Reaching Out to the Next Generation

Forty years down the road, Aglow International is reaching toward the future with a rebranding effort that targets young women.

By Laura Moss

A new sound could be heard at Aglow International’s Worldwide Conference last September in Seattle. You could hear it in the lively welcome from a group of young greeters at the city’s Washington State Convention & Trade Center, and in conversations in a dozen different languages as women young and old mingled in the center’s lobby. When the band Christ for the Nations took the stage on opening day, the new sound of Aglow echoed through the convention center and in the hearts of the more than 5,000 women in attendance.

That night Aglow International was celebrating its 40th anniversary—and a new generation of women. Staff had been working hard for months to reach out to younger women and to invite them to join Aglow, one of the largest organizations for Christian women in the world.

“The entire evening was designed to celebrate the young woman and youth in the body of Christ,” says Arvie Murff, special events and conference director for Aglow. “This was definitely a night for the young and young at heart.”

But just a year and a half before the conference, Aglow was in the throes of reinvention, facing the challenges of how to tap the next generation without fundamentally altering the organization’s identity.

“The catalyst was that we were approaching our 40th anniversary and we realized that we’d had a loyal group of women for 20 to 30 years—our audience was the same. We weren’t getting new, younger members,” explains Ledene Johnson, chief operating officer for Aglow, which is based in Edmonds, Washington, just outside Seattle. “While we wanted to keep our core message, we knew that it was getting a little stale,” she says. “We had to tell ourselves that this isn’t our mothers’ Aglow. It’s their Aglow, too.”

Same Mission, Different Delivery

Aglow was born in 1967 when four Seattle women gathered at a kitchen table and decided to form a women’s Christian group “without denominational barriers.” The first meeting was held in Seattle and about 100 women attended. Within months, Aglow groups were forming in states around the country. By 1974, Aglow had member organizations in Canada, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. Today, more than 4,600 Aglow groups meet in 172 countries.

Aglow’s three-fold mission is “to help restore and mobilize women, to promote gender reconciliation in the Body of Christ as God designed, and to amplify awareness of global concerns from a Biblical perspective.”

“We looked at our mission statement and decided it was still relevant as is, but at the same time, we had to dig deeper and look at who we are and how we are communicating that,” Johnson says.

To launch its rebranding efforts, Aglow partnered with the organizational development company The Elevation Group. Aglow also hired A. Larry Ross Communications, a Dallas-based public relations company, to help refine its mission and improve its message to both the media and the outside world.

The process began with a series of interviews and questionnaires for the Aglow leadership team and its national field leaders, and from this information, the consultant group found some common points of improvement. Johnson says this effort helped to identify areas where the staff needed better communication and where they were failing to get their message across. Getting the entire team involved in the process helped ensure that everyone was a part of the solution, she says.

“By bringing in someone externally, [staff] knew that this was important, and that we were serious about making changes. I haven’t heard any criticism, but the move has encouraged a lot of questions, and that’s healthy,” Johnson notes. “Most everyone realized that we needed a spark to get us excited again.”

One of the first steps the organization took to attract younger women was to launch the Generations Project, a program that targets women ages 18 to 35 and offers mentoring opportunities as well as a variety of events and special programming. Through a matching grant from the MJ and the organization brought in Evangeline Weiner, author of the book The Calling of a Generation.

“This rebranding effort is still new, but I would also say it’s just more current with the times we are in,” Weiner says. “I believe that as young women come in, new ideas and new vision will too.”

The Generations Project offers young women the opportunity to work with “hope coaches,” older Aglow members who serve as mentors. The project helps them establish Generations groups on college campuses, at work, and in their communities. It will also soon offer an internship program to help young women connect with Christians working in professions that interest them. Weiner says Aglow has found new ways to attract a younger demographic by partnering with Dawson McAlister Live, a national radio program that reaches 325,000 young adults, and by using an Aglow social networking website.

“Young people are willing to take risks and be completely dedicated to a cause,” says Mercy Novak, Aglow’s new webmaster—and one of the new “20-something” employees on staff. “All they need is someone to lead them in the right cause and show them how to find the answers they seek. Aglow’s emphasis on reaching women and meeting their needs creates a niche that is not filled by any other comparable worldwide organization. I believe all these factors will contribute to a tipping point where we will see the new venture of reaching the youth becoming an established part of Aglow’s organizational philosophy.”

