Online Church: Best Practices w/ Carl Barnhill

Carl Barnhill 00:00 Think of it like a campus. So if you’re not a multi site church, you’ve now become one your in person gathering and your online campus. Like if you were to plant a church and not put any staff or volunteers there and it was just an empty building, how would people feel it’s kind of the same thing. You’re just throwing your stream up with no energy behind it. So pour some energy behind it.

Alex Enfiedjian 00:37 Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the worship ministry training podcast. My name is Alex Enfiedjian, your host. This podcast exists to give you local church worship leaders, the practical tools and training that you need to succeed and feel confident. And so hopefully you’ve been helped by this podcast. And if you’re a new listener, I want to encourage you to one hit subscribe so you can get new episodes delivered to you for free every month. And to go dig through our online archive list. If you just scroll down in your podcast feed, you should see 80 or 90 episodes Now, each one containing a single topic and going as in depth and practical as possible. So go through the list, find out which topics you need to hear about hit download, and enjoy and be encouraged. Today we’re talking with Carl Barnhill from 1230 media about how to do online church. Well, this is something we all need to know we all need to do these things. And Carl has a ton of wisdom and insight and really practical tips that are going to help take your online experience to the next level. keep people engaged, figure out how to follow up with them online, and all sorts of things in that vein. So this episode will help you I promise. Listen to it, send it to your pastor. Send it to your media team. Make sure people listen to it. This episode is also sponsored by 1230 Media, which is Karl’s company. This company helps churches with their worship experience through media content and training. They are a one stop shop for all your church’s media needs. They can help with graphic design videography, video editing, motion graphics, hosted video announcements, training, resources and more. And you can visit 1230 dot media to get your project started today. That’s 1230 spelled out dot media to get your project started today, I would encourage you to check out all their free resources you can tell from today’s episode that Carl is a genius. Alright, let’s get into the episode on how to do online church well for your church. Everybody I am here with Carl Barnhill from 1230 media, a media company that helps churches with their worship experience through media content and training. And he’s an awesome guy. Hello, Carl. How you doing,

Carl Barnhill 02:45 Alex? Man? Thanks for having me. Really appreciate you inviting me and I’m excited for our time together.

Alex Enfiedjian 02:52 Yeah, you were on the podcast maybe a year or two ago talking about building incredible volunteer teams. And that is one of my favorite episodes ever. Everybody should stop listening to this one. Or maybe just wait till this one’s over. And then go back. I’ll put a link in the show notes, but so much gold, you’re like the ultimate team builder. And so thanks for being back on.

Carl Barnhill 03:11 Well, man, you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, man, you’re bringing in the C string while you’re bringing in the the bench crowd two times, I really don’t know.

Alex Enfiedjian 03:19 Oh my gosh, I think your top tier top tier baby. Okay, so Carl COVID, you know, 19 hits, everyone gets locked down everyone’s shelter in place. And every single church in the world almost has to figure out how to connect with their people online. And they’re trying to figure out how to do online church. Now you just released several products and training materials about online church. And I thought, Okay, I know we’re kind of wrapping up COVID-19. Hopefully, people will start to be able to have real church soon, like in person church soon. But I still think all the churches are going to move forward online anyway. And they should. And so I wanted you to come on and really help us figure out online church. First of all, before we get into like the nitty gritty of it, is there any sort of philosophical thing you want to share up top regarding online church versus in person, church and how we should be thinking about that in general?

Carl Barnhill 04:16 Yeah, man, I think that you’re dead on. I think that it’s been great in a way to see a lot of pastors who are hesitant about online, or just not pour energy into it, or the church that considers the camera in the back of the room in the balcony that’s getting this massive, wide shot, and they’re streaming it on that that’s their online experience. Realize that, Oh, well, that’s not really an experience. It’s just we’re streaming a camera. So I think it’s been interesting that we’ve been forced to do an experience online, not just streaming whatever comes through our cameras. So I’m excited to see what comes in the next few months to see pastors and leaders pour The same amount of energy into the in person gathering and the online gathering. So that that really excites me.

Alex Enfiedjian 05:07 Yeah, I’m excited about it. So okay, so Carl, let’s just say we’re talking to a church, they know they need to get online, or they just got online, but they’re not sure if they’re doing it, right. I mean, the first thing is to figure out this streaming service, the streaming platform, what are some of the go twos that you suggest churches look at?

