RETHINK CHURCH is a branded communication effort from The United Methodist Church (UMC), reaching out to the seeker audience: those without a church home but looking for greater meaning in their lives. The client wanted to raise awareness in a subsegment of that target — seekers with young children. UMC challenged LOOMIS to create a branding campaign that would engage and intrigue those parents.
Of all the seeker subgroups, parents with young children are most likely to be searching for a church home. Those who attended a United Methodist Church growing up, now with kids of their own, may want their family involved with a faith-based community. This segment is also interested in helping others, so the “putting beliefs into action” approach of the Wesleyan denomination would also be attractive.
Our idea was to interview a diverse group of UMC kids and get their authentic responses to fairly deep and meaningful subjects. We envisioned a highly sharable, integrated campaign highlighting engaging sound bites of the kids speaking from their hearts about how United Methodists believe in open hearts, open minds, and open doors.
Capturing interviews with over sixty kids, we compiled enough footage to support a two-year integrated campaign, covering topics from the UMC brand pillars to major holidays, social issues, and personal growth. With dozens of executions, the campaign became an aspirational portrayal of UMC children that communicated the beliefs of the church through the children’s words.
For the special Black History Month edition of USA Today, we created a double-page spread around the topic of kindness and equality. It was featured in the publication’s coveted center fold position and distributed nation-wide.
Digital campaigns supported the brand message while driving to RETHINKCHURCH.org, where visitors were exposed to the library of videos as well as expanded content. Social channels used organic and boosted posts to supplement the campaign. When we started seeing burn-out, we updated the creative look and feel, successfully refreshing the campaign for a longer life-span.
Beyond raising awareness, the campaign drove over 230K users to the RETHINKCHURCH website in the span of 18 months. Across search, social, video, display, and native channels, LOOMIS was able to deliver over 5,000 newsletter sign-ups and location searches. Ad interaction inspired over 20K complete article reads on the RETHINKCHURCH site, and 5,000 complete video views.
– Jennifer Rodia, UMC Chief Communications Officer
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