Conferences Take on A New Look

Aglow is working to not just create a separate program for young women, but also to get them involved throughout the organization and its conferences. “In the past we’ve held separate conferences alongside for the youth, but we realized we were missing something big and that these women wanted to be part of what God is doing in all of our lives,” explains conference director Arvie Murff.

The 2007 conference incorporated a variety of features to make the younger group of women feel welcome, including a walking tour of Seattle led by Weiner, a special luncheon, and a Generations suite where young women could drop by to get to know each other and learn more about the Generations Project—in addition to the opening night’s focus on youth.

“We definitely had more young women on the platform,” says Aglow’s COO Johnson. “Evangeline spoke about the vision of Aglow’s Generations Project. Mercy Novak spoke about the new era of communications and the power of the Web and social networking. Our new public relations coordinator, Johanna Cameron, another 20-something, spoke about the vision she had for Aglow. So if a picture is worth a thousand words, these young women presented three pictures of young professionals in action to our audience of 5,000.”

Aglow also began promoting their events in new and creative ways.

“Over the last three years we really started pushing online registration, updating our website with news and events, and looking at new ways we can market our meetings,” Murff says. While the organization traditionally advertised in the print market, it began to break into other types of media, such as radio, television, and Internet. “We’ve realized that Internet advertising really goes a long way in promotion with this age group,” Murff says. Aglow has really tapped into that market by utilizing e-newsletters, podcasts, and even social networking sites.

Originally, Aglow set up an online community on zoecity.org, a Christian social network, but now the staff is working to develop its own website to bring the younger and older Aglow generations into closer communication. “We determined that social networking was a viable tool to connect our contacts, and now we’re in the process of testing a new site and migrating our users over to our own site,” Weiner says.

Novak ensures that the site is kept up-to-date and that it maintains a similar appearance to Aglow’s other marketing materials. She says she’s worked to give Aglow’s logo, brochures, banners, and website a consistent look and that her youth has helped her bring a more current feel to their design.

“A website is very often the only face of an organization that people will ever see. Therefore it is important that the site is a true expression of the organization’s goals and purposes,” Novak says. “And since everything has been designed by one person, I think it has helped the rebranding process by creating a more cohesive image for the organization.”

While Aglow is keeping its core message the same, it’s finding new ways of communicating that message. Johnson says one way they’re doing this is by shortening the organization’s e-mails to make them resemble text messages, and even the very language of Aglow has evolved as the staff has experimented with using “non-churchy” speech.

“For instance, 2007’s conference brochure deliberately didn’t have an overly biblical theme,” Johnson says. “It was ‘A Voice, Not An Echo.’ You can read the spirituality into it, but it also reads to a more secular audience.”

Aglow also developed a specially designed conference brochure that could be used as aposter as well. The organization also began making their convention videos available on CD and DVD. And in 2007 it partnered with God TV to begin airing video of their conferences. Last year’s worldwide conference in Seattle has already been broadcast once and will air several more times before this year’s national conference, which will be held at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., in September.

An Ongoing Process

Aglow’s rebranding efforts are not only visible at the group’s conferences and events, but also at its headquarters in Edmonds, Washington. Of the 32 employees at the Washington office, one-fifth are under the age of 30.

While Aglow’s rebranding has revitalized its staff and successfully brought a new generation of women into the organization, the women of Aglow say their journey to becoming truly intergenerational continues. “We’re in a transitional place now, but our DNA is the same,” Murff says. “We’ve moved away from some of the things that we’ve always done at our meetings, but we continue to have an impact on women.”

Johnson agrees, saying that the rebranding process is far from over for Aglow. “Our efforts this past year were a conscious effort to become a new voice to a younger generation. A momentum has started, and we continue to see it grow.”

Rebranding Your Organization

Aglow’s COO, Ledene Johnson, offers tips and advice for organizations looking to launch their own rebranding effort.

1. Don’t be afraid to give your organization a face-lift.

“Rebranding can be scary. It undermines what you’ve always done and what you’re comfortable with, but you need to move forward in spite of that fear because the rewards are great. You just need to get everyone involved and get them excited about it.”

2. Recognize that rebranding involves a change in attitude.

“Rebranding is not simply a new name or a new logo. You have to get to the heart of who you are and really learn how to tell your story in a different way.”

3. Seek outside help.

“You need an external resource, someone who can ask the hard questions and serve as your reality check. I like to call this person a ‘caring agitator.’ It’s someone who loves you as an organization, but can help you expand on who you are becoming.”