Carl Barnhill 05:24 Yeah, so the data really shows that people are going to stay with your stream longer, they’re going to be more engaged. If you do it on your website, like that’s your dedicated place that you send people to. Now, there are a few outliers, I’ve seen some churches that have more success on other platforms. But the data from Facebook and YouTube both show that they want you to go and watch the cat video also. Okay, so but if you have someone on your dedicated website, and that’s where you send people, they’re going to be a viewer longer, they’re going to stay engaged longer. Okay. But as far as streaming providers, streaming services, one, I would say, as a streaming provider, I would go with either Vimeo live stream, or living as one, both of those are pretty solid, and have kind of stood the test of COVID. You might say, Okay, so I’ve seen and heard less problems with those two platforms. So Vimeo, actually, we have a partnership with them on our website, 1230, dot media, Ford slash Vimeo, you can actually get 10% off their plans, which is really cool. And they’re really stable. They’re the number one provider for live stream in the faith market in the world. So those are the two streaming providers that I would definitely look into. I would also look into church online platform if you’re not, I just did an interview with Kyle cutter from Life Church. And he was telling me this, this is pretty astounding. So in like nine years of church online platform, they had 25,000 churches sign up. In the last few months, they’ve had 27,000, churches sign up. So as many in the last two months, as I’ve had the previous nine years Come on church online platform. So church online is here to stay, buddy.

Alex Enfiedjian 07:17 Yeah, it is. And I really appreciate your point about getting people away from the distraction of YouTube and Facebook and getting them on a dedicated page that’s solely for your service. Because I know, on our church, we have, you know, multiple 1000s of views on YouTube. But when you dig into the stats and look at the view counts for the service, it’s like most of them are 10. Second views, some of them are three second views. Some of them are one minute views, and then you get the longer views. But it’s mostly there people just scrolling and they see it, they click on it, they watch it for a second and they keep scrolling to the cats, you know, and so we want to keep people off those platforms, I still think it’s important to stream to those platforms. Yes, yeah. But not like point your people to those platforms. Right You What about YouTube live?

Carl Barnhill 08:06 Well, I would definitely I’m gonna lean toward the pre recorded simulated live. Right now. Now, I’ve kind of shifted a little bit. So when this thing first started, I’m definitely in the pre recorded simulated live camp. As we progress, this might change. So you might have dual, like, you might have a live experience. And you might have an online experience. And they’re two different services. Or it might be a combined thing. Like we’re kind of in this bridge or Limbo right now. Okay. So I don’t want to just blank it, you need to pre record and simulate live, when this thing started. I was definitely that way. So if you go that direction, a YouTube premiere or Facebook premiere, I think is the way to go. I think it causes less problems and less errors that way.

Alex Enfiedjian 08:54 Yeah. And so if someone’s looking at streaming Vimeo, or the We Are One or two living as one, yep, living is one. And then using that feed into the church online platform, which I highly recommend. We haven’t found a better platform than that. It’s free, completely free. It has chat, it has prayer requests. When all those searches got online, those two months ago, it crashed multiple times. So we had to stop using it for our church because it was, you know, they were working out the bugs of massive growth. But it’s probably more stable now. And we’re eventually going to move back to that platform period, because it’s just so interactive, and so good. So those are two good ones. So now let’s talk about we’re streaming. What should we be streaming? Should we be approaching services as normal? Like my pastor, he’s like, people want normalcy. They want to feel the familiar, but you I think are gonna say we should be leaning into innovation, making it a completely different experience because of the context. Give us some insight.

Carl Barnhill 09:52 Okay, I would ask your pastor, why was he hearing from that they weren’t normal. I’m not discounting his opinion. at all, and then let me let me start by saying like, I am not an expert on this, I’m just, we serve a lot of churches. And so I’m kind of curating a lot of information together and spitting that back out. So I am not the authority on the subject, I have a lot of ideas. I’ve served in church world in some, some really large churches, so I kind of been in the space a long time. So I would say to your pastor, if that is what your church is feeling, then do take a and if people are like, man, I just want normal, then do normal. But I would save for another batch of people. There’s nothing been normal about the last two months. I mean, it’s, you know, the word unprecedented is been overused, like crazy. So I would say, lean into innovation and creativity. This is an opportunity to do something different that people are going to completely forgive. You can be a pastor on his iPhone, streaming straight to Facebook, from the backyard. Nobody cares right now. You know, you can put fun videos, I’ve seen a lot of churches, and we can talk about this a little bit more. But I’ve seen a lot of churches do like family activity videos, or, or nurses and medical staff saying thank you church for praying for us. Like now’s the time to do that. I mean, that might spill into your in person gathering. But now’s the time to put a video together. That’s very creative, very new, I would say. Not that we’re going to take every cue from Hollywood, but I would say that every major talk show is doing some type of Home Edition approach right now. So people don’t people don’t care, the production quality, they just want you to be authentic. So maybe in your auditorium talking to an empty room that we know is empty, may not work. So I’m just don’t add a different approach.

