March 18, 2008

Churches as a Media Platform

Veggie Tales founder Phil Vischer has been blogging about his big dreams for his new company, Jellyfish (if you're not familiar with Vischer's departure from Big Idea, you should read his book, Me, Myself & Bob: A True Story About Dreams, God, and Talking Vegetables). So far he's blogged about two problems:

• "Problem #1 – we need to raise a generation of Christians who know what it means to live out the Gospel."
• "Problem #2 – Christian kids media is dying for lack of a platform."

He's gone on to talk about a platform to address these problems, which he called the "world's smallest TV network." God speed, Phil.

But I've got another idea: Why can't the church be the platform?

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Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks at 1:49 PM
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July 26, 2007

Church YouTube Contest

A few days ago we talked about online church video. We encouraged everyone to embrace the phenomenon of online video and harness its power. One church in Boston is doing just that.

The Greater Boston Vineyard is having a YouTube video contest for their fall kick-off service. It's certainly an interesting way to harness the power of web 2.0 and mobilize church members outside of church walls. I see some really good things coming of this.

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Posted by Joshua Cody at 11:25 AM
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July 23, 2007

Embracing Online Video

According to comScore, 75% of Internet users watched online video in May 2007, averaging 158 minutes per viewer. Nearly 8.4 billion videos were streamed online in the month of May. That's a lot.

Online video isn't a market that's too saturated to succeed in, either. It's not even a market that can become too saturated to succeed. If you missed the boat on the whole web 2.0 craze, you should read up on it. No matter how many videos stream online (in our case, 8,357,000,000), if you have a solid message and something fresh to offer, you can succeed.

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Posted by Joshua Cody at 3:56 PM
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July 11, 2007

Buzz Film Fest

The Buzz Conference wrapped up in Washington, D.C., a few weeks back and the results of their film festival are now online. You can watch the four top church films to see some examples of cool church videos.

For those who didn't get to attend (like me), you can also download audio or watch video from the main session speakers (folks like Mark Batterson, Tim Stevens and Craig Groeschel).

Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks at 5:39 PM
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April 25, 2007

Theater Church Movies

Just wanted to pass the word along to everyone that National Community Church has begun making their video efforts public and open source. Make sure you check them out and be inspired, but don't copy!

Update 1: Perhaps open source isn't the best term. As you'll read in the comments, that's the direction NCC is looking to head, but these videos aren't quite there. They're just for the public to see and learn from and critique.

Update 2: "...but don't copy!" OK, so maybe copying is a good alternative to not creating at all. But at least do your best to tailor everything you do to your own environment, and move towards a greater understanding of creativity and contribution.

Still go check out their videos, they're well-planned and well-executed. We can all at least use them as a creative resource.

Posted by Joshua Cody at 5:38 AM
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April 23, 2007

Help Wanted: Good Videos

Last time we posted a help wanted ad, we were pretty much just making fun of someone. This time we're serious. Seriously. Over in the Church Marketing Lab this week, terrell_sanders has an announcement. He's looking for church videos to showcase at MinistryCOM 2007. Don't know what MinistryCOM is? It's a conference that we here at CMS love. Check it out.

Head over to the discussion and consider submitting your videos.

Posted by Joshua Cody at 6:01 AM
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April 12, 2007

Where's the Church's Ask a Ninja?

Online entertainment has been taking the world by storm. Homestar Runner. Ask a Ninja. lonelygirl15. ZeFrank. For the most part these were projects started by small groups of people with small amounts of money. They are media empires on shoestring budgets. They can be created by folks in their pajamas and they have incredible impact.

While watching Ask a Ninja co-founder Kent Nichols talk about his rules for success in this new entertianment world in a video from Pop!Tech, I wondered where the church is in this new online entertainment phenomenon.

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Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks at 11:23 AM
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April 7, 2006

How Your Church Can Use Video

Part 4 in a continuing series on What Web 2.0 Means for Your Church

Online video is the latest tech fad. There are TV shows for sale from Apple, you can buy downloadable movies, you can watch old school TV reruns (PC only). Thanks to broadband, video is exploding online. It's also becoming incredibly viral, like the recent Lazy Sunday and Microsoft's iPod packaging clips.

