“Which marketing method gets more pre-registrations AND attendance?”
Isn’t that the question EVERY Pastor or Evangelist wants to know?
SermonView is in a unique position. We offer marketing for evangelistic events. We have a pre-registration system that can tell us the source of a registration. We also have the AttendanceTracker module for our InterestTracker CRM software. Because of this, we’ve collected a ton of anonymized data over the last 15 years. But it’s not connected to each other, making it difficult to analyze.
So when I had an opportunity to write a paper for my PhD program that required this exact type of data analysis, I jumped at the chance. It opened the door to the possibility of uncovering patterns and insights on evangelism marketing and attendance that previously could only be speculated on. (If you’d like to review it, the full paper is available online.)
The Study
The purpose of this study was to understand the influence of various marketing communication channels—ranging from emails, mailers, or social media—on event pre-registration and actual event attendance. In other words, which marketing channel gives us the most pre-registrations? And which marketing channel gives us the most attendance?
The data for this study came from two sources. The first dataset is SermonView’s event pre-registration platform database, which provided individual registration records for 119 campaigns for in-person events in the 2020-2023 range for which matching attendance tracking data was available. To qualify for inclusion, a campaign needed to:
be for an in-person event
have received attendee registrations from at least one marketing channel
have corresponding attendance tracking data
The second dataset is our InterestTracker database, which provided individual interest records of those who attended at least one session for these same 119 campaigns.
While we have data for thousands of marketing campaigns over the last 15 years, not every event used InterestTracker to track nightly attendance. And many events in InterestTracker did not have a corresponding marketing campaign using SermonView’s event pre-registration system. That limited the analysis to just these 119 campaigns.
There were 9,510 records in the event pre-registration platform that met the study criteria, of which 3,314 had matching records in the InterestTracker database. The InterestTracker database provided 11,631 records that met the study criteria, of which there were 3,314 matching records in the event pre-registration platform database.
Findings from the Data
First, keep in mind that there are many factors to consider when reviewing data such as this. Things like event length and topic are likely to influence registration and attendance rates, as well as the clarity of communication of the value to potential participants. There is not enough data to slice this with any more granularity, such as by event length or topic, but this does give us some insight into ways attendance rates can improve.
With that in mind, here are four specific findings from the data:
1. How you hear about the event matters.
When they registered for the event using SermonView’s event pre-registration system, guests were asked how they heard about the event. Figure 6 (below) shows the pre-registrations for 119 events broken down by how the guest self-reported how they learned about the event.
The first thing that jumps out from this graph is that nearly half (49%) of all the pre-registrants said they heard about the event from online marketing, predominantly through Facebook or Instagram.
But the second thing you immediately see is that Facebook/Instagram had really low attendance rates, and in fact this group represented a smaller number of attendees than those who heard about it from more traditional marketing channels like direct mail.
2. “Effort” matters, but not how you think.
Figure 7 (below) shows all pre-registrations from people who heard about the event on Facebook or Instagram and compares attendance rates between people who registered on the pre-registration website versus the on-page form used for social media ad event registrations.
While the on-page form had much more registrations overall, it had a lower attendance rate than the website form submissions. What is the difference between the forms?
The on-page form used for online marketing allows for auto-filled fields. This reduces friction, and makes submitting the form easier. The website form requires entering multiple fields manually.
One might think that the simplified, easier form would be more beneficial, right? However, the higher attendance rate from the website form aligns with what Cialdini found in his principle of Commitment and Consistency: lower commitment leads to lower rates of follow-through, while higher commitment effort leads to higher rates of follow-through.
3. There is always room for growth.
This study shows that some additional commitment steps could be added to the registration funnel, particularly for those who sign up via Facebook or Instagram advertising. Cialdini’s principle of Commitment and Consistency suggests that additional small commitments, with some type of public view, could improve compliance with the ultimate goal of attendance at the event. This might lower the overall pre-registration rate but would increase the rate of attendance by those who do pre-register.
This could be done by researching different types of forms, perhaps removing auto-fill or incentivizing registered guests to post publicly on social media or share the event to their friends via email. For example, a book or printed study guide could be offered to those who send an email to 3 of their friends, stating, “I’m going to this event, and I hope you will, too.” (Attendance rates could then be compared between those who share and those who don’t.)
The take away from this is it is worth experimenting with not making it “too easy” to do, or else it might be too easy to forget too. By increasing the additional commitment steps, you are increasing the likelihood of the pre-registrant staying consistent with the commitment they made in the beginning of their journey with you.
Let’s take another look at Figure 6 (below). We don’t know what “”Unknown” or “Other” represent, but take a look at the attendance rate for “Friend”.
