This fall our church Sojourn is hosting the Word & Words Conference – Christian reflections on reading, writing and storytelling. As a communications staff, we wanted to come up with a fun, interesting way to tell people about this conference. So, graphic designer extraordinaire Chris Bennett dreamed up a Mad Lib-styled poster, where people could fill in their own adjectives, verbs and other parts of speech.
I knew at first glance that it was one of Chris’s best concepts, and that is saying a lot. So I thought,
What if we design this as a small Sunday insert, with the word game on one side and the “real” conference promotion on the other side? Then we can give them to the elementary school kids in our Sunday SojournKids classes. They’ll play the word game, and then give the whole insert to their parents.
You see an example in the photo above, with my son Logan as the guinea pig who played the game.
Then I created an online version of the game using Wufoo Forms, and embedded it into our church blog.
Next, I posted a selection of results from our church members on the church blog, here and here.
Are we also doing some “normal” promotions for this event?
Of course.
But just telling people, “Come to our event,” all the time is boring — for you and for them. The Word & Words game got a lot of people talking about the conference, because the game is fun. And if the game is fun, then the conference might be fun. And who doesn’t want more fun?
None of this would have been possible without the outside-the-box thinking of the designer. Fortunately, all of us on the Sojourn staff feel empowered to try different things, even if we occasionally bomb. If you’re a pastor or on church communications staff, think about ways you can “think different” yourself, and how you can encourage everyone on your team to do the same.