You should know there's a new slj site! Check it out

I cringed as I held up the poster of little stick people with happy faces playing guitars. The advertisement read: "Prayer & Praise night with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Tuesday, 6:30 p.m. All welcome."

"One of our agenda items tonight is to talk about our publicity. What do you think of this poster?"

"Too churchy."

"It’s tacky."

"Way stereotypical."

"Just plain embarrassing," came the answers from the students on our executive committee. We all agreed that our publicity was lacking.

"Why are we using a poster like this one?" I asked.

"We left it up to Bill [not his real name] and, well, he’s the only person on the advertising committee," said one of the students.

"And he was in a hurry because he had mid-terms the next day and this is the only poster that he could come up with." And on it went. Ouch! Poor Bill. And poor publicity as a result.

Posters are powerful
With a campus of nearly 14,000 full-time students and another 3,000 part-time, it’s probably true that the vast majority of them will never attend our InterVarsity meetings. But it’s also true that the closest they may ever get to our chapter is reading our posters. So why do we settle for such poor advertising?

After ten years of doing campus work, I’ve learned that whatever you put up as your advertising becomes the face of your chapter. For some students, advertising seems like a crass topic for spirituality, but its power is real. Advertising is a powerful tool. The business world knows this. Coke^® knows it. Nike^® knows it. So why then do Christian believers use tacky stick people to represent the King of Kings? It just doesn’t make sense.

Seize the opportunities
The potential of communicating to students through our advertising is something we don’t want to miss. Most students fall into regular routines during their weekly schedules on campus. They walk past the coffee shop on the way to their 8:30 a.m. class, slide through the turnstile into the library at noon, head into the lab at 3 p.m. and then pass the campus bookstore at 5 p.m. to head home for supper. On their daily routes through the campus, students look at the regular weekly advertising. They even come to expect it if the advertising is consistent enough. This is a valuable opportunity to communicate to students.

As our leaders’ meeting continued, I held up another poster. It had a black and white photograph of a barren tree in a wintery landscape, austere and bleak, yet compelling. It had a dramatic artistic quality about it. It looked cruel and haunting; it made you feel like turning your coat collar up. Whose club could this poster possibly represent? You’d have to look twice to see that it was the Russian Club. But then it all made sense.

Next, I held up a Student Travel Club poster. The title of the poster was made of ripped-out newspaper letters that had been pasted together in a black, white and gray collage. Each of the faces in the poster was composed of individual, torn-out parts of other faces, all pasted together--again a collage. It had a funky, alternative look and feel. It looked thrown together, yet every letter was intentionally placed on the page. You might see a poster like this plastered up in a subway tunnel or in the doorway of a Bohemian cafe. It looked like a very cool travel club. What student wouldn’t be interested in such a sharp presentation?

"Okay," I ventured, "which posters are you drawn to?"

By now we were having a hard time staying serious. The answer was so obvious that it was humorous. The students all agreed: yes, the Russian and travel club posters were far superior. We all laughed together in recognition of how much we had missed the boat in our publicity.

Our discussion continued with the next question: "What do we want our advertising to be like? What is our ‘look’?" The alternative style emerged as the main topic of our discussion. It’s in tune with the mindset on our campus. We liked this style of publicity and chose to run with it.

Good publicity pays off
The following school year was one of our best years for publicity. The students (not just one person alone!) made it a priority to do superior work in advertising and it paid off. Students’ non-Christian roommates began commenting on how good the InterVarsity posters were that year. We persevered with our new and improved publicity.

Art isn’t the only important element in good posters. In the next months, we focused on the wording in our advertising. "Less is more" is a true adage. Finding succinct and catchy titles for events takes energy and work. Once, as we discussed themes at a planning weekend, we wanted to come up with a way to communicate our monthly theme on outreach in a way that described Jesus but didn’t sound too plain. After what seemed like a thousand suggestions, one student came up with the catchy title "Grace, Mercy and Dining with Thieves." It was perfect. We added a wonderful print of Jesus standing in a food line feeding street people. Something very powerful was being communicated through our poster--Christ identifying with the poor and becoming one of them. Jesus in a food line, feeling the pain and humiliation of hunger. "Grace, Mercy and Dining with Thieves" communicates the kindness of Jesus to our eyes, ears and ultimately our hearts. This would minister to the unbeliever; it was ministering to us at that moment. We sensed the warmth of God’s mercy. It even cut through our sometimes thick evangelical hearts. This was the Jesus that humankind could trust. This was the Jesus that we wanted to communicate on campus. I couldn’t help but think that God was with us as we made our publicity a priority.

Hearing God
God is very interested in communication. He wants to reveal himself through the advertising on campus in creative and loving ways, but we need to have a vision for creative, quality communication. Part of the solution is to have a greater commitment to quality publicity, and I believe that God will help us create compelling communication styles if we seek them out.

Despite what we think, people really are listening to us. Sometimes, they are looking closer than we would like, and little stick people aren’t going to cut it. We need to communicate visually in ways that will capture the eyes of the campus because the King of Kings wants to lovingly capture every heart on campus. He wants the campus to know him. We need to reveal him as he is.