Communicating in Multi-Ethnic Communities.

I work at the Sanctuary Covenant Church in Minneapolis, MN. As far as churches are concerned, we are a rarity. We’re a church of more than a 1,000 people, in the city, with a multi-ethnic community of participants that is vastly unlike most churches in America.

On any given Sunday, our people gather, roughly 50% European-Americans, 40-45% African-Americans, and roughly 5% or so of other ethnicities. This presents challenges on so many levels. People are here for many different reasons. We’re young, we’re hip, we bring in da funk’ (notice how white I am?).

Design and Communication for inter-cultural communities present the very challenges that you’d expect:

1. Language is not common. Different words have different meanings to different cultural groups.
2. Imagery doesn’t represent the combined audience. Unless you’re using real pictures from you’re real community, stock imagery will likely feign multi-ethnicity with unrealistic representations.
3. The motivation is not the same. Some white folks are here for specific reasons, some black folks are here for other reasons. It’s a major challenge to find the heart and mind motivators that are common amongst us.

I am by no means an expert, but I would suggest 4 helps for communicating to a multi-cultural audience:

1. Engage your audience, invest in relationships. Beyond anything you do, investing time into cross-cultural relationships will bring perspective on your design and communication strategies that no book, blog or axiom can help you with. Relationships matter. Listening and learning people’s stories, passions and pursuits will shape your content.
2. Keep it simple. If you can’t communicate it in 3 or 4 bullet points, it’s unlikely information is going to be retained anyway. Keeping it simple means keeping it accurate and to the point. Let your images do the motivating and let your text do the informing.
3. Be yourself. Don’t try to be something you’re not. If you are a clean cut designer and it’s hip hop day at church, stay clean cut, but add a twist of hip hop. People will know if you’re trying to over-reach beyond your style.
4. Track results and modify your approach. Find out who is showing up and why. Who didn’t show up? Pay attention to the details and ask questions to learn why one approach may have had a huge reach, while others had a shorter reach.

Homogeneity will kill the church. A multi-cultural generation is growing up with multi-ethnicity as a baseline. If the church isn’t aggressive in connecting across culture during these global cultural shifts, we’re going to continue to see church attendance and participation in steady decline.