This leads us to believe there should be connection efforts that are complementary to your digital marketing methods that get great pre-registration numbers, but perhaps weaker attendance rates.
Establishing a nurturing campaign both increases the awareness of the commitment and starts building relational connections with pre-registrants.
For example, a church could call each person, particularly those who registered using the on-page form on Facebook or Instagram. Even if the caller couldn’t speak to the guest directly, leaving a voicemail would alert the guest that a real human is aware of the commitment they made, raising the apparent weight of the commitment.
Another option would be to send weekly emails, signed by the pastor or speaker. These emails would affirm the decision the person made to pre-register, inform them a seat is being saved for them, and let them know you are looking forward to seeing them there. Emails should also include engaging questions and Bible verses to help keep the excitement of what first drew them in at the core of your communications.
The data for events that took this extra approach could then be analyzed to determine if this intervention increased the rate of attendance.
4. You need both digital ads and direct mail.
In a previous study, I found the median cost of a pre-registration by direct mail was $538.89, while the median cost from digital advertising was $50.00. Once we account for the lower attendance rates from digital advertising, though, this difference is dramatically reduced. The cost per attendee who pre-registered from direct mail was $1,189.60 ($538.90 ÷ 45.3%), while the cost per attendee who pre-registered via the Facebook or Instagram on-page form was $847.46 ($50.00 ÷ 5.9%). This suggests that even though people who pre-register via the social media on-page form attend at much lower rates, there is still value in including Facebook and Instagram in the advertising mix, because ultimately the cost per attendee is still less than the cost of an attendee from direct mail. However, direct mail is still the only way to guarantee that someone in every home gets your invitation, so even though the cost per attendee for direct mail was slightly more than from digital ads, you’re reaching a wider audience. Ultimately, it’s both/and, not either/or.
Conclusion
This data shows that by utilizing a combination of digital marketing efforts across Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, you’ll get a better cost-per-lead for your event marketing budget. While supporting your marketing digital efforts with a mailing might lead to a higher cost per lead, it is actually likely to get you more attendance.
Plus, building an intentional follow up plan to your marketing efforts, with reminders and personal connections built in, shows promising potential for turning more of your pre-registrants into attendees.
Next-generation digital advertising to reachthis generation.
At SermonView, we take a multi-touch marketing approach as often as we can when helping churches reach their communities. There are several key ways a multi-touch digital marketing approach can have a positive impact on reaching more people and building trust with your ministry.
We have helped churches with over 6,000 outreach events. We’ve sent over 30 million mailers into communities and reached over 8 million social media users. So we know how to help you plan an effective campaign.
Click the button below or call us at 800.525.5791 to learn more.
Technology has changed how we interact with the physical world. Yet despite all of the technological advances, people still need human connection. So how do you create connections and build trust in a society that has less and less experience with church?
By evaluating current trends, churches can adapt to a rapidly changing societal landscape and consider new approaches to fulfill their mission of sharing the love and teachings of Jesus Christ. If we take a thoughtful and multi-dimensional approach that recognizes the importance of embracing digital tools and strategies in the modern context, we can effectively reimagine how a church can “go” and spread the Good News today’s digital world and make disciples in their local communities.
What are current trends telling us?
1. Church attendance is dropping nationally.
The decline in church attendance can be attributed to various factors, including changing cultural norms and evolving attitudes toward organized religion, spirituality, and communal worship. The availability of digital platforms and social media has transformed how younger generations access information, and differing perspectives on the importance of church in people’s lives are emerging.
It’s crucial to recognize that the decline in church attendance is a complex and multifaceted trend shaped by individual and collective factors. While this trend poses challenges, it also presents opportunities for churches to adapt, engage with diverse audiences, and explore innovative ways to connect with those seeking spiritual fulfillment and community involvement.
2. People are less likely to go out as they used to.
The likelihood of people going out to events or places has fluctuated over time and is influenced by factors such as cultural shifts, technology, personal economic conditions, and health considerations. The emergence of digital delivery options, the rise of streaming services, and the convenience of virtual experiences have provided alternative social engagement and reduced in-person activities for many individuals.
However, we are all still human, and the desire for social interaction and community remains strong, motivating people to seek new experiences, connections, and enrichment through events and places. The key is it has to be truly meaningful to get them to go out.
3. People spend more time on electronic devices.
It is well-documented that as society increasingly turns to electronic devices for communication and entertainment, there has been a noted decline in face-to-face interactions and the development of rich, in-person communities. Research has indicated a decrease in the amount of time individuals spend engaging in close proximity, human-to-human interactions, has been linked to an increase in feelings of anxiety and loneliness. Additionally, there is evidence of a gradual erosion of basic social skills, including the ability to maintain sustained eye contact during conversations, as a result of the shift towards digital communication.
