The NewSpring Creative Process

I get the great pleasure of working at NewSpring Church on our in-house Creative Team. We’re currently around 35 strong, with designers, motion graphics designers, filmmakers, producers, project managers, and various other support and leadership roles.

NewSpring is a multi-site (19 and growing!) church with locations all over South Carolina, and a big web audience, as well. We stay busy. So busy, in fact, that sometimes we don’t take the necessary time to review our processes and systems for opportunities to do things better.

In the words of the great theologian Ferris Bueller:

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

You’ll never find the time to fix this stuff—you have to make it. So at the beginning of 2015, we made the time to look at the structure, process, and personnel of the Creative Team, and made some changes.

The biggest shift was moving to a structure with multiple Creative Directors (three of us, each with defined responsibilities for individual areas of the church) leading projects.

With those roles in place, we streamlined the creative process, too. Without a defined creative process, we knew that each Creative Director would do what felt best to them and best for the project, resulting in whiplash for the people involved, inconsistent work, and huge gaps between expectation and experience for everyone.

Our Current Creative Process

We aimed for clarity, simplicity (if possible), and a process the whole Creative Team would be able to embrace. We knew if we couldn’t describe it in a few words, a large group of busy humans was never going to stick to a new process.

Here’s where we landed:

1. Discover
2. Concept
3. Produce
4. Review

Clear, simple, memorable. During an ideal project, everyone knows what phase we’re in, what is expected of them at that time, what they can expect from their teammates, and which types of meetings will happen. We don’t always get it right (I’ll highlight some of the difficulties we’ve experienced at the end of the article) but so far it has served us, and our church, well.

Phase 1: Discover

Photo by Joshua Earle

The purpose of our Discovery phase is to learn a few key things:

1. Who are we working with? We serve the various ministries of our church (our Sunday Services, Kids and Student ministries, etc.) To serve them well, we need to know their overall vision and the personalities of the people we’ll be working alongside.
2. Who they want to reach? Who is the intended audience for the project? A tip: “You know, everyone!” is not an acceptable answer here. If you aim at everything, you won’t hit anything. We press in to narrow the audience as much as possible to ensure a clear target.
3. What does the ministry want to accomplish? What is the end goal for the project? How does that goal align with what the audience wants?

To discover these things, we ask a lot of questions. Sometimes these questions are informal, and sometimes we use specific group excercises to get that information.

A quick example of Discovery:

I was meeting with our Missions Team to discuss how we could raise awareness for upcoming trips abroad. But before we could produce any deliverables, before we ever made the first sketch or storyboarded a scene or wrote a line of copy, we needed to discover who they were as a ministry.

To get started, we did two simple excercises that didn’t cost anything but time and a few office supplies:

1. The team members individually answered the question, “Who is NewSpring Missions?” on an index card. Then I instructed them to work together to collaborate one answer they all agreed upon.
2. Then they individually answered the question, “What does NewSpring Missions do?” with a single verb per stickie note. When you paste these up on a wall in groupings you get a sort of bell curve with densities around common themes and duplicate answers.

The results were fascinating—none of the common verbs in their bell curve were in their “Who are we?” statement, and nothing in the statement was pasted up on the wall.

So…what do we do with that? There’s something wrong, right? Either they’re aspiring to be something they aren’t, or they’re doing a lot of things that aren’t in keeping with who they are. When purpose and actions don’t align, it’s not surprising the previous promotional items and engagment were falling flat. If we don’t know who we are, why would anyone be drawn to what we have to offer?

Since that meeting, we’ve been able to to focus on the disparity between their purpose and actions, and work to align who they are with what they do. That way, as we produce deliverables for them that our people see and experience, those videos, print pieces, etc. are built on a firm foundation.

The Win for Discovery

If we’ve done a good job with the Discovery phase, we know the ministry, their intended audience, and what they want to accomplish with the project. Good discovery is what fuels the rest of the process. Without it, we’re likely still creating work, but it’s probably the wrong work, and won’t accomplish their goals.

