From a stalled logo to launch, with no paid advertising.

Clark Harris and Luke Lingle started talking about the idea in April 2025. Luke had a decade of church adaptive-reuse work behind him at other organizations. Clark ran the business side. What they didn't have was anything a funder, a denomination, or a church could look at and believe.

A logo project with an outside designer had been drifting for a while and wasn't in good shape. There was no website, no social presence, and no way to tell the story. NCV was pre-revenue and raising money to get off the ground.

I started by finishing the logo, then built everything around it. That covered:

• Brand identity, starting with the stalled logo project and carrying through to the full system.
• The website at newchapter.org.
• Social media, started from zero, plus a LinkedIn process that lets Luke refine and schedule his own posts without another approval loop. I preload the photos at the draft stage, which fixed posts that used to stall for two weeks.
• The YouTube channel, with the cohort church videos and the brand video.
• A cohort hub on the site that shows each church's work in progress and turns into a full case study page over time.
• A design pass on the cohort curriculum in Pathwright.
• An SEO and AEO plan (search engines plus AI answer tools) built around "adaptive reuse for churches" and related searches. My research found the other groups in this space mostly inactive online, so NCV can get to the top of those results without a heavy content operation.
• A content marketing strategy. A light version is running now, with blog posts from team members. The full version, two ghostwritten posts a month each cut into three social posts, is approved to start in October 2026.

I also worked alongside Clark and Luke on the pitch decks and fundraising. They led that work, and I was involved throughout.

Most of NCV's early work comes through networks: denominations, funders, municipalities, and the conferences where Luke and Clark speak. Those people look you up after a conversation, and they need to find a real organization when they do. That's what the brand and site were built to do first, and it's what Luke and Clark hear about when they're on the road.

The hardest call was holding back. NCV runs a small team, and a six-church cohort in Durham funded by a local community development partner gave it its first big set of stories to tell. The temptation was to promote every church's plans. My position was that if two of six projects become big wins, people will look at the other four and ask what happened. So we set two rules: no promises about a specific church's outcome until there's reasonable certainty, and no drawing in more attention than the team can handle. For the same reason, we picked a slow search plan, roughly 12 to 18 months before it turns into leads, over a road show that would flood the pipeline.

Leads came in anyway. An out-of-state church group found NCV through a Google search, compared it with the other national groups doing this work, and came to NCV. Nobody was doing outreach at the time.

NCV launched in 2026 and is growing in steps the team can handle. The full content plan starts in October 2026, and the search numbers will fill in as it runs. I'm still NCV's fractional CMO.