Consequently, individuals who experience anxiety and loneliness may turn even more to their electronic devices for comfort and companionship, further perpetuating a cycle of reliance on technology as a source of solace in the absence of fulfilling in-person connections.
How do we reach people online?
We can navigate these challenges by offering something that every human is longing for: trust and connection. We just need to do it through the digital avenues that will actually reach them. And that is where intentional digital marketing strategies come in.
At SermonView, we take a multi-touch marketing approach as often as we can when helping churches reach their communities.
There are several key ways a multi-touch digital marketing approach can have a positive impact on reaching more people and building trust with your ministry.
Here are the top 4 benefits:
Increased Exposure:
Consistently running ads across different channels not only increases visibility, but it also creates “brand recognition” for your church. People are more likely to take notice and remember your church name or events when they encounter multiple touchpoints, leading to higher awareness and engagement. Multiple touchpoints enable churches to reinforce its messaging and serve as reminders to potential event attendees. With each interaction, the event details, attendance benefits, and relevance are reiterated, increasing the chances of participants taking action and pre-registering for the event or engaging with another call to action.
Audience Targeting:
A multi-touch approach allows churches to leverage more channels with different messages to target multiple specific audiences. For example, social media ads can target users based on their demographics and interests, while your email marketing efforts can be personalized and sent to those who have already taken the first step and given you their contact information. This enables you to deliver tailored messages to various segments of your audience, increasing the likelihood of attracting people at each stage of their journey with your church.
Diversification:
Reduce your reliance on a single channel or platform, so you aren’t just shouting one message in one direction and hoping everyone hears it. This mitigates the risk of missed opportunities due to changes in algorithms, changes in user behavior, or technical issues with a specific platform. It provides you with a broader foundation for communication, ensuring consistent, widespread outreach throughout the year.
Tracking and Optimization:
By employing a multi-touch approach, a church can track the effectiveness of each marketing effort and evaluate which touchpoints are most successful in driving interactions, connections, pre-registrations, event or even Sabbath attendance. You can even use this data to tailor your messaging to pre-registrations without attendance vs. pre-registrations with attendance. This data-driven approach allows for ongoing optimization and refinement of your marketing strategies for connecting with your unique community God has called you to reach.
Can A Church Really Build Trust Through Marketing?
So we need to meet people where they are at, both physically and spiritually, to help them become comfortable with the idea of church, and digital marketing can do that. Sounds easy enough, but we are faced with a deluge of information online every day, how can a church cut through the noise? There are several theories about how many times someone needs to see an ad before they take action. The problem is this number varies depending on the context, industry, and target audience.
Plus, we aren’t talking about quick fix, “secular solutions” like the rest of our consumer-driven culture uses to handle numbing personal, spiritual issues. There is no singular answer to how long it takes each heart to respond to the Holy Spirit, so there is no cookie cutter formula. The Holy Spirit’s job is to convict, our job is just to go and tell. So let’s make sure that we are in a position to spread the good news as much as we can to those in our community that we can physically meet with.
Here is one example of how a church might approach applying a multi-touch marketing strategy to their mission to reach their community throughout the year:
Facebook/Instagram
Paid Ad Campaign:
Offer Bible studies or event invitations to a targeted audience outside your follower base.
Church Account:
Share inspiration through Bible verses, sermon snippets, member testimonials, etc. to your followers and for public display should someone manually look up your church account.
YouTube
Paid Ad Campaign:
Build brand awareness and develop a parasocial relationship through personalized videos throughout the year:
Offer prayer, inspiration, encouragement, personal growth challenges, invitations to events, etc. (For more information about building a parasocial relationship, check out The Digital Transformation of Ministry.)
Google
AdWord Campaigns:
Drive traffic by using links to specific landing pages (these can be articles or videos with an opportunity to ask for more information) on your outreach-focused website. These are tied to your church’s fundamental beliefs while still speaking to common felt needs:
Landing page ideas: Prayer Request, Importance of Rest (Sabbath), What Happens When We Die? (State of the dead), Starting a healthy lifestyle (benefits to a vegetarian/caffeine free lifestyle), etc.
Google Reviews:
Get your church members to review your church on Google. Never underestimate the power of a good testimony. This is an easy way to get more people involved and drive up your church’s reputation online.
This is just one example of a multi-touch marketing strategy a church could adopt. What matters is repeated exposure, across multiple platforms, and actively studying the frequency to maintain the effectiveness of your efforts throughout the year.