Alex Enfiedjian 11:56 Yeah, you’re totally right. And I think my pastor would say, you know, he’s a little older. Well, he’s 65. So he’s older. And you know, he’s

Alex Enfiedjian 12:03 saying, I think he’s going from his gut, like, people want stability right now, when everything else is crumbling around them this and that. And a lot of the younger guys are like, no, this is the time to like, go digital and go into a different context. Because the internet is a different context. You don’t have a captive audience. When they’re watching on a computer, they have 18 browser tabs open it’s one click away from distraction. So you know, let’s make it as engaging as possible. Maybe Can you talk about that? I’m going to skip a question about dumbing down lights and flash and just share about keeping people engaged online. What should we be doing, thinking about this inevitable distraction that is at people’s fingertips? How do we keep them with us?

Carl Barnhill 12:46 Yeah, I would say one idea here is to turn your hospitality team into an army of chatters online. Okay. So your parking lot greeters, your door greeters? Your hospitality people, your coffee station people? What if you turn those people into your online hospitality team in the chat of your church online platform? What if you had multiple services throughout your day and you split your hospitality team and said, okay, you three, do this service, you three to do that service. And you prep them and prepare them for things to talk about in the chat. Okay, so here are a few ideas. You can tell people to post where they’re watching from now, I wouldn’t go overboard with this. But you can post that you can arm them to engage with polls and questions. Your pastor could give them resources that pertain to the sermon, so they could put links and resources in the chat. Hey, do you want to learn more about what pastor Joe is talking about? Check out this great resource, this great devotional, this great Bible study to go deeper this week, you could put resources for parents to share with their kids. A great idea I’ve seen is to do an activity page that pertains to the sermon, something like that, that you can send parents to Hey, parents, while your kids are watching, have them download this. You might send that out on like a Wednesday Thursday so that they’re prepared for it too. You can also put a list of your scheduled like small groups or your online activities in the chat there. So basically, turn your hospitality team into an online hospitality team. So I think the friendship in the relationship as that keeps going that keeps people engaged online. They’re not just oh, they’re distant from me, and I’m watching a screen. I can engage in the chat and it might keep people engaged. That’s good.

Alex Enfiedjian 14:44 Yeah. And I think even like you mentioned earlier, not having you or your pastor look around and empty room but actually look right at the camera. Yeah, talk to the people. And I, you know, when I first started out the very first service we did online, like solely online because we’ve always streamed our services online, but like only Online, I didn’t know if I should say things like sing it out or like give vocal cues and kind of lead people, I kind of just sing the songs more like an artist in a sense for that one service. And I was like, that was lame. And my wife even told me she was like, yeah, you just kind of saying you didn’t like engage me or lead me. And so I would encourage worship leaders like, lead, like you’re leading people, and even acknowledging like, Hey, guys, you know, you’re probably still in your pajamas, if you are Say, Amen. And let’s do this, you know, let’s worship the Lord, like just acknowledge where they’re at what they’re experiencing and lead them across the screen in their living room to engage in worship. And I’ve heard of pastors even like saying, If you agree, type amen in the chat, you know, so that they’re actually telling people what to do through the internet. Yeah, that’s cool.

Carl Barnhill 15:48 Yeah, yeah, I agree. And especially about playing to the camera, I think that’s going to continue. I think one, maybe tip for that is when you go back to an in person gathering, realize that your online experience is a campus of your church that you’re talking to, as well as those in the room. So you can change your language. So instead of, you know, Hey, guys, thanks for making the trip out to church today, getting up and coming out. Thanks so much. Maybe you change it to Hey, guys, hey, those in the room and those watching online. Thanks for joining us and look right into the camera, Adam. And you could also give them instruction. So hey, guys, if you’re asked to rate or we’re gonna do this, or that maybe you’re not passed in the plate for a little while, but you know, give instruction to the room, but also give instruction to the online. Hey, guys, if you’re watching online, I want you to click that next step button, right by the chat window, that’s going to let us know that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So even when you’re at the podium, change your language to talk to both your in person and your online audience.

