Radiant

05/22/2026

In her latest blog post, Radiant's Ryan Johnston looks at an Instagram account that stopped her mid-scroll and pulls out seven practical lessons any organization can learn from, whether you’re trying to grow an audience, strengthen your message or create content people actually want to engage with.

Read it now!

I came across an Instagram ad recently that completely stopped me mid-scroll. I watched it a few times over and realized something interesting: while I could see myself being interested in the product, I was even more drawn in by the entertainment of the ad itself. It felt engaging, authentic and fu...

05/14/2026

WANTED: A senior-level marketing strategist, graphic designer, copywriter, web developer, PR consultant, social media manager, project coordinator, fundraising communicator, SEO specialist, videographer and brand advisor.

Sound impossible? Maybe not...

Wanted: A senior-level marketing strategist, graphic designer, copywriter, web developer, PR consultant, social media manager, project coordinator, fundraising communicator, SEO specialist, videographer and brand advisor. Must be available immediately. Must understand ministry. Must not require bene...

05/04/2026

There's a reason most organizations default to one-size-fits-all messaging: it's efficient. One campaign, one audience, one set of materials. You cover the most ground with the least effort.

And there's a comforting logic to it. More reach should mean more response, right?

But reach isn't resonance.

In the early 2010s, despite decades of iconic advertising, Coca-Cola was watching consumption decline — especially among younger audiences. Their research uncovered something uncomfortable: young adults felt Coke "wasn't talking to them at eye level." The brand was everywhere, but it wasn't connecting.

The fix wasn't louder ads or bigger budgets. It was personalization. The "Share a Coke" campaign launched in Australia in 2011, replacing the logo with individual names. When it reached the US three years later, it reversed more than a decade of declining sales.

The instinct to speak to every audience the same way is understandable. Segmenting takes time. Creating different messages for different groups isn’t easy. And it can feel like you're leaving people out when you stop trying to speak to everyone at once.

But that discomfort is the point. When you try to reach everyone, your mission, programs or fundraising campaigns may resonate with no one. The message becomes so broad it stops meaning anything to the person reading it.

This is especially hard for smaller organizations without Coca-Cola's resources. You don't have teams dedicated to research and personalization. You're already stretched thin. The thought of creating multiple versions of anything feels incredibly hard.

But you don’t need Coca-Cola’s budget to make a shift. Start small. Pick your two most important audiences. Ask what they each need to hear and resist the urge to give them the same answer. That’s how you move from one-size-fits-all messaging to real connection.

05/01/2026

A message on the importance of brand alignment from Radiant CEO Ray Majoran. 👇

I’ve been in this line of work for more than 30 years now, and when you do things for long enough, you identify patterns. Today I want to show you a pattern that I’ve seen continually repeat itself.

A ministry starts to feel stuck, and their immediate assumption is that they need a marketing overhaul.

Sometimes that means a new website. Sometimes it means more social media, better design, stronger campaigns or an entirely new brand image. More recently, I’ve watched ministries try to jerry-rig AI into absolutely everything.

What I’ve come to realize is that in the majority of cases, their problem isn’t a lack of marketing, but rather a lack of alignment.

The leadership team sees the company one way. The fundraising team describes it another way. The website tells a slightly different story, and the customer experience doesn’t quite match any of them. The pieces may all be decent on their own, but they don’t reinforce one another. Instead, they pull in different directions.

That creates confusion, and confusion is expensive. It erodes trust, weakens traction and forces you to work harder than you should have to, just to explain who you are.

All that to say that in my experience, the strongest brands are rarely the busiest ones. More often, they are the ones that are aligned. Their message is clear, their visuals support it, their donor and partner relationships reflect it and the experience of those they serve confirms it.

That’s why we created Radiant ONE. It’s built to bring strategy, story, design and ex*****on into alignment, so the brand starts moving as one. In the end, most ministries don’t need a complete overhaul. They need someone who can see the disconnect and help bring the pieces back into alignment.

A Partnership Model for Missionally-Minded Organizations

04/24/2026

Legendary baseball star Jackie Robinson reminds us of what it looks like when belief becomes visible under pressure.

We wrote about what his story teaches us about leadership, branding and living your values in public: that it’s not enough to say what you stand for, you have to show it when it counts.

https://thinkradiant.com/reading-room/the-courage-behind-no-42/

04/15/2026

Down 19. 0.4 seconds left. One shot changes everything. But the real story isn’t the ending — it’s what happened before it.

We wrote about what UConn’s comeback reveals about resilience, pressure and staying engaged when it would be easier to step back.

Read the full piece →

Every spring in the United States, the college basketball tournament known as March Madness narrows dozens of teams into a final handful through a ruthless format: lose once, and your season is over. It is part sport, part national ritual, and it has a way of revealing what people do when there is n...

04/04/2026

In this article, Tom Ward offers a sharp and timely look at why empathy matters more than ever in marketing and communications.

Read about what happens when organizations stop talking at their audience and start speaking to the world they actually live in:

There’s a version of this that happens in almost every organization. A campaign comes together and on paper it looks great. There’s smart strategy and solid tactics. It’s textbook, the kind of campaign that checks every box in the brief. Then it goes out into the world and the response is mute...

04/01/2026

What do you do when the original plan just… isn’t possible anymore? Ernest Shackleton set out to cross Antarctica and ended up fighting just to get his crew home. He didn’t pretend things were fine or push a broken plan. He adjusted.

That’s the kind of leadership that actually matters.

Read more:

In August 1914, as Europe moved toward war, Ernest Shackleton sailed from Britain with a crew of 27 men aboard the Endurance. His ambition was immense: to become the first to cross Antarctica from sea to sea. By January of the following year, that ambition had been arrested by the Weddell Sea. The s...

03/21/2026

Most organizations don’t have a marketing problem — they have a clarity problem. Apple didn’t solve that by hiring more marketers. They aligned at the top, brought in outside perspective, and made one message work everywhere.

That’s the idea behind Radiant ONE: one partner, total alignment, real traction.

Read more:

It’s summer 1997. Apple is wobbling, and the conference room has the tired smell of corporate wishful thinking. A new comeback line is pitched: “We’re back.” Heads nod. Then Steve Jobs, newly returned to the company, cuts through it: Apple isn’t “back” yet. A slogan can’t be a victor...

03/17/2026

Restraint is often the secret to stronger communication. Read about how the discipline to focus on what matters most can make a message far more powerful than trying to say everything at once.

When Google launched in 1998, search engines were portals — cluttered pages covered in news, weather, links, and ads. Yahoo's homepage alone had over 100 links competing for attention. Google offered something radical: a logo, a search box, and two buttons. That was it. The instinct to add more is...