Best (secular) marketing practices suggests the“Rule of Seven”: that a consumer needs to encounter an ad approximately seven times to take action, as repeated exposure builds familiarity and trust. However, it is not an absolute rule and can vary. Another popular concept, that perhaps works better to cut through the digital noise of today is “Effective Frequency”: This focuses on fine-tune management to find the optimal number of ad exposures to achieve specific marketing goals, considering multiple factors like target audience, the objectives of each of your ads (inspiration, prayer request, event invitation, etc.), and the creative being advertised.
Trust takes time, and it takes trust to build connections.
Increasing your exposure while building trust over time and in multiple places is crucial to maintaining a steady, successful marketing campaign that is targeted to reach more people in your unique area. With a targeted, intentional approach, churches can utilize digital media marketing to build connections within their community and lead more people to a lasting relationship with Jesus.
Next-generation digital advertising to reachthis generation.
At SermonView, we have helped churches with over 6,000 outreach events. We’ve sent over 30 million mailers into communities and reached over 8 million social media users. So we know how to help you plan an effective campaign.
Click the button below or call us at 800.525.5791 to learn more.
Technology has changed how we interact with the physical world. Yet despite all of the technological advances, people still need human connection. So how do you create connections and build trust in a society that has less and less experience with church?
By meeting people right where they are: online.
In this webinar, SermonView founder and president Larry Witzel will explore essential digital marketing strategies such as search engine marketing, targeted social media ads, engaging social posts, impactful YouTube advertising, and consistent email communication.
We delved into the power of leveraging doctrine and felt-need-based content to resonate with your audience, fostering meaningful connections and guiding them along their spiritual journey. Additionally, we uncovered the potential of remarketing strategies to re-engage individuals who have visited your website, ensuring sustained outreach and impact. It’s a new way to transform your church’s digital presence and effectively engage with those seeking spiritual connection and growth in today’s digital age.
In less than an hour, you’ll discover innovative methods for digital outreach and community building that align with the unique mission and teachings of your church.
Welcome to today’s webinar! We’ll be talking about church marketing funnels, what they are, and how to use them evangelistically. My goal for today is that you leave with something practical that you can put into use this week in your ministry.
Before we get to what a funnel is and how its used in e-commerce, let’s talk about our goal for using this tool. Our goal is in-person relationship. We want people to connect with your church in a physically present way. Your church offers connection to a spiritual community, relationships with other believers. God created humans with the innate need to belong to community, and church exists to fulfill this fundamental need to belong. We are social creatures, and although church of course has a theological component, and a vertical relationship with God, church is fundamentally a social experience, with horizontal relationships between humans. And the most powerful social relationships exist when people are physically with each other.
So our goal is in-person community. People today, especially younger generations, live much of their lives in the digital space, and research is showing that this digital engagement is actually driving loneliness, anxiety, and depression. People today crave in-person experiences and real, life-giving community. We’re going to use digital communication technologies to reach people where they are, online, but our goal is to progressively move them toward an in-person relationship. The digital transformation allows us to accelerate this relationship-building through digital media. It allows us to break through the social anxiety to connect with people right where they’re at. It allows us to get out of the church building and begin developing relationships with people in the community. When the time is right, we can then invite these people to an in-person experience where that relationship can be deepened.
So our goal is in-person, face-to-face interactions with you and other church members.
What is a Funnel?
In the context of marketing and online engagement, the funnel is a model used to represent a customer’s journey from first learning about a product or service to taking the action we desire, such as making a purchase. It’s called a funnel because of its shape, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. This shape represents the gradual decrease in the number of people at each stage of the process as potential leads are filtered through different stages of engagement. Only a fraction move on to the next stage.
Here’s a general model of the marketing funnel:
Awareness: In e-commerce, you want to attract as many people as possible to your website, using a variety of techniques: search engine optimization, social media advertising, content marketing, and search engine ad campaigns to generate traffic. When someone clicks through to your website from one of these sources, they’ve completed the awareness stage.
Interest: This is where you engage your website visitors by showcasing the value of your product or service. Provide detailed product information, attractive images, compelling product descriptions, and customer reviews to help visitors understand the product.
Consideration: In this stage, you encourage visitors to consider the product as a solution to their needs. Offer comparisons with similar products, show testimonials or case studies, and provide detailed benefits or unique selling propositions (USPs) of the products. When a user adds a product to the shopping cart, they’ve completed the consideration stage
Conversion: This is where you convert interested visitors into buyers. Here an online marketer will work to streamline the checkout process, offer multiple payment options, and provide clear calls-to-action. Sometimes they will implement strategies like offering limited-time discounts, free shipping, or using urgency (e.g., “Only 2 left in stock!”) to encourage immediate purchase.
