Disciplines Used:

Qualitative Interviewing
Automation of Marketing Tools
Social Media Marketing
Basic Brand Design (Naming, Logo, Typography)
Wireframing
Website Build using Pagecloud (Domain purchase, hosting, drag and drop page editor)
Podcast Creation
Blog Creation

As part of a personal passion project, I posed a question, “What is the state of the small church in America?”

To answer this, I first began by writing up a project brief.

We’re asking small church pastors to give us 60-minutes of their time as we ask them some questions about their history, their church and the experiences they’ve had. We’ll be consolidating the findings for our own personal use. No names will be published without permission. Quotes from the interviews will not be published with your name attached to them. Depending on what we find, we may pursue building a proof of concept solution.

Then, I set out to interview at least 10 small church pastors (I ended up with 13). This involved:

Defining the audience selection criteria
Creating a set of interview questions
Reaching out to social media influencers to help me promote the project
Setting up an automated system for scheduling specific interview times. I used Typeform, Calendly and Google Sheets, and integrated all of them with Zapier. This created a seamless user flow, without the hassle of back and forth emails to find a time to meet, and kept me organized.

I ended up with pages of notes and transcripts which needed to be consolidated and analyzed to find the key nuggets of insights. Based on these insights, I decided to focus on two major areas: the lack of a consistent emphasis on prayer and the lack of unity either in their own congregation or amongst the neighboring churches.

The theme of prayer rose to the top in almost every interview. Pastors viewed it as important, yet for many it had fallen down the priority list. Many lamented the fact that they once prayed more than they did, and on numerous occasions pastors responded to questions on prayer by saying, “I need to do more of that.”

Within the topic of unity, several mini-themes rose to the surface: the relationship between worship and the pastor, the approach towards legacy (generational divides), the belief around best practice models or church growth methods and the existence of sacred cows. All of these smaller issues laddered up to the umbrella of a lack of unity in the body which seemed almost irreparable to many of the pastors I spoke with.

Based on these insights, I put together a concept called Men who Pray.

The name “Men who Pray” seemed to be the perfect blend:

Memorable and short
Direct and to the point
Very targeted to the primary audience
Spoke to the desired outcome of our target audience, to become Men who Pray

While the domain wasn’t originally available, I spoke with the domain owner and after several months, the domain became available.

In the meantime, I began to build out basic brand design elements and wireframes for the website.

I also created a content strategy centered around demonstrating the practice of regular prayer and worship. This became a podcast, hosted and recorded using Anchor.

In addition, I wanted to build a future vision for how we could support pastors and churches in person. This concept is represented by the graphic below.