Welcome to the Resolve series, in which the KPC team explores top 5 takeaways from the McGrath Institute for Church Life’s Church Communications Ecology Program at the University of Notre Dame. This week, we explore what it means to be authentic and vulnerable.

Happy New Year!

What’s your New Year’s resolution? Grow your team? Improve internal communication? Embrace a culture of co-responsibility?

KP Consulting team member Anne Steffens was recently invited to speak to seminarians at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary.

“Babe, why is there a skull in the bottom of this mug?” my husband asked carefully, peering into the depths of an otherwise unremarkable black coffee cup.

Happy Thanksgiving! We are grateful for the opportunity to work alongside so many great organizations as we advance the mission of the Church in the modern world.

#Awakenthehunger is more than just a social media hashtag for Katie Pesha and her colleagues at KP Consulting Group. In fact, awakening the hunger for Christ among the faithful is one of the most important outcomes we expect to achieve when we collaborate with parishes, schools and other Catholic institutions. We know that goodness builds upon goodness when we “awaken the hunger” in our faith-based communities.

If she weren’t so busy reinvigorating her family’s once-ubiquitous chain of highway-roadside convenience stores, I think Stephanie Stuckey would be a great addition to the KP Consulting Group team. Because when it comes to being a brand evangelizer, she speaks our language.

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to participate in the inaugural McGrath Institute for Church Life’s Church Communications Ecology Program at the University of Notre Dame.

Have a blessed and prayerful Easter Season, for our team to you and your family.

In her recent blog post “Finding your Community’s Charism,” Katie Pesha advocates for Catholic parishes and other ministries to “celebrate… and build our individual brand identities, our public personas, around the normative story of our charism.”

For Valentine’s Day this year, the KPC team let me write about something I really, really love - the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Over the past thirteen years the MCU has rolled out The Infinity Saga in three phases, with more than twenty films, each telling one chapter in a massive, interlocking story.

In marketing, we spend a lot of time talking about the power of a brand. A brand is often defined as “a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.” In other words a brand is based upon someone’s individual perceptions due to their experience or recognition of an image.

I am positively convinced that God has a sense of humor.

Why?

Because I have just written a book called Providential. It’s 324 pages, nearly 65,000 words, more than 370,000 characters. Providential is a memoir, an exploration of the gift of God’s providence in my life over time. In the book, I share stories – many humorous, some more serious – that demonstrate how God, in conjunction with my free will, has worked his plan for me.

We know that a “brand” is nothing more than one’s perception of a product, a service, an experience or an organization. And as one of my former bosses said frequently, “A brand is a promise, and a great brand is a promise kept.”

Each year on the Feast of St. Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers and journalists, the Church releases the message for World Communications Day. This year’s theme for the 55th World Communications Day is “Come and See (Jn 1:46) Communicating by Encountering People as They Are.”

Early last week, Katie introduced us to the importance of a strong brand; this week, Steve shared how the Church can struggle with staying on message. Now, we’ll look at how a strong, well-established brand can simplify fundraising and connect donors to your mission.

Last week, I popped into a fabric store. As soon as I stepped into the arctic blast of AC, I saw a jolting summertime sight: fresh bolts of Christmas fabric, on the NEW ARRIVALS display shelves.

Let’s all take 5 seconds and let out whatever feelings you have about Starbucks (They hate Catholics! I’d die without a venti iced soy caramel frappuccino! Overpriced burnt swill! PSL fan for life!) Ok, good, now let’s move on and admit that they know a thing or two about management, branding, and marketing and see what we can learn. 

The week before last, I wrote about the 2018 Pew Research Center study revealing a new typology of religion in America. The typology finds three major categories, and seven types of believers within the core categories.

When it comes to evangelizing during the coronavirus pandemic, is the Church more like Best Buy or J.C. Penney?