Retention: In this stage, you work to turn one-time buyers into repeat customers. Marketers do this by engaging customers after the purchase with follow-up emails, solicit feedback, offer customer support, encourage them to join loyalty programs, and provide them with special offers or recommendations based on past purchases.
Advocacy: Beyond just being repeat customers, you want satisfied customers to become brand advocates. You want them to be raving fans. Here a marketer will implement referral programs, encourage social media sharing, and make it easy for customers to leave reviews or testimonials.
Online marketers work hard to optimize each stage of the funnel, guiding potential customers through their buying journey.
This results in higher conversion rates and customer loyalty. The funnel not only helps in targeting the right audience with the right message at the right time but also in allocating marketing resources efficiently. So for example, if we see that there’s a big drop-off between the Consideration and Conversion stages, we’ll look at what’s going on and in this case, how can we make it easier to help the potential customer add the product into the shopping card.
Today, the top funnel experts say you want to be tightly focused on a single product or service. So if someone searches for webcam, for example, they should come to a landing page specifically about a webcam that you offer. Help them focus on that single product. Ideally, you’ll avoid distractions by removing links to other parts of your website.
Let me give you an example. Here is an ad in my Facebook feed for a webcam from a company called iContactCamera.
It’s a webcam that puts the camera down into the middle of the screen, so when you’re looking at the screen you’re also looking at the camera. And this is a 4K version with a better quality camera. I’m in the awareness stage, where I’m being introduced to this for the first time. This looks interesting, so I want to learn more about it.
When I click the ad it sends me to their website, where I can learn more about this camera. I’m now in the interest stage.
They’ve got information about their value proposition and the benefits you get from using this particular webcam. As I learn more about it, I move from the interest to the consideration stage, where now I’m actually thinking about buying the camera. When I click the add to cart button, I’m now in the conversion stage, where they do things to help me complete the checkout process and actually make the purchase.
If I click “Pay Now”, I will move to the retention stage of the funnel, where I assume I’ll get an email with information about the purchase. After the product arrives, they’ll probably contact me again to see how the camera is working for me and ensure I’m satisfied with the purchase. In this case, there may not be an opportunity for me to become a repeat customer, because of the type of product, but I could become an advocate, telling people about the product. And they have tools to make that easy, like a share button.
So that’s how e-commerce companies use the marketing funnel.
Why a funnel works: Cialdini’s Commitment and Consistency
Before we talk about how to apply this online funnel to local church evangelism, I want to briefly look at the psychology of funnels. In my PhD studies I ran across work by Dr. Robert Cialdini, an American psychologist who developed a framework for understanding how to influence people to take a specific action. He described 6 principles for influence. We don’t have time to go through all of them, but his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is a New York Times bestseller with over 5 million copies sold. Now, full disclosure, I haven’t actually read this book yet. I bought it, but I’ve looked at more of his academic research.
I want to focus on just two of his principles. The first he calls Reciprocity, which suggests that when someone is given something of value, they want to return something of equivalent value. We’ll use that when we offer something for free. The second is what he calls Consistency. This principle suggests that people like to be consistent in terms of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. This is similar to the idea of cognitive dissonance that we’ve talked about on a previous webinar, but flipped around.
Here’s the key: if you ask someone to take an action that is consistent with established behaviors, with what they’ve done in the past, they are more likely to do what you ask.
Also, if the individual has voluntarily and publicly declared a commitment to something, they are more likely to follow through. That’s the psychological principle of consistency. Once people commit to something, they are more likely to go through with it to maintain a self-image of consistency and reliability. In the context of online marketing funnels, this principle can be leveraged to guide potential customers from initial interest to final purchase and beyond.
So for example, in the Awareness stage you ask for a low-risk and non-binding commitment, like signing up for a newsletter, or following a social media account, or downloading a free ebook. These small commitments are designed to start building a relationship. When users take this initial step, they begin to see themselves as someone who is interested in your brand or products, setting the stage for further engagement.
As potential customers move through the interest and consideration stages of the funnel, they are encouraged to make more significant commitments. This could be engaging with content, participating in a free trial, or adding items to a cart. Each step is designed to reinforce the customer’s self-image as someone who is interested in and supportive of the brand. People are more likely to continue a behavior if they see it as consistent with their self-image and past actions.
In the conversation stage, the potential customer is asked to make a more significant commitment: actually making the purchase. If the previous stages have effectively reinforced the customer’s commitment, making a purchase is seen as the natural next step in maintaining a consistent pattern of behavior. Techniques like highlighting the customer’s previous engagements or choices (e.g., “You’ve already chosen the perfect color, just one step away from enjoying your new product!”) can be effective.
