Your church needs a style guide. A style guide helps your church communications (text, branding, voice, etc.) stay consistent and ensures that people know when communications come from you.
It’ll also provide your staff and volunteers with an easy-to-access guide to help communicate in a single voice.
This blog post will take you through what a style guide is, what should be in yours, and how to create and maintain your guide.
What is a Church Style Guide?
No, a church style guide isn’t a document that helps to ensure your preacher looks impeccable on Sunday morning. A style guide is a comprehensive document that describes the standards and guidelines for all your church’s communications.
A church style guide usually includes information on branding, tone and voice, and language. You might remember in school using style guides for term papers (usually MLA, Turabian, or the American Psychological Association or APA). When working on term papers, you’d reference the style guide when you had questions about formatting, spelling, or other style issues. The church style guide serves a similar purpose. It’s just not near as comprehensive.
In most cases, you’ll identify another (maybe even two), more general style guide to handle most of the language issues. For example, you shouldn’t worry about how you’ll handle numbers, state abbreviations, or general spelling issues. Include a note at the start of your document about a dictionary and a general style guide that your church adheres to. The most common style guides for non-academic works are The Associated Press Style Guide and The Chicago Manual of Style. Zondervan also publishes The Christian Writer’s Manual of Style that has entries on church-related topics.
Key Components of a Church Style Guide
Your style guide is, of course, your church’s document. You may have unique needs that don’t fit in the following categories, but generally these are the topics you’ll want to cover.
- Branding: Define how people should use your church logo, color schemes, and typography. Include a note about where people can get official logos and branded templates. If you’re using a document in the cloud (such as a Google Doc), include the link to these items right in the copy.
- Tone and voice: Describe the church’s tone and voice for different communications channels (social, email, printed materials, etc.) As much as possible, include examples of content that fits your tone and content that doesn’t.
- Language and terminology: List commonly used terms not covered in traditional style guides. This can include ministry names, acronyms, locations on your campus, etc. It should also include any terms you want to treat differently than traditional guides. A couple of topics to keep in mind for this section (because they frequently need to be covered in church style manuals), include which translation to use for Bible verses, whether you’ll capitalize deity pronouns, and how you’ll deal with abbreviating Bible books.
Don’t let the list above overwhelm you. Depending upon the complexity of your church’s communications, you can likely do this in just a few pages.
Steps to Develop Your Church Style Guide
To ensure you leave nothing out, it is best to develop style guides systematically.
Here are the key steps.
- Gather your team: This may be the most important part of the process. Put too large of a team together, and you’ll struggle to get anything done. But if you leave key stakeholders out of the process, you risk struggling to get all areas of your church to use the guide you create. Get representatives from as many ministry areas of your church as possible, particularly those involved in age-graded work. Ministries might not take the guide seriously if they weren’t involved in its creation.
- Research other church style guides: No sense in trying to reinvent the wheel. Try to find other churches and nonprofits that have created their own style guides, so you get a feel for best practices. While you’re connecting with other churches, learn about the process they took to put together their guide. Try to discern what they’d do differently if they restarted the process now.
- Drafting the guide: You can choose to split up the drafting of the guide between several people on your team. Most likely, the people most responsible for communications are the ones who should write the bulk of the guide.
- Review and revise: Your first draft is just a start. Pass it around and get feedback from others on your style guide team. Then circulate it throughout the rest of the staff. If you have key lay leaders (such as elders, deacons, and volunteers), make sure they see the document as well. Once you’ve gotten feedback, gather your team back up and decide together about how you’ll implement the feedback.
- Implement and educate: Make sure you distribute the guide throughout the staff and volunteers that deal with communications. Hold a couple of training sessions to ensure people understand the expectations of how they’ll use the style guide.
Maintaining and Updating Your Church Style Guide
Although it would be nice if you could just create a style guide and it would be valuable for the rest of your church’s ministry, that’s not how it works. Style guides must be evaluated regularly to make sure they are up to date.
Somewhere in the style guide, let users know how to suggest changes and updates to the guide. Include an email address or a web form where suggestions can be sent.
Develop an annual cadence where you (and a team of others) look through the guide and see if there are glaring omissions.
Your church’s style guide will develop as your ministry does. Make sure you have an effective feedback loop in place to capture the needed changes.
Get started today. Your style guide is an important part of a successful church communications strategy.
To learn how to create a successful communications strategy to bring back members who have drifted away in the summer, download our free guide: The Fall Church Communications Playbook: The Ultimate Guide to Re-Engaging Your Church Family.
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