If your church is like most churches, Easter weekend is the SuperBowl of services. You will see many first time visitors, new family faces and of course, new clothing.
Technology is an important part of the weekend and I put together 7 tech tips to get ready for the weekend:
7 Tech Tips to Get Ready for Easter Sunday Services
1. Backup critical files.
This should be done often anyway. If you have any files that aren’t hosted on the the cloud you should have them on at least two hard drives and in the cloud if possible. Disaster can come in any form, especially on the big days and you want to make sure you are prepared.
2. Do a dry run of tech at least two weeks prior to Easter.
Sometimes I get a lot of pushback from testing things in a non-production environment , but I feel it’s vital for you to run through the worship set at least two weeks before the service. Of course things will change, but as long as the media team has a framework of what should happen you can be flexible with the proverbial “curveball” that will come your way.
3. Have enough removable media.
I was working at a church recently and they ran out of DVD’s and CD’s and we had to send someone up to Staples during service to grab some. This shouldn’t ever happen. Take an inventory of your supplies and ensure that you have enough media especially on the largest seeker day of the year.
4. Meet with the senior leadership early and often.
I am not a big fan of meetings, but I am a fan of productive meetings with agenda’s and norms. The leadership of your church should have a plan of action and most
5. If you don’t use a run sheet for a service, please consider using one.
My church uses planningcenteronline.com and that helps with organization and delegation of duties. You can also use free tools such as Google Docs or Evernote, but the key point is to not leave anything to chance. This is good advice to implement going forward after Easter service too.
6. Be prepared for Murphy’s Law.
As you know what can go wrong will go wrong and there is not way to plan for everything, but knowing that something may go wrong and have a back up plan if it does. For example one Easter weekend at church the power went out and all the tech went out too, but the church had a backup generator that got us through that service (even though it was abbreviated). I’m not saying you need to purchase generators, but things happen especially at large and important events, try to run through many scenarios so you will be prepared.
7. Set up a guest wifi network with login to a guest landing page.
I know many churches do this already, but I would consider offering a guest network that automatically redirects to a church customized easter landing page (here’s how). Companies like Panera and Starbucks do this well, but I haven’t seen this type of intentionality from many churches. Also, consider to limit or block some file sharing and bandwidth hogging websites.
Easter is a celebration of our the resurrection of our Lord and as technology and media workers want to make sure tech doesn’t get in the way of bringing people to a relationship with Jesus Christ.
Eric Dye says
Awesome list, Chip!