New Hope UCC

A rebrand for a nonprofit goes deeper than a new logo. For New Hope Church, the work started with roughly 10 hours of listening which included a marketing committee kickoff meeting plus one-on-one conversations with members and friends of the congregation before any visual design began. From those conversations, we developed a full brand strategy including a value proposition, decision-making questions the staff and members could use to evaluate new initiatives, an internal vocabulary guide, and voice guidelines built from language members actually used. The visual identity, developed by creative strategist Paul Bourne, came after the strategy was clear — so the logo, color palette, and typography reflected who the congregation actually is rather than what a designer imagined a church should look like.

When two nonprofits merge, the branding challenge is holding onto what each community brought to the union while creating something that feels new not a compromise between the two. For New Hope, formed by the merger of Pilgrim Faith and Salem UCC in Oak Lawn, Illinois, that meant honoring the food pantry serving 2,300 people annually, the tradition of handmade blankets for homebound neighbors, and the theological identity both congregations shared, while building a visual and verbal identity flexible enough to represent everything the combined church would do next. The result was a lettermark that doubles as a symbol of community — a small group of people, arm in arm, forming an "N" and "H."

While churches need money to keep the doors open and the lights on, a church’s mission isn't about driving revenue. It’s primary goal is to serve people and make them feel like they belong before they walk through the doors. That shift changes almost every marketing decision. Instead of building funnels and conversion paths, you build welcome experiences. Instead of measuring cost per acquisition, you measure whether people feel safe, seen, and connected.

For New Hope, we built a short set of decision-making questions the staff could use to evaluate new initiatives including "will this help people feel like they belong" and "are we lowering anxiety and raising connection" so the marketing decisions stayed aligned with the mission.

Authentic brand voice comes from listening to the people who already belong to your community, not from applying a template. For New Hope, we spent hours in one-on-one conversations with members and captured the exact words people used to describe their church. Members consistently described the tone the same way — hopeful, uplifting, energizing — and pushed back on both performative evangelical theatrics and stiff traditional churchy polish. That specificity shaped the entire voice guide. If it came out of a real conversation with a real member, it had a place in the brand.

Yes. While NEW Marketing Solutions specializes in performing arts marketing and audience development, the underlying methodology — deep listening, behavioral science-informed strategy, and building brands that create belonging rather than just visibility — applies to any mission-driven organization working on community, audience, or member engagement. New Hope Church in Oak Lawn is a recent example of that work in a non-arts context, and Nicole Wetzell partners with trusted creative collaborators like Paul Bourne when a project requires additional specialized expertise.