Alex Enfiedjian 16:57 That’s really good. Okay, so let’s talk service flow, you have a preferred service flow that you’re recommending right now, can you share what that is and why you recommend it?

Carl Barnhill 17:09 Yeah, this is kind of fluid. This was definitely you know, a month or two ago, when we got a lot of questions of Okay, well, we’re doing an online worship experience, it’d be the same exact flow as our in person gathering. So we just put this together, and it’s one flow, okay, it’s not the flow, but it’s one flow that you can consider is doing right off the bat, do a five minute countdown and start it at the time that your service starts, meaning if your service starts at 11, start your countdown at 11. So that your service starts at 1105. Why is that well helps people get their technology, right. It just kind of sets the tone. And also you can use your countdown, I think that the countdown is real estate that churches don’t use in. Okay, put the countdown numbers in the bottom corner, and use that time to share testimonies, to share announcements, to have a pastor talk about something to give information to your church. It might not be the video that you want everybody to see, you might save that for another time and you’re in the flow of worship. But your countdown can be you can repurpose old content in the countdown. Anyway. So use your countdown, use the real estate in your countdown. So countdown, then a two to three minute intro from your pastor. Then a two song worship set. So a lot of what people are seeing that we’ve heard online is the five six song worship set. Before dawn worship is too long for online people are dipping out and then coming back in the sermon, or they’re dipping out and staying out. Or they’re not even tuning in for another 20 minutes into your stream because they know that you’re gonna drag on for five songs. So they just jumped in at the sermon. Not that there’s anything wrong with your worship set. But keep it short, is my opinion there. Then a message from your pastor and I would keep this a little bit shorter to 1520 Minute Message kind of thing. And then a one song close. And then like a two to three minute close from from your pastor. Now you might do it different again, this is you might add little stories or little other videos or things in your online experience. But that kind of might give you a base of a flow that you can work from.

Alex Enfiedjian 19:38 That’s really good. And I agree with pretty much everything you said I really love the idea of starting the countdown timer at the zero mark. So like Sam starts at 12 and you start the countdown timer 12 I love that because we’re starting right at 12 o’clock and I’m giving some pretty important because I’m the worship pastor worship leader, but I also at this season and really emcee A lot of the service and I’ll be giving like really important information like, Hey, guys, we really want to encourage you to share the link to this live stream. You know, we could send it out to 60,000 people, if everybody just got one, you know, two people to watch it or whatever. And yet, my guess is only like a third or a quarter of the people are even they’re watching at that time. And so I love that, you know, starting late. That’s good. Also, I agree with the shorter worship, I think, you know, we went down to three songs set upfront. Yeah. And I definitely agree with the shorter sermon, because again, the pastor is used to having a captive audience like they can’t get up and leave. But we were watching our online service watch time. So great. Yeah, we have 1000s of people watching. But if you look at the average watch time, it’s 30 minutes. Well, our services have been going for like, probably an hour and 10 minutes or an hour and 15 minutes, right. And so if they’re only tuning in for 30 minutes of that they’re not even catching the whole sermon. So right. You know, it’s it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. If If pastors are used to teaching for 45 minutes, like, yeah, it’s really hard for some of them to cut that down. But I highly also recommend having your pastors shorten their sermon to be more digestible in an online context. So yeah, yeah, that’s really good. What are some of the other ideas that you’ve seen implemented in services to keep people’s engagement or just creative ways that people are using the online platform to do services?