Then after the purchase, the focus shifts to retaining the customer and encouraging them to advocate for the brand. Customers who have made a purchase are reminded of their positive choice and are encouraged to remain consistent with that choice by repurchasing, subscribing, or recommending the brand to others. Testimonials, loyalty programs, and referral incentives can play a significant role at this stage.
As you can see, this psychological principle of consistency is the basis for effective funnels. Small commitments lead toward bigger commitments, ultimately leading to a purchase, and then to advocacy for the brand.
Funnels in the church
Okay, so how does a church use this concept of a marketing funnel? Well, if you’ve spent any time around Adventist evangelism you know that we already use these principles in evangelism. An evangelistic series is essentially an evangelistic funnel, where we move people through a sequence of decisions until it’s easy for them to say, yes, I want to be a member of the remnant church.
Here at SermonView, we use the funnel principles when we do evangelism marketing. We send out direct mail and use social media advertising to make people aware of the meetings. That’s the awareness stage. We send them to a website where they can learn more. That’s the interest stage. We invite them to reserve seats, which is the consideration stage, but pre-registration is obviously not the final step here. We want them to show up on opening night. So we send reminder emails and text messages, and when they walk through the church doors on opening night, we’ve reached the conversion stage of the marketing funnel. That’s how we use it as an evangelism marketing company.
But what I want to talk about today is how your church can use this marketing funnel every day, all year long. You’ll use it not just for one-time events, but for year-round ministry.
Here’s how we’ll do it. We’ll start by running some Google ads for specific keywords related to various doctrinal and felt-need topics, targeted to the area around your church, so when people search on Google in your geographic area they’ll see an ad for that topic. We’ll also run social media ads, YouTube ads, and make social media posts on this topic. That’s the awareness phase.
When they click through, they go to a page on that specific topic, where they can learn more. They’re now in the interest stage. We put a video on that page and a short article where their curiosity is piqued further. We also put a form on the page where they can request a Bible study guide on this specific topic. When they fill out that form, they’re in the consideration stage.
Once we have their contact information, we can text and email them afterwards, checking in on how the Bible study went. These emails can also invite them to an in-person Bible study on this topic. We send a message immediately, to help them remember they made this request. Then we send another message every 3 or 4 days for a couple of weeks, then we move them to once a week. These messages begin to broaden the focus beyond that particular doctrinal topic to other things your church offers. You offer something of value in each email, so brief devotional thought or inspirational message, and you invite them to an in-person event. That could be a Sabbath School, or the worship service, or some other event specifically designed for guests.
Here’s the thing: you want there to be a page where they can “register” for the event, whatever it is. When they fill out that form, they’re now in the conversion stage. You’ll send them a follow up email and text saying, “We’re so excited to see you at this event! When you arrive, be sure to ask for [your name], and I’ll be your personal host for this experience. I’m looking forward to meeting you!”
When they show up for the event, they’re now in the retention stage. What can you do to create an experience where they want to come back? Once you’re meeting with them in person, we’re done with the digital marketing funnel, and now you’re just doing ministry in your church.
Let’s go through the specific components to making this work. I’m going to start with the landing page, which is NOT the first stage, right? This is the interest stage of the marketing funnel.
Interest: Landing Pages
The topic for this funnel is Sabbath rest. So here’s a landing page on that specific topic. We have a short, 60-second video on the topic by the pastor, which, by the way, helps to continue fostering a parasocial relationship if you’ve been running YouTube ads. (We’ll come back to that.)
We then have a short, 400-word blog post about Sabbath rest. And at the bottom, we’ve got a form for them to give us information for a free Bible study guide on the Sabbath.
There’s not much to it, and that’s intentional. We don’t share the entire 20th fundamental belief on the Sabbath. It’s very focused on the felt need of rest, and talking about the benefits of Sabbath rest. Then they can contact you to learn more.
Awareness: Ads/Posts
So how do people get to this web page? This is where social posts and advertising come in.
First, you need to run Google ads for Sabbath-related keywords. Here’s an example.
So when someone searches for Sabbath, this ad appears. When they click on it, it goes to the landing page on the Sabbath. This is really inexpensive, and should be running year round. And in fact there are cases where these search ads could actually be free to you as a church.
Another thing you can do is run Facebook and Instagram ads.
When you click the link, it goes to that landing page. Now, these won’t run year round. You’ll want to run ads on a particular topic for 3 or 4 weeks, then switch to another topic. So if you have 6 topics you’re focusing on, you can hit each topic twice a year.
(Here’s an example of a Facebook ad on the Sabbath.)
