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How your church presents itself visually is incredibly important. People are increasingly visual learners, so your church needs to ensure it presents a compelling visual aesthetic in everything you do. Even if you have a graphic designer on your staff, the increased visual needs can be difficult to keep up with. You need to keep things fresh and current, and in order to do that you need help.

In the past, we’ve talked about using Virtual Assistants in local churches. Today, we want to challenge you to “outsource” some of the graphic design tasks your church should be doing to a third-party design firm. We strongly endorse Design Pickle. They provide flat rate, unlimited design services for a fraction of what it costs to hire a full-time designer. We’d encourage your church to check it out — drop by this site to learn more. Here are five design tasks you should consider outsourcing right away:

• Social Media Graphics // To keep people engaged on social media, you need to keep feeding Facebook, Instagram and whatever other networks you connect on new visuals. Take images of your senior pastor teaching and combine them with quotes from the messages for compelling quote squares. Repurpose the announcement slides from your weekend services into social media infographics that remind people about upcoming events at your church. Both of these tasks are really template driven and disappear so quickly — it’s best to outsource them to another firm rather than having your team do them.
• Repurposed Series Graphics // Many churches create compelling series graphics that entice people to attend their church. Often a core look is created and then derivatives of that image are produced (e.g., cover for the program, Facebook cover, website header graphics, email header, Twitter square, etc.). Rather than having your team do all the “downstream” work, have them focus on the core creative work and then pass the “repurposing” on to a third-party group to do.
• Department Flyers // Your youth department has new events every few weeks. They need great looking flyers but you don’t want the youth ministry staff spending time making their flyers look pretty … you want them building up leaders and reaching students. Have your team pull together the event name, description “blurb,” and date/time/location details, along with a couple other advertisements they like, and give them to a firm like Design Pickle to do the work. The student team will be happy because they will get more design time and variety. If you have a communications department, they will be happy for not having to dream up a new approach every time.
• Sunday Morning Slides // Many churches have a “slide rotation” that plays before every service. These pre-service ads often include information about upcoming events, images of staff and general information about the church. Keeping these images up to date can be a pain, as the information on them is constantly in flux. (Not to mention that not many people are sitting in most auditoriums before the start of the service, meaning the design team has low motivation to do these graphics!) Why not email the changes on these graphics to a third-party firm every week and have them turn around what needs to be done?
• Internal Reports // You know that boring chart you send to people every month? How about that monthly report you do for your leadership team? What about those slides at your quarterly staff meeting? The people receiving your internal communications deserve it to look great. Often churches with great “external facing” graphics have really crappy looking internal communications. That shouldn’t be so! Excellent communications with your team breeds excellence as they interact with their teams. Send those internal communications pieces to a low-cost external firm to make sure they look great and communicate what you want them to.

The key to any third-party service like outsourced graphic design is thinking of it as a way to increase your reach and impact — not just as a way to decrease cost. You’re doing more for less. Look for strategically important graphic design tasks that are regular and repetitive … those are great candidates for passing off to another firm.

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