- Thanks For The Feedback; Douglas Stone & Sheila Heen. We have done an entire staff read on this one it was so good. Amazing book on giving and receiving feedback. Great for your team and your marriage. One of my top favorites this year.
- The 4:8 Principle; Tommy Newberry. Great book based off of Philippians 4:8 and our thought life.
- Man’s Search For Meaning; Victor E Frankl. Psychiatrist and WWII Holocaust Survivor. We cannot avoid suffering, but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward.
- Reinforcements; Heidi Grant. An amazing book on how to ask for help and how are typical instincts about asking others for help are wrong.
- The Power of Moments; Chip Heath & Dan Heath. How to create experiences that have extraordinary impact. Like the LA hotel ranked in the top 5 in all of LA because they deliver popsicles to your room for free on a silver platter.
- Excellence Wins; Horst Schulze. The cofounder of Ritz-Carlton shares his secrets on becoming the best in a world of compromise. Great book for your team with customer service insights. Every employee, down to the maid, is preapproved to spend up to $2000 to make a customer happy.
- Canoeing The Mountains; Tod Bolsinger. On Lewis and Clark’s expedition west they took canoes in hopes of finding a waterway to the Pacific Ocean. Instead they encountered mountains. What worked before may not work for you today.
- Never Split The Difference / Negotiating As If Your Life Depended Upon it; Chris Voss. A top former FBI hostage negotiator shares insights on talking anyone into (or out of) just about anything. *One of my top favorites!
- Building A Story Brand; Donald Miller. Clarifying your message so customers will listen. Absolute all-time favorite! He guides you through the story line of every great movie and how that applies in telling our story. Key for me . . . “Make your customer (members) the hero of the story. Not the church, not you, not even Jesus. Yes, Jesus has his role in the story . . . you’ll just have to read it if you haven’t. We went through an entire rebranding of our church, culture, logo, core values at the end of last year based upon this book.
- Younger Next Year; Chris Crowley & Henry S Lodge, M.D. “Live strong, fit, and sexy – until you’re 80 and beyond.” is the sub title. For all of my older pastor friends on the back half of life – this is an inspiring book to get off your backside and work-out while you achieve the greatest amount of results. This upped my work-out pace and I dropped five pounds in the process. The book does get a little repetitious in the last half.
99Designs.com is an internet graphics company where graphic artist from around the world COMPETE to win your business. I am very picky when it comes to logos and I was highly skeptical that the process would produce a logo and icon I loved. I was stunned by the amazing options presented.
For both our church logo and youth ministry logo we had over 100 submissions and struggled to choose a winner from 3-5 excellent designs. Cost ranges between $399-1299 depending on the level of graphic artist you invite to compete. We will use 99designs any time we need a new brand, icon, or logo. They also do basic graphic and web work but we have not utilized that portion.
Here are some important steps in the process.
- Know what you like and don’t like. What colors and style do you prefer? Contemporary, traditional, modern? Surf the internet and find some “styles” of church or corporate logos you like. The more info you give them up front the more satisfied you will be when ideas start rolling in. **Take screen shots of logos you like as you will have an option to upload them for the artist to preview.
- Here is a good article to help you identify the “type” of logo you desire: https://99designs.com/blog/tips/types-of-logos/
- We chose to “guarantee” a contest winner. This will engage more artist early in the process as they know a winner will be paid. You do have the option to wait for payment further into the process.
- It is CRUCIAL that once a contest begins you stay on top of the submissions to rate them and give feedback on EVERY submission. Note: most of the artist are from outside the US and in a different time zone. Tell them what you like or don’t like. Trash the ones that are not even close. This helps dial in your finalist quicker.
- After the five-day contest you will choose SIX finalists to take to the final round. There you will work with each of them to dial in their logo and ultimately choose a winning design. *With the time difference I had to ask for an extension of the contest for two days to get all final submissions back. The staff member at 99Designs will assist you with that if needed.
- Feedback from creative people in various age demographics is important to the process. When in doubt, lean toward the younger generation’s input. My suggestion . . . allow people to narrow the field to your top 2-3 designs, but bottom line, you as the head of the organization HAS to ultimately love it because you are the one who will live with it. That millennial employee may not be around in 12 months.
- Below are the new church and youth logos. As you can see in the Rock logo, once a design was chosen, they gave it to us in multiple formats and styles. I was pursuing a clean modern logo with mountains. Clean crisp fonts, not cursive or swirly fonts. “Rock” was to be the anchor word. The artist probably had no idea he was being used by the Holy Spirit but here are the facets that helped me decide on this icon:
- The bottom half of the icon represents Jesus is the Rock we build our lives upon.
- The top half represents that we are the visible reflection of Christ to the world.
- We must grow deeper (bottom half) in order to grow higher (top half).
- Our lives interlock in unity and love as a church which is represented by combining the two outside bars that now appear to interlock.
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