Carl Barnhill 21:23 I think someone want to mention earlier, like, what if you had some selfie videos of families? So for instance, maybe after your worship set, or between your intro and your worship set? What if you had a selfie video, that’s one minute long of a family going on a hike? Hey, guys, with the James fam, we’re at a high Akin today. And men, I know that it’s been crazy with COVID, we just thought we’d go out hiking, and here’s some of the things that we’ve gotten to do as a family. And here’s some of the things that God has allowed us to do or shown us in this time in the last month, and then maybe show a you know, your 10 year old kid and how they’re so show a family and what where they are and what God’s doing with them. I think stuff like that will help me connect with Oh, hey, that’s, that’s, I know, that person. You know, it just kind of brings a relationship in, or like I was mentioning, maybe nurses or medical staff. Maybe you do like a montage video of them saying, hey, church, thank you so much for praying, here’s where we are at our hospital, here’s what we’re doing. Thanks so much for praying for us, or food recipe, like I’ve seen several churches do kids doing, you know, making cookies. And this is 123 of how we make chocolate chip cookies while we’re at home and quarantine, maybe you could tie it to your sermon, now’s the time to kind of think out of the box and connect with the people in our church, and that it might be neat to see what others are doing at home.

Alex Enfiedjian 22:59 I love that I think that’s really cool. And it brings like, more people into the experience, which when people are involved in the experience, then they pay more attention to it. Because they know, you know, they’re like, oh, maybe my family will be next. Okay, so you kind of started hinting at this earlier in the conversation about pretty soon we’re going to be moving to this interesting, unexplored area of really doing church for 50% of our people in the building and 50% watching online. I mean, those numbers are just, you know, averaged out. But let’s just say you are now officially ministering to two different groups of people in one experience. How should we be thinking about that? What are some of the ways we can get the most out of both crowds in one event? Like I’m thinking, Okay, maybe there’s a separate livestream host? But what are the things that they’re saying? And how do you make sure that you time that person to the person who’s on stage? And how do you achieve it, technically, maybe I’m getting too complicated, but just help us think about ministering to two different groups of people at the same time.

Carl Barnhill 23:58 So I have three kind of tips here that we can hit on that are just scratching the surface. And we can get into some technical, you know, how to mix your host with your lab and things like that. But let me hit on these first and we can dive into that. So I think number one is you want to address or acknowledge that your online audience is there. I think what a lot of churches might have done is your streaming, what is going on live like you’re putting a camera in the back of the room, or you’re capturing that and putting it online? My suggestion is to Alright, we’ve done that. Now let’s maybe go to 2.0. So what does 2.0 look like? And what does it look like when you’re back in your building and you have to speak to both audiences. So what I was saying earlier, address and acknowledge your audience and that comes in in the form of your language. So when you’re on stage as a host, when you’re on stage as a pastor, a worship leader, this Deaf hits your audience with worship folks. Don’t just speak to the people in the room, speak to the people online and say, Hey, guys in the room, we’re going to be singing it out loud. If you’re singing along online, do this XYZ, or, Hey, guys, if you’re watching online, you can find the lyrics to all of our songs on our app. So feel free to download that today. If you’re watching online, like just something that tells them, Hey, I see you, I know that you’re there. The second thing is, I would say shoot closer. So if you’re a church that has camera shots with your worship experience, I would shoot closer for the online experience. If we were doing this interview, and I was, you know, way back somewhere, it was not very relational, right here. And so shoot in the room, or shoot your online experience. If you’re pre recording closer to tighter shots, you might put the cameras in different places that you wouldn’t normally do that before. So if you are recording your service on the stage, but there’s nobody in the room, you can put the camera right on the stage in front of the pastor, where you wouldn’t be able to do that if people are in the room. So take advantage of putting the camera in weird places. I would say the third thing is prepare your team. So yes, have a online host. Yes, prepare your hospitality team, things like that. But be intentional about building your volunteer teams in such a way that they’re ministering to the in person, audience, as well as the online audience. So you might build your volunteer team have coffee stations, but don’t forget that there needs to be people in the chat on the online campus, as well. So when you’re building your volunteer teams, make sure that they’re in both places. So that’s think those would be the kind of the three points that I would say, but I can get into the win. Get into the technical nitty gritty, if you want to.

Alex Enfiedjian 27:05 Yeah, let’s spend a few minutes just sharing technically, how, how can we kind of splice our services to maybe like the the cheap way, and maybe like the more professional way to how to have two different cameras and two different hosts and all that stuff? If you even think we need that, you know?

Carl Barnhill 27:23 Yeah, I think it does get a little bit hairy when you’re trying to time stuff out in person. And so that would I think that would take some coordinating. But I mean, it’s doable. Maybe an easy way to do this is to go live with one or two hosts before the service starts. So hey, guys, welcome to our online experience, we’re going to be here all you know, for the next hour right here with you, here’s how to do things online, here’s where to go. Alright, we’re gonna take you right to our worship experience, as it starts right now in the room. So guys watch this worship, and then transition over so you can Tom that. And then they could come back at the end of your experience, and say, Hey, guys, man, great message from Pastor Joe today. Here’s how to go deeper. So put your host at the beginning and the end. And that that wouldn’t would not take too much on the timing to do.

