In today’s church we talk a lot about building relationships. We have many ways of saying it: investing in someone, building a bridge, etc. In many cases, churches are doing a fantastic job at employing the relational church model and are seeing many come to Christ as a result. I think there is a medium that isn’t being exploited to it’s fullest possibility however; the church website. Specifically I want to focus on the pastor/staff biographies.
Most churches have an online presence, commonly in the form of a website. A well structured church website is going to have a page for pastor bios. The church may even choose to include other staff members in the bio section. No matter who the church decides to present to website visitors, the vast majority post the bios in the same format: text.
I’m suggesting a different approach! Why not video?
Imagine this, a person can click the link to your Senior Pastor’s bio and be presented a picture of the pastor with a few sentences or text OR they can be greeted with a warm smile, eye contact, and a verbal encouragement to come give your church a try.
Even better, chances are that your church can run with this idea tomorrow with zero monetary investment!
Where is what you do:
Materials:
- Camcorder or Smartphone
- Video editing software (iMovie or TrakAxPc)
- Some space to shoot the video
Actions:
- Create a church YouTube account (if your church doesn’t already have one)
- Get with each person who will have a bio posted, put them in front of the camera and let them wax poetically on who they are, why they love the church, that they’re excited to see the visitor come to the church, etc.
- Edit those videos down to about 30 seconds each
- Upload each video to YouTube
- Delete the text on those old profiles and replace it with the embedded player code that you’ll see on each video’s YouTube page
There are a few considerations to keep in mind:
- Schedule the video shoots a few days in advance. This gives the person a heads up to dress and look the part.
- Be aware of the lighting and sound profile of the room you select. You want it nice and bright, but no lights behind the person that shine straight into the camera. Also you don’t want a big room with hard floors and bare walls. That would make you have the echo/empty room sound quality.
- I like TrakAxPC on a Windows platform due to it’s capability and low cost. It does have a free 14 day trial, but make sure you don’t go download it today and run out of trial time before you get to the first edit!
- You may not want to really delete the old text bios. Having a transcript of the video on the page will make your page more compatible with accessibility tools that read text to the visitor via text-to-speech.
The above approach is targeted to the church that wants to get into online videos quickly and cheaply. Obviously if your church is already into video production then go with the tools you already have at hand.
The essence of this post isn’t HOW you get the video onto your site, it’s just to get your brain juices flowing in a way to start thinking of a different way to present the front line personalities of the church to potential visitors and future members.
I see this use of technology primarily as an external ministry tool. People who are new to an area or just looking for a church in their area will most likely begin that search on Google (a few might use Bing). This strategy will have a greater impact on those people who are looking for a church home than those who have already moved in.
I’d love to hear from you on this topic! Is your church already doing this? If so what has your experience been? What are some of the lessons you learned in the process? Are there areas in this post I can explain deeper for you? Respond to these questions, ask your own, or just strike up discussion on this topic by using the comments section below.
o/
Thad White says
So I love the idea… but good video is hard to do well! I highly recommend you bring in someone who knows video and can do it well. You don’t want your first impression on your web site to give an amateur feel. I don’t think a talking head is better than text.
TC Johnson says
You are correct, good video is a challenge. I also agree that you shouldn’t settle for mediocrity just do do something new and exciting. If you have the talent in your church, use it. If you have the budget to hire a videographer, go that route. But I also don’t think you should forego the experiment because you have neither at hand right now.
I’m pushing this idea with my church, seeing as how it IS just an idea that popped into my head 🙂 We’ll see how it goes!