How are you packaging your message?

I’ve seen a lot of websites, newsletters, church bulletins, church service slides, and social media pages/posts…and some of it ain’t pretty. I’d love to say that it’s fine and that nobody judges your company/church/organization by the materials it produces – but that’s simply not true.

​​In the absence of an existing relationship, how else would someone make a decision about your organization? By the message it shares and the message’s packaging/presentation. Generally speaking, this is increasingly more true as we move from earlier generations (Baby Boomers & older) to later generations (Xennials, Millenials, Centennials, & younger).

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Xennials, or the Oregon Trail Generation, were born in the late 70s / early 80s, growing up as personal computers were gaining popularity in schools and in homes (hence the name). Later generations (including Millenials) grew up with even more interaction with computers and related technology (including social media). Take a brief trip with me through memory lane:

– Clipart – those cutesy, often pixelated, cartoonish graphics – became popular in the 80s and 90s. Nowadays in much of the professional world, clipart has been sent off to live in the land of floppy disks and physically going to buy software at CompUSA – Microsoft even ended their clip art library in 2014. Instead, we have high definition graphics and photography, scalable vector images, and flat design icons. We also have the high definition screens that require high definition images – lest you get blurry, pixelated, or thumbnail-sized images.

– Even our fonts have evolved. According to Wikipedia and Microsoft.com, the font Times New Roman debuted in 1932; Arial, Papyrus, Wingdings, Comic Sans, Tahoma, and Verdana all were released by 1996. With Windows 98, dozens of fonts were included, and now there is an unimaginable number of fonts in existence, making those old originals seem a little dated or amateurish at times, especially to those from younger generations. Papyrus and Comic Sans, in particular, have gained a very strong (negative) reputation…which passes on to its users, who won’t be taken seriously by a large portion of the population. [Yes, Comic Sans has been shown to be good for people who have dyslexia, but so has Tiresias, Sassoon, Century Gothic, Calibri, Myriad Pro, and Geneva according to dyslexic.com.] Just google “bad fonts” or similar and observe.

– PowerPoint was released on Microsoft in 1990, leading the change from physical transparencies and slides (remember those?) to slide shows / presentations. Today, there are scores of additional presentation programs available, from Prezi to Keynote to Google Slides. There are also several options specifically built for church worship services, such as Proclaim, Propresenter, EasyWorship, ShareFaith, and MediaShout.

– Excel became popular in the early 90s (replacing Lotus 1-2-3 as the standard for spreadsheets). In addition to simple spreadsheets, Excel (and other alternatives) handles calculation, pivot tables, macros, and graphing.

– MySpace started in 2003 and was the largest social networking site in the world from 2005 to 2008. In early 2004, Zuckerberg launched “TheFacebook,” whose membership was initially restricted to Harvard College students. Through a series of roll-outs, membership was eventually extended to other universities until it included most universities in the US and Canada. I’m an Xennial of an age where I actually remember waiting for the rollout to reach my university – then being thrilled when it finally arrived. In 2005, you could finally go to facebook.com instead of thefacebook.com – how novel! It wasn’t until 2006 that Facebook was opened up to anyone 13+ with a valid email address (I remember a bunch of us more ‘original’ university users bemoaning the idea of ‘high school kids’ and then ‘parents’ being allowed on ‘our’ site. By mid-2010, Facebook had 500 million members and half of them were using Facebook daily for an average of 34 minutes; at that time, Zuckerberg was confident they’d hit 1 billion users eventually. Today, of course, there are about 2 billion monthly active users, and Facebook doesn’t seem like it’s going away any time soon.

– Apple released the first generation GSM iPhone in 2007, making touchscreens a reality. The first Android smartphone was the T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream), released in the US in late 2008. I pined over it and finally bought one the following year; “the Google phone” allowed you to access Gmail on your phone (!), let you download other apps through the Android Market, and was great for customization/modding. Now, 77% of adults say they own a smartphone, and younger people are much more likely to own a smartphone than those who are older (92% for 18-to-29 year-olds vs 42% for ages 65+).

So what does this all mean?

Well, younger people – Xennials (in their mid-to-late 30s now) and younger – grew up surrounded with these disruptive technologies and innovations, which have evolved a great deal from their initial versions. Growing up with technology also means that using that technology (and beyond) is much more natural and ingrained – so there is a higher standard for technology and design among younger generations.

What looked super professional and cutting-edge in the 90s can look dated, amateur, trivial, and/or superficial today, especially to the younger crowd. If your goal is to impress and appeal only to older generations or people who don’t care about design, then clipart and comic sans will be…okay. However, if you want to appeal to younger generations and/or all generations, your design will need to be more clean and modern. (That doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to stay on top of the ultra-latest fads and trends – just learn and stick to what is considered classic and professional now.) On the plus side, generally no one will snub their nose at a good, clean design.

The same applies for social media (and not just Facebook): younger people have higher expectations for an organization’s web presence. I generally believe that it’s better to have no social media presence than a bad one, because a bad web presence is a huge turnoff (for younger people especially). For example, if you’re going to take the time to set up a Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Snapchat account, then you should also be prepared to maintain it to keep it interactive and up-to-date. Social media these days is often more about having a conversation in a community, not simply providing one-way information all the time.

All of this applies to anything associated with your company, organization, church, or community. If your website, social media accounts, newsletters, bulletins, worship service slides, reports, etc. look like they were designed in the 90s and never touched again…it will give a bad impression to a large portion of your consumers.


- Jen Jesse