The Vatican appoints Accenture to design and rebrand its digital channels

The Vatican’s ministry of communications has appointed Accenture Interactive to design and conceive a brand identity for its new communications channel, Vatican News, to “create a more accessible Church”. It has already unveiled a logo for the platform as part of a visual system to be used across sister channels Vatican Media and Radio Vaticana Italiana, and social media, to unify the Vatican’s comms output. The Church says the rebrand “is rooted in age-old tradition”.

A release from Accenture says the move is part of the Vatican reform, “aimed at finding new ways to communicate with and engage all people in today’s digital world”. It hopes to define a strategy that increases the consistency and clarity of its public-facing messaging, creating a defined online identity with one voice and a “richer, digital source of multimedia content”, bringing together the “array” of independent channels under a single new portal – Vatican News.

In 2013, Accenture acquired Fjord, an international service design consultancy specialising in digital projects. For the Vatican, Accenture Interactive will design Vatican News and create one multi-language editorial team “able to work with a multimedia, multi-device and multi-cultural approach”.

Monsignor Dario Edoardo Viganò, prefect of the Secretariat for Communications (the Vatican’s Ministry of Communications) said in a statement: “We are launching the last part of the reform sought by Pope Francis. Each reform does not originate from a mistaken past but from a present that calls for a change: in this case, today’s cultural and digital convergence require the adoption of production processes that are different from traditional ones. Today, in fact, information production and dissemination happens through agnostic software, in multiple media formats.”