Doing 4% less does not get you 4% less.

Doing 4% less may very well get you 95% less.

That’s because almost good enough gets you nowhere. No sales, no votes, no customers. The sad lie of mediocrity is the mistaken belief that partial effort yields partial results. In fact, the results are usually totally out of proportion to the incremental effort.

Church, please stop getting by. If you can’t do great, remarkable work…don’t do it. Do what you can be remarkable at. When you settle for mediocrity it’s not just ineffective it will often set people back 10x the amount. Let me give some examples:

If you can’t afford great creative for a mailing campaign…don’t do it.
If you can’t afford a powerful logo…don’t do it, just find a nice font.
If you aren’t ready for a remarkable website…don’t do it, use facebook.

Think about this, remarkable means being worthy of being noticed…especially being noticed as extraordinary. If you are doing anything less then that can you really say you’re effective as a church? If the message you bring isn’t worthy of being noticed what are you doing?

What do you need to stop doing…or start doing to be remarkable?

Tony did a Q&A with him as part of the promo for Catalyst and to talk about Seth’s “new” Triibes.com. I put “new” in quotation marks because quite honestly, I’m a bit surprised at the lack of ingenuity from Seth on this one. He started with genius…create a barrier to entry causing everyone that should be there to want to be there. But…then he used a boxed solution (ning.com) for the platform so when I log in I see what I see on every other site. Eh. Hopefully he will surprise me…so far, other than the fact that he’s narrowed down who’s involved which is nice, I’m not overly excited.

Then wander on over to Seth’s blog for a great post about n00bs….but the n00bs part isn’t what caught my attention this did:

Great design is intuitive. Great design eliminates confusion. But not for everyone, not all the time. The words and interactions you use often have a sophistication that will confuse some portion of your audience.

It supports my ranting about design being about more than the prettiness (yep that’s a real word), it’s about communication. In fact I am no longer calling what we do church marketing…Holy Cow Creative is a strategic church communications + design studio. We will always take it in that order 1. Communications 2. Design.