Alex Enfiedjian 28:23 This is why I love you, Carl, you’re like on the fly making up perfect solutions to difficult problems. You’re the man.

Carl Barnhill 28:30 It’s nothing’s perfect man you get in the moment. And it’s like, Man, this, this sounded good. But to make it work, you know, takes some time to think about.

Alex Enfiedjian 28:40 Yeah, so one of the benefits of having church online is that people all over the world are watching churches, which Yeah, this is a side point. But it made me think recently about the passage that said, and the gospel will be preached all over the world. And then the end will come I was like, hey, maybe this is it. Maybe God just needed all the churches to get on line for the gospel to be preached through the internet. I never thought of it going through the internet. But anyway, different side story. But people are watching online, people are actually getting saved. We’ve had a few people tell us that. Yeah. How should we be approaching follow up and discipleship digitally in this time?

Carl Barnhill 29:17 Man? That’s a great question, I would say the major thing that you need to do is get their contact information. So I was I was talking with Tyler Smith from text in church. And he gave me a couple of things to think about that I thought were golden. One is gather their contact information. So and you can do that best through like a digital connection card. So your online host or your hospitality team that’s in the chat, can say, Hey guys, before you leave today, be sure to fill out our digital connection card, especially if you’re new. hit this box, fill this out. So and have that digital Connection Card button right where your live stream page lives. Make it very, very easy for people One thing that he said is keep it short. So first name, last name, email, phone number, that’s it, you don’t need their kids names, you don’t need their address, you don’t need any of that right now. In fact, the longer the form is, the less likely they’re going to complete it. Okay, so gather their information. The second thing is reach out to them during the week with some type of communication. So that’s email, text, social media messaging, something like that. You might use a service like text and church to text people. And you can do some automation. But I think that the major piece of that is, make sure that your automation sounds like a friend. If it sounds like a robot, people are going to just not respond. And that that’s a way that you can tell if you’re not sounding like a robot is, if no one responds to you, you need to change your messaging. So if people respond, then you know that you’re on to something. So he put it this way, automation plus personalization equals effective communication. So I thought that was really good. And then consider a guest follow up calendar. So just like anything, you know, having a plan of attack allows you to be intentional. So if you have a an actual calendar, that you say, Okay, I’m gonna send this type of message here. And then this type of message here on this Thursday, and then this, I mean, like, map it out. And text and church has a great guest follow up calendar that you can kind of get you started. But that’s what I would suggest. I would say, follow up with them, don’t let them go, you know, set a time for a zoom call during the week, especially if somebody got saved. If you jump on a zoom call and walk them through that decision, I would say one, this might sound crass, but make sure that they got saved, like one through eight. Tell me about your decision walkthrough. That is genuine. I know I’m not trying to judge it. Yeah. But But walk them through that decision. And then if you’re on a zoom call, you can give them next steps of how to find a small group or baptism or whatever’s next for them. That’s really good.

Alex Enfiedjian 32:09 Yeah, so what we are working on right now, well, we have a no God page, which we send people to we did it for Easter. And then when they if they say I accepted Christ, they click the button, they put their info into MailChimp, you know, MailChimp form. And that will begin an automated trigger, which we have not yet built. We’re building the emails right now. But it’s basically like a discipleship pathway. Yeah, like a seven sequence email, like, you know, who is this God I now serve? And what is the gospel require a very and and then like, how do I pray? How do I so we’re working on that? Yeah, as but what we’re actually thinking now is to make it something that can be used in person as well, where if the pastor gives an altar call, and instead of saying go to the prayer room, because you know, 90% of the people don’t go to the prayer room. But if you could just say, If you prayed that prayer, I want you to take one second and send your email address 27774. And then that will put their email into MailChimp and begin the sequence. Yes. And that’s how we’re approaching it. And I wanted to encourage people to when you said, the digital Connect card like they might be, how do I build a web page? Look, you can make it really easy to just go to Google Forms. I don’t know Yes, addresses but type in Google Forms. And you’ll find it’s free. Yes, you can create the form and you can post that link in your chat. So that would be something to not to not be overwhelmed with. Great idea, Alex. Cool. So that’s great. Follow up. Now let’s talk a little bit about social media, because obviously everybody’s on their phones all day doing nothing. How should we as the church be using social media to encourage our church during this time? Well, man, I