Another way to raise awareness is if you’re doing YouTube advertising. We talked last time about a year-long YouTube program where you run ads on spiritual topics to build parasocial relationships in the community. So if you were doing this, I would do a series of 4 short videos on the power of Sabbath rest. These would then click through to this landing page.
And finally, you can do social posts on the topic. Now, the issue here is that the algorithm tends to display your post only to your followers and, sometimes, people like them. So you’re not going to get very much exposure from these organic social posts. But it doesn’t cost anything, and it doesn’t hurt to do it. So every week, you could do a social post on Sabbath rest. If you have 6 topics, you can do 3 posts every week, which allows you to hit each topic every 2 weeks.
Consideration: Follow-up
Okay, someone saw and ad or a social post, came to the landing page, and requested your offer. How do you follow up?
First of all, when someone requests the Bible study from the landing page, they should get an email and a text message immediately. We’re so excited to offer this Bible study guide, we hope you’ll be blessed.
In that message, you could also mentioned prayer. Something like, By the way, we’d love to pray for you. Is there a specific need you have that we can pray for? Just reply to this message and let us know!
3 days later, another message should automatically go out. Just wanted to check in to see how the Bible study was? Let us know if you have any questions. By the way, we have an in-person Bible study that is happening this Saturday morning at 10:00, where we’ll be getting deeper into the Bible on the topic of the Sabbath. We’d love for you to join us! Click here to let us know you’ll be coming.
4 days later, send another email with a short paragraph about the Sabbath, and invite them again to an in-person Bible study on Saturday morning.
Then, every week after that, invite them to the Bible study, with a link to reserve their spot.
Conversion: Register to attend
So here’s an example of a page for registering for the class. We’ve got another video from the pastor, along with some basic information about the class and a form to register.
Now, why are we asking someone to reserve a spot to come to Sabbath School? Do you really need to know how many guests have registered? Of course not. (If a bunch of people showed up, you’d grab more chairs and make it work, right?) This isn’t about capacity planning. And we already have their information, since these emails and text messages come after they’ve requested the Bible study guide. Yes, it’s nice to know that a guest is planning to come, so you can be in the right mindset to meet them, but even that’s not the fundamental reason for asking them to register.
So why do it? Two reasons. First, remember Cialdini’s principle of consistency. We’re asking them to make another small commitment prior to them coming, because that increases the likelihood of them actually coming.
Second, now we can send them reminders about the event.
Similar to requesting a Bible study guide, as soon as they register send them an email and a text. Say something like, we’re saving your seat at the Bible study on Saturday, and we’re so excited to meet you! Remind them of what they signed up for: an in-person Bible study group. And tell them, when you arrive be sure to ask for me, so I can be your personal host on Saturday morning. Affirm them for making the right decision, and warmly welcome them.
Then, the day before, send a reminder. So if it’s a Saturday morning Bible study class, then on Friday morning send an email and text message reminding them of the class the next day. Again, be enthusiastic. We’re so excited you’re planning to come! We’ll have a Bible study workbook ready for you, and when you arrive me sure to ask for me. I’ll be your personal host.
With that, you’ve done everything you can to encourage their attendance. And if they show up, you’ll be ready.
Remarketing
One last digital marketing technique you should use. What happens if they click your ad or social post but then don’t fill out the form to request the Bible study? You don’t have their contact information, so is that the end of it? Well, no, they’ll continue to see ads and social posts, whatever brought them to that web page in the first place. But there’s another tool that you can use to stay in front of them. If they came to your web page but didn’t take the action you wanted, you can use what’s called remarketing, or retargeting, to place ads on the internet that they will see. This is internet advertising that is driven by a user’s past behavior.
So for example, if they came to the page but didn’t complete the form, and then they go to SpeedTest.net a few days later, you can place a remarketing ad there to remind them. The Google ad network is huge, with hundreds of thousands of websites that run these ads. So there will be lots of places on the internet where they can run across your ad.
You can do the same thing on Facebook and Instagram. If they came to your web page but didn’t fill out the form, you can stay in front of them with repeated ads. You can set it so this ad gets displayed more often to people who came to your website but didn’t take the action you wanted.
You can also change the advertising to invite them to an in-person Bible study, after they’ve completed the form and requested the Bible study guide. Since that’s the next step in the funnel, you can stay in front of them with that offer.
What SermonView Offers for Church Marketing Funnels
I understand that it can be difficult to set it all up. I explained how all this works so you can get the vision for this, but the great thing is we can handle everything for you. You don’t have to do it. You continue to focus on the ministry you do, and we’ll set up the digital marketing to introduce new people to you. You’ll be reaching people right where they are, online, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all year long. So let me tell you how SermonView can help you execute your vision for this digital outreach. It’s an amazing program, and I hope you’ll take advantage of it.
