We All Make Mistakes: The Typo of All Typos Church Marketing Sucks

We All Make Mistakes: The Typo of All Typos

March 7, 2018 by Kevin D. Hendricks

In celebration of our newest book, You’ve Got This: A Pep Talk for Church Communicators by Kelley Hartnett, we’ve been talking about mistakes. Kelley shares one of her mistakes in the book, and rather than being ashamed, our failures are an opportunity to improve.

We asked for your best mistake stories, and we got some whoppers. The five best stories won a copy of Kelley’s book, and we’re going to share those winners.

The Typo of All Typos

Here’s one of our winners:

A few years ago I designed a magazine for my church. It was a big project filled with editorial content as well as advertising. A lot of time and creativity went into this project. I had over 10,000 copies professionally printed and everything looked great—except the church name was spelled wrong on the cover! I wanted to cry. Definitely a big “oops!” -Mary Martin

Ouch. We’ve all been there, right? The typo is the church communication mistake of choice. It’s always embarrassing, but getting the name of your own church wrong—in such a prominent location—is pretty impressive.

That deserves a pep talk.

Thanks for sharing. It takes guts to share your mistakes.

How to Stop the Dreaded Typo

So how do we overcome the dreaded typo? Sadly, there’s often nothing you can do. By the time you catch it, it’s too late to fix it.

The best you can hope for is better prevention next time:

Set up a proofing process, including extra time to double check.
Recruit a team of proofers so you can get more eyeballs spotting mistakes.
Create a checklist of things to look for.

In the end, you just have to be vigilant.

We All Make Mistakes

And remember that it’s not the end of the world. OK, spelling your church name wrong on the cover of a 10,000-piece print run is a pretty big oops. It probably felt like the end of the world.

So have a good cry, crumple some paper—whatever you need to do. And then move on.

We all make mistakes. The best of us learn from them.

Still need a pep talk? Check out You’ve Got This: A Pep Talk for Church Communicators. And check out some of our other mistake stories:

Need more help? Our Courageous Storytellers membership site has a number of resources to stop mistakes, including proofing checklists and how to vet proofreaders.