discussed. By using the National slogan, we can tie into an existing marketing plan and would possibly get some money from the National Conference as we did with our movie theater ad. The current “Uplifting Hearts…” slogan was the majority winner among the keywords list respondents and the work of a logo and slogan are already complete. A new slogan and visual mark would give us a fresh identity during this time of change with the opening of our west facility. This question remained unresolved. Here are some of the slogan suggestions:

--“Uplifting Hearts, Transforming Lives”

--“Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors”

--“Faithful Past, Prayerful Present, Promising Future”

--“Growing Toward the Future with Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors”

--“Growing Families with Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors”

--“A Growing Family with Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors”

--Other keywords: Welcoming, Generous, Friendly, Open, Inclusive, Accepting

Since there was no resolution and we need to keep moving forward because of our crunched timeline, Bennett suggested we continue our discussion in email. Any suggestions by team members should be emailed to Bennett this week or submitted at our next meeting.

Internal Marketing Workshop: Candice recently attended a workshop on marketing within the church and gave a short report. She found the workshop to be very informative and would like for the team to review the information she received. There are several websites for us to visit that contain good examples of internal marketing and she will provide those URLs to Jerry Niebaum who will make links available on our team website. Please visit those when time permits.

Next Meeting: Tuesday, July 25th, 7:30pm.