Carl Barnhill 33:44 can tell you that I dip my toes in communications a little bit. But social media is definitely not I’m more of a video guy. So social media is not my sweet spot. But we do create a lot of graphics, for churches, graphics and video content for their social so I can tell you what they’re coming to us for. So I’ll just kind of read off a little bit that I wrote down. One is informational. So things that they need to know about the church. Another is inspirational. So quotes and things like that maybe pull a quote from your pastor’s message, that sort of thing. relational. So ask questions, get people responding, get people in conversation. And in fact, I did this. The other day, I just made like, 10 social graphics that just asked a question. And then it has a website at the bottom. And I posted that on my Facebook page. So instead of using the Facebook, pre done default things, background images, I’ve created my own and it’s just kind of branded. And that’s gotten just as much as a response. So you could say like, What is one thing that you learn from today’s sermon, and then at the bottom of that graph that you can put to learn more of this A church comm kind of thing. So relational. And then the last thing is educational. So if you have discipleship material or devotionals, or next step guides or things like that, you could try using that.

Alex Enfiedjian 35:16 Yeah, we did a little how I do my DeVos. Like, it’s it was kind of cheesy, but it’s like, here’s how five different people from five totally different backgrounds do their devotionals in the morning. Yeah. And we posted that we posted it every day, one per day, and it lost steam. But I think if we would have spaced it out one a week, people would have continued to engage with it. So yeah, but yeah, I love I love that. So lastly, I want to talk about giving, because obviously, the church cannot function without the fuel of finances. Yeah, that was good alliteration right there. So well talk to us how you see churches doing giving, which platforms do you recommend? Are there any creative ideas you’ve seen around giving? Well, there’s

Carl Barnhill 35:58 a lot out there you got, we recommend secure give, as a platform for people to use. So secure, give, and then, you know, there’s tidally and subsplash. And, and others that have great giving platforms. So here are a couple things that they gave us to use in. So obviously, you want to make sure that you have a give online button on your homepage, I would put it right in front of people don’t make people search for it, especially your your older crowd or your folks that are a little more challenge with technology, you can put that give button and that makes it easy for them to find that that button and give, I would also emphasize Mobile Giving. So like secure give has a one tap giving available like you would a an Amazon, all my credit card information is stored is just tap and go. The major thing with with giving is keeping the why in front of people. And one thing that they suggest is specific given categories. So if you hit your give online page, and you have several, you have several categories there like you know, the building fun, or the missions offering or special campaign or stuff like that, it puts me in a little bit more of control of what I’m getting to. And also if I hit like missions, and then I may be asked to get sent an email later of things that are happening with missions at my church, it makes me connect the dots and go, Okay, my giving is making a difference through my local church, for the kingdom. So anything that you can do to put the why in front of people do it. You also want to make sure that you’re communicating to folks, that ministry is still happening at your church. So any time that you can show stories, or have testimonies or show them photos or or videos of where they’re giving is going, like, hey, church, because of your generosity, we’ve gotten to feed 50,000 people in our community through our campaign, love your neighbor, whatever, keep those kinds of stories in front of people. So through our friends at secure give, those are the things that they’ve really seen be effective when it comes to online giving for churches.

Alex Enfiedjian 38:20 Yeah. And I think everybody freaked out at first when this happened. And they’re like, Oh, my gosh, and there are probably churches who, you know, maybe they sunk, you know, because of this. But I think in a good way, it has pushed a lot of people to give online. And a benefit of that is the reoccurring thing. So if you can train your people to use reoccurring giving, then no matter what happens, if they go on vacation, they’re not going to forget to write the check. You know, the downside of giving is the fees that the credit card processing companies take and then also even the given take a little bit. There is one company that Brady shear who has been on the podcast before we both know him he created a company called rebel give that I believe doesn’t take any fees for his own company. And so might be worth looking at for the smaller church because it is a bummer when you start to see like money that people gave to the church is actually not going to the church. We’re going to these, you know, credit card processing fees. Yeah. Man, this has been really helpful. Do you feel like there’s been anything that we haven’t hit that’s really important to hit? And I have a few more questions before we wrap up. But just sure stuff that