The end deliverable of the Discovery phase is information. We get what we need to move forward to the next phase.

Phase 2: Concept

Photo by Angelina Litvin

After the Discovery phase, we have enough information to start the Concept phase, which is made up of a few key steps:

Brainstorming

Brainstorming can get a bad rap, and rightly so. If you throw a bunch of people in a room and say, “Be creative! Go!” with no agenda or prior knowledge of the project, you’re not going to get good, consistent results.

But brainstorming can be powerful and useful if we’re intentional about how we do it. For our brainstorm meetings, we follow Ideo’s excellent 7 Tips for Better Brainstorming, differentiating between Open Brainstorms (blue sky, no need to think about how or even if we can pull off the ideas) and Closed Brainstorms (the core idea is already decided on, and we’re creatively thinking of how we’ll execute it). That differentiation is key to everyone knowing what’s expected of them in the meeting. We also make frequent use of the book Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers, which has dozens of games and excercises to jumpstart the creative process.

Recently, we’re trying something new with brainstorming. Instead of putting each project team through the process, the Creative Directors have a standing once-a-week brainstorm with a set agenda. We invite various people from the larger team in for a four-week commitment. Most of the time, the people in that brainstorm won’t end up being the people working on the project.

So far, we’re finding the idea generation out of these to be high-quality, usable content that gets us to a much better Creative Brief, faster.

The Creative Brief

Once we have a solid concept (or concepts), the Creative Director and Project Manager write/design a Creative Brief. This is simply a document designed to inspire and inform the people working on the project. It includes the audience(s), goal(s), constraints, and most of the logistical details, too. We’ve been using Evernote’s Presentation Mode for these because it lets us make the briefs a little more visually interesting (moodboards, animated gifs, etc.) and easy to share.

The Internal Pitch

After the brief happens, the team members assigned to the project work on concepts and present those back to the Creative Director. From there revisions or changes are made, or the concept is green lit by the Creative Director and we move forward.

The Ministry Pitch

Once the Creative Director is comfortable with the concept, we present to the Ministry for approval and can either move forward, go back to the Creative Team with revisions, or start the process over completely.

A note here: if we have to completely reset the project back because the concept is universally rejected, we failed somewhere in the Discovery phase. There will always be personal preferences at play that we have to navigate, but if the concept is rejected for not hitting the vision or audience, we simply didn’t do our homework.

Phase 3: Produce

Photo by s w

Production is the unglamorous, unsexy, rarely-discussed nuts and bolts work. The thorns and thistles. The sweat of your brow. The ground fighting against you.

Production is probably the longest phase, but I have the least to say about it — this is the work. Putting pen to paper, pushing pixels, writing, the logistics of ordering and delivery, press checks, film sets, craft services, proofing, editing, revisions, etc. We can dedicate future articles to the work itself.

Phase 4: Review

Photo by Jens Mayer

This is the easiest phase to skip. This is the worst phase to skip.

Seriously, don’t skip it.

If we never review a project, we never get the opportunity to learn from it.

Every project is a unique combination of people, personalities, constraints (time, money, vision), successes, failures, and details. It’s essentially unrepeatable—a unique and beautiful snowflake. Each time our team accomplishes a thing together it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn something new that we can apply to the next one.

Unless we miss it.

When we don’t review, those details fade. We forget. The snowflake melts. We’re on to the next thing. And the opportunity to learn and grow gets lost as we scramble to get ready for Sunday Sunday Sunday.

In church world, Sunday is always coming. But Sunday won’t get better if we don’t. And we can’t without regular reviews.

For our reviews, we keep it simple:

1. Get all the people who touched the project in a room for 15–30 minutes.
2. Thank them.
3. Celebrate what worked about the process and the project.
4. Critique what didn’t work about the process and the project.

