Franciscan Friars of the Holy Spirit
Rebranding, Strategic Marketing Plan, Web Design, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Print Design
The Backstory
The Franciscan Friars of the Holy Spirit are a young religious order located in the Diocese of Phoenix. They’re dedicated to a life of penance and prayer, and called to serve the abandoned and marginalized, especially the Native American communities around Phoenix.
As a young and tech-savvy order, they realized that their current website was getting in the way of building relationships with the benefactors that are so vital to their ministry.
Having recently lost their marketing team member, their Director of Mission Advancement was trying to do it all. He was trying to do so much that he couldn’t focus on the work of building relationships with benefactors and fundraising.
The old website took too much time to edit and was too cluttered with content that wasn’t laid out in a user-friendly way.
They needed someone who understood them to partner with who could help breathe new life into their vision and help them stay on mission.
The Challenge
- Their branding was inconsistent and didn’t resonate with their target audience.
- Website was divided into too many categories and didn’t have any clear priorities or purpose. It was being treated like a junk drawer of information.
- Branding didn’t express the maturity and gravity of what they do because it was targeting a younger audience. They really needed to focus on reaching benefactors. These two priorities weren’t aligned.
- Print collateral did not reflect the overall brand.
- There wasn’t enough time in the day for the friars to do it all on their own: Social Media, Email marketing, Design and Copywriting, etc. Also, the cost of hiring an additional team member full-time would limit the number of specialists they could leverage.
The Strategy
Rebranding
- Determine target audience for the new website.
- Simplify messaging and update branding to convey competence, and cultivate confidence. Professional quality speaks to the authenticity of who the friars are.
- Develop new branding that reflects who they are, where they are, and the quality of what they do, with primary focus on consistent branding.
Strategic Marketing Plan
- Provide direction for all marketing efforts by developing a five-year plan.
- Create two user personas: one for their ideal donor and one for young men discerning a vocation to religious life.
- Schedule monthly meetings with the client to continuously assess marketing strategy and make adjustments when needed.
Web Design
- Design the website with the target audience in mind. Make relationship-building via the website a priority, and make it easy.
- Align branding, messaging, and website structure to reflect the User Persona and User Journey.
- Remove extra content that distracts the user from their main objective.
- Streamline content and communicate through optimized channels—social media and email.
- Make clear that the best way to support them at the moment is by helping to increase their donations.
Email Marketing
- Update email branding to create a cohesive look and feel with new website, social media, and print collateral.
- Design email templates based on content clusters: types of content the Friars want to share in order to add value to their subscribers’ lives.
- Create a content calendar centered on weekly messages to drive engagement and financial support as well as communicate events, promotions, and community news.
Social Media Marketing
- Rebrand Facebook and Instagram pages. Incorporate new brand assets into posts, creating a cohesive feel between all marketing channels. Give feeds a professional, polished look.
- Curate content to build relationships between the Friars and followers, making sure all posts are engaging and personal.
- Announce community events such as Healing Masses and share news and other relevant information.
Print Collateral
- Design business cards, prayer request cards, contact cards, donation cards, and ads in local magazines, newspapers, and parish bulletins.
- Write copy and design a vocations brochure to help young men take the next step in their vocational discernment.
Fundraising with Marketing Strategy
- Revise, edit, and design monthly message and appeal letters. Include assertive calls to action that clearly communicate how a recipient can donate and how their donations make a difference.
- Develop assets, advertisements, and email marketing messaging for FriarQ, the Friars’ largest annual fundraiser. This year’s FriarQ was their most successful ever, during which they brought in more money in a single night than ever before!
Why it Works
Focusing on what matters most and subordinating other efforts to that primary goal helps mission-oriented groups increase quality and leverage less work for greater impact.
In the case of the friars, the end result is a new website that is simplified, sleek, encourages engagement and conversions, and really captures who the friars are. The website is focused primarily on driving donations and secondarily on encouraging new vocations.
We are further fueling the effectiveness of the website with content curation for both print and digital assets, as well as strategic social media and email marketing campaigns to keep the Friars top-of-mind among potential donors.
By outsourcing much of the ongoing work a smaller team of full-time employees is able to increase the quality of what they’re doing and get the same work done for half the cost. Outsourcing social media management, email marketing, and design work allows the smaller team to increase the number of touchpoints the Friars have with greater professionalism.