Carl Barnhill 39:29 I will say that online is here to stay. It’s not going anywhere. If you haven’t been online before. You’re going to have to be online from here on out. And so we need to make it excellent. Now I’m a big proponent of start with what you have. version one is better than version none. I am right there. However, at some point in this you need to go to 2.0 you need to Do things that will take your online experience up a notch. And then at some point, you need to go to 3.0, you need to make sure that you have a host in the chat every week, you need to make sure that you’re on a streaming provider, and that you’re using church online platform or whatever you want to use, you need to put these things in place. So that your online experience, think of it like a campus. Okay, so if you’re not a multi site church, you’ve now become one, okay, your in person gathering and your online campus. Like if you were to plant a church, and not put any staff or volunteers there, and it was just an empty building, how would people feel it’s kind of the same thing, you’re just throwing your stream up with no energy behind it? Okay, so pour some energy behind it. And however you need to do that, wherever steps you are in the process, eventually, you need to take the next step. And then the next step, and, and there’s, you know, our ministry can help and you give fantastic ideas on your podcasts and through your resources, Alex, and there’s so many people out there that are that are helping in this space, that the Help is out there, to bring your experience up. So I would say, start with what you have, then get to 2.0 when you can get to 3.0. When you can. Does that make sense?

Alex Enfiedjian 41:27 Yeah, I love the point that you make that, you know, you wouldn’t just put an empty building up and say, I hope that people are there, how are they going to feel? Well, the people are online. And so how are they going to feel if we don’t engage with them where they are, that’s where they are, you know, most of them. And the potential to reach more people online is greater than the potential to what we can reach in the building. So yeah, I think that’s a really good word. So Carl, you created an online resource, or a resource for online church, and tell listeners what those resources are, and more about what 1213 media does and how they can get in touch with you how you guys can help them.

Carl Barnhill 42:05 Yes, so 1230 dot media, Ford slash church online, we’ve put together a web series, it’s that’s a lot of these ideas. So we have a lot of them out. And we’re I think we’re going to do around 40 different videos that are like little two to three minute videos, that are a little tips and tricks. And again, we are by far from the being the expert on this, but it but it’s a matter of just experience that we’ve had experience talking with all these churches, consulting with churches, and kind of curating it and putting it together and putting it back out to people just sharing ideas. So yeah, our resource is 1230 dot media, forward slash church online, that web series is they are also putting a book together. That’s pretty comprehensive on all these ideas, from how to do kids ministry, how to do live stream, how to do giving, all that kind of stuff. We’ll be right in one place. And we’re almost done with it. And it’ll be on the website soon.

Alex Enfiedjian 43:05 Awesome. And I’ll put a link in the show notes all that did you cover kind of what other services you offer churches who are listening who might take advantage of what you guys do?

Carl Barnhill 43:14 Yeah, so our Bullseye is to help churches with their worship experience. So we really had to make a decision when this whole thing started, do we add to the noise? You know, or do we kind of sit back and let other people create resources, we decided to jump headfirst. And the reason why we did that is because our bull’s eye is to help with your worship experience. And so the the number one thing that people are talking about is how do we do church as we know it? How do we do our worship experience. And so we jumped in big time on this. And so but but what we do is media content, both off the shelf ready to go stuff on our website, and custom media. So if you needed to a custom countdown or bumper or trailer or any graphics, custom graphics for your sermon series, or announcements or announcement videos, or any type of custom graphics and video, we do that. So ready made media, custom media and training. And that training piece is all about helping you transform your worship experience. Awesome,

Alex Enfiedjian 44:22 Carl, you’re doing a great job. And I counted a privilege to be a friend with you. And thank you for your time on the podcast and it’s gonna have a lot of people.

Carl Barnhill 44:31 Thanks so much, Alex. appreciate you having me, man.

Alex Enfiedjian 44:33 All right, that’s all we have time for today. I hope this episode was helpful to you. I want to encourage you to send it to your pastor, send it to your video or your media team or whoever needs to hear it so that you can begin discussing how to get to online church 2.0 or 3.0. Like Carl said, I also want to encourage you to check out our sponsor again 1230 media, you can go to 1230 dot media to get many great free resources for your church to transform your worship. experience and help you with whatever creative projects you might have. So thanks for tuning in today. I hope this episode helped you. I will see you again in a month with another helpful episode. God bless you guys