Over time, we can identify patterns, and work to change the underlying issues, whether they be process, project type, or personnel. When we review, we grow, we change, and the next project(s) are better for everyone involved.

Proverbs 26:11–12 has a pointed metaphor to drive this point home:

As a dog returns to its vomit,
so fools repeat their folly.
Do you see a person wise in their own eyes?
There is more hope for a fool than for them.

Don’t be that dog. Review your projects!

Failures Along the Way

When we’re critiquing a process, we look at the individual instances of failure, but we’re more interested in the patterns—where are we repeatedly failing? What are the things everyone on a project is feeling? Those are our opportunities to improve on a large scale. Those are the big wins.

Here are a few points of failure we’re actively working on:

We forget to review projects.

Yeah, I know, I know…what a bunch of hypocrites. Like I said, it’s the easiest phase to skip. We’re having to intentionally shift the team culture to reimagine what “done” means.

Done is not when the task is checked off your list. Done is not when the presscheck has happened, or the final edit was approved. A project isn’t done until it’s reviewed.

We make the Creative Brief too loose.

The brief is the opportunity to define the vision of the project. Everyone should walk away from that meeting with a clear understanding of where to go from here. If someone working on a project doesn’t know what they’re doing after the Brief, it’s the Creative Director’s responsibility to help fix it.

We make the Creative Brief too rigid.

We have a huge team of talented, smart, dedicated people who want to do good work. But if we tell them exactly what to do, we miss out on what they might have done. What a loss!

We (the Creative Directors) aren’t in the trenches enough.

If the person directing the project isn’t around for enough of the details of the project, it doesn’t set anyone up for success. Assumptions run wild, expectations aren’t met, communication doesn’t happen, and the project suffers for it.

We’ve positioned the Creative Directors as the primary vision-carriers for each project. And as Andy Stanley says, “Vision doesn’t stick; it doesn’t have natural adhesive. Instead, vision leaks.” We have to consistently, clearly cast the vision for a project throughout the life of that project, from Discovery through Concept, Production, and Review. If not, the vision leaks. The project veers off course, often too far to bring back under tight timelines.

But to make that vision stick, we’ve got to be around. We have to make the time to be the vision carrier and give our team what they need to stay on course. As Shane Duffey says, we need to be available, visible, and valuable.

We expect everyone to have the same skillset.

Obviously we all have job descriptions, and we do different things. But early on we were expecting everyone on a project to come to a brainstorm, actively participate, and produce the same level of great ideas.

That’s a nice goal, but it doesn’t take into account a simple fact—some people are better at ideation than others. Some people can’t easily turn off the part of their brain that says, “yeah, but how are we going to pull that off?”

Brainstorming, ideation, and blue sky thinking can be taught. Everyone can participate. But identifying people who are already strong in these areas and giving them opportunities use their gifts sets us all up for better ideas.

Some people really aren’t great at execution, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable to the creative process. Maybe they’re amazing at idea generation. And on the flip side, letting the people who excel at execution finish projects, see them through on time and under budget and somehow manage to find that last 10% that makes an idea go from average to amazing, that’s just good stewardship of our team.

In Ephesians 4:12 the Apostle Paul talks about how different people have different gifts, “to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up…” We’re currently learning what putting the right people with the right skillsets in the right seats can do to help us build up the whole church. That seems like a far better goal than forcing every person on the team into a narrow process where they may or may not be able to thrive.

Final Thoughts

Martin André Rosanoff was a chemist who went to work for Thomas Edison in 1903. On his first day in the lab, he asked, “Mr. Edison, please tell me what laboratory rules you want me to observe.”

In response, Edison spat on the floor and said:

Hell! There ain’t no rules around here! We are tryin’ to accomplish somep’n!

A process is just that—a way of accomplishing something. A tactic in service of a bigger goal. We can never let the tactics become the mission. Tactics always can (and should!) be analyzed for improvement and, if necessary, change. Our creative process is no different.

We’ll keep you updated on how it’s going!