But video meets web 2.0 when users submit the content. Sites like You Tube, Google Video and Vimeo are essentially Flickr for videos. Sometimes they're short and shaky clips and sometimes professionally cut and soundtracked mini-movies. Web videos are even making a splash on real TV, like VH1's Web Junk 20, Bravo's Outrageous and Contagious: Viral Videos and The Net with Carson Daly in development by NBC and USA.

Video and the Church
So here's that question again: What does all this have to do with the church?

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Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks at 8:49 AM
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December 10, 2005

Me Church

I got a kick out of this Me Church video about church that's all about me. (link via Jordon Cooper)

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May 13, 2005

Evangelism & IT Lessons by Robert Scoble

Not sure how we missed this (probably because it pre-dates us), but last year Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble visited Fellowship Church in Dallas and wrote the Ten Evangelism and IT Lessons from one of America's Biggest Churches. It's heavy on the techie side, but there's plenty of interesting gems:

1. Make it easy for everyone to learn about you—on their terms. Scoble notes that the only thing visible from the freeway is the church's url.
2. Make it easy to experience your product's special attributes. Scoble was given a DVD with an overview of the church.
3. To get word-of-mouth advertising you need to be remarkable. 50 manned computer registration stations, all-digtal sound system, plasma screens everywhere, etc.
4. Use IT to efficiently get close to your customers and take care of their needs. A high-tech system to register kids quickly and easily.
5. If you want to be better, make sure you're better from the first minutes of someone's experience. The church makes a sports fan feel at home.
6. If you want to be seen as bleeding edge, invest to be bleeding edge and do so throughout your company. They are the first church to film all their services in HDTV.
7. Extend the usefulness of your plant. They make WiFi available to their congregation during the week.
8. Design your systems so they never go down and can expand for future growth. they've got redundancy all over the place.
9. Don't be religious about technology, choose what gets the job done best for the least amount of money and staff time. While they heavily rely on Microsoft's technology, they also use Macs and Linux when those platforms work better.
10. When you become successful, bottle up what got you there and sell it to others. They sell their own software: FellowshipOne.

Brian Bailey, Fellowship's Internet Manager and the one who originally invited Scoble, blogs about the experience as well.

Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks at 6:03 AM
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September 9, 2004

Video Killed the Preacher Man

The Washington Post reports on churches that are switching from a real live preacher man to a canned video sermon. The approach allows churches to expand to multiple locations without hiring an additional pastor. Young people like it for the familiarity it shares with all the other screens in their lives, and older people appreciate being able to see the pastor better.

But some people aren't so happy, arguing that video preachers enhance the celebrity image of pastors and discourage interaction in the church (though I don't understand how interaction happens during a sermon, at least not the sermons I grew up with).

From a marketing standpoint it's an interesting approach.

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Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks at 2:58 PM
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September 8, 2004

Taking Sermons Beyond Sunday

With the spread of iPods and MP3 players listening to audio is no longer restricted to a music collection. Sermons, speeches and books are actually becoming popular in audio format. Both the Democratic and Republican National Convention speeches are available for free on iTunes (George W. Bush, John Kerry and many more). Telltale Weekly offers free and dirt cheap audio downloads, including John F. Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address for free and the Epistles of John from the Bible for 75 cents.

Churches can join the technological revolution by making sermons or other teachings available for download (not just streaming audio). It's not only a ministry to members who can take those sermons beyond Sunday morning, but it's an ad for your church. Many churches already do this and are a step ahead in the quest not to suck.

Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks at 10:50 AM
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Church Promo Videos That Don't Suck

The homemade promotional video is a time-honored marketing tool of the church, especially among youth groups with tech savvy teens. But with digital video cameras and cheap editing software, those homemade videos aren't too shabby anymore.

Vintage 21, an emergent church in Raleigh, N.C., has made a number of videos to promote different church functions, including their small group ministry, mid-size group activities, a Super Bowl event, and a four-week series on Jesus. The videos are funny and smart, and in the case of the Jesus series, effective at generating discussion (if not border-line sacrilegious).

Best of all, this style of promotional video can be done on the cheap. The Jesus series videos even took a page from Mystery Science Theater 3000 and didn't require any extensive filming. (link via Nick Ciske)

Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks at 9:44 AM
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