CRM Software
Okay, let’s talk about some tools you’ll need. First, as you can imagine, you’re going to have to manage a higher volume of relationships. In addition, parasocial relationships more tenuous. Because of this, you’re going to need some way to manage all this information, some way to keep track of everyone. That’s what a CRM is for. A CRM stands for Customer Relationship Software, like SalesForce, HubSpot, and Zoho CRM. One could argue that eAdventist is actually a CRM, though that is missing a much of features. To be really helpful, you’ll need a way to capture information about each person, and make notes each time you interact with them. Ideally you’ll have the ability to text and email directly from the CRM and set reminders to follow up with someone later on. These are all core functions of a CRM program. You need a CRM to be remain effective, particularly as you grow and develop new relationships.
SermonView has developed a CRM specifically for Adventist evangelism, called InterestTracker. It’s a robust CRM that allows you to segment your list, add notes, & track activity. It’s cloud-based so you can access it anywhere you have internet access, and it centralized so all your users always have the latest information. It offers multiple user roles for your whole team. The user-friendly design and customizable notification settings mean you never miss a new lead or reminder to connect.
It also seamless integrates with all of SermonView’s marketing solutions, like our event pre-registration system and our Bible study lead generation program. The basic features are free and always will be for every church in the North American Division. There are additional paid features, like text messaging and attendance tracking, that are also available. You can learn more about InterestTracker at InterestTracker.org.
Your Church Website
I already mentioned the key role your church website will play in the marketing funnel, but I want to take it a step further. Your church website should be the central, authoritative hub for all your communication, including the spiritual influence messages you’re trying to get out there. Your website should not be about your church, though that information does need to be available. Rather, it should primarily be a venue for evangelistic and discipleship content. If you’re preaching it, put it on the website.
Now this is harder to do if you have an Adventist Church Connect website provided by the NAD. So SermonView offers a website service, Evangelism Websites. It’s focused on reaching new people, but it also has features specifically for your members and leaders, too. It’s built on the most popular platform, WordPress. The service has multiple options, including content management as well as managed digital marketing.
Related to this, you don’t just want a website, but you also want to be visible out in the search engines. We do search engine optimization as part of the website setup. But we also offer Google search engine advertising to keep you visible as an add-on to our website product. The campaign is managed by one of our digital marketing coordinators, and we will run ads for general keywords like “church near me” or “church in Vancouver,” those types of things. We also have a list of keywords we recommend specifically related to Seventh-day Adventist doctrine. So, for example, we’ll run ads when someone in your community searches for “Sabbath,” and we’ll direct them to a page on the website with an article about the Sabbath. Ideally, you’ll have a short video about the Sabbath, in addition to a short article, with a form inviting people to request a Bible study on the topic. We’ll do the same thing for other keywords, like “Second Coming” and “what happens when you die.” Each will send the user to a page on that topic, with a call to action to capture their information so you can continue communicating with them.
Google ads are available at discounted rates when bundled with your church website build.
YouTube advertising
Our newest service that we just launched is YouTube advertising. We can run YouTube ads leading up to an event, or run them systematically throughout the year to raise awareness for your church and help you build parasocial relationships with people in your town. We train you on how to record selfie videos, and we’ll provide coaching and feedback to help you grow in your skills. Once you record it, we’ll handle everything else: video editing, lower third graphics, audio sweetening, call to action slate, rending, uploading to YouTube, and running the ads. It’s all managed by a digital marketing coordinator, to help you get maximum results.
We have a year-long service that we call a pastor branding program. Again, you record the videos, we provide coaching and feedback with every video, and we handle the editing, rendering and uploading to YouTube. Then we’ll set up the campaign. We’ll also give you content ideas, based on what we’ve seen work best in other campaigns.
This program is not cheap. It ranges from $5,000 for the year, to record one video per month, up to $15,000 to record 4 videos per month. A portion of that service fee is allocated to the ad spend, so that includes the cost of running the ads on YouTube. We coach and give you feedback, so you’re improving throughout the year, and we handle all the mechanics of the videos.
Digital Church Funnel Bundles
We wanted to make it easy for you to get started in your church, so we’ve created three bundles to help you. This is a collection of everything you’ll need to move your church into the digital realm.
First, we’ll build you a new outreach-oriented website, with 6 specific landing pages focused on your spiritual messages, like we talked about earlier. Then we’ll set up all the Google search engine ads for the keywords appropriate for your ministry. We’ll also include content management, so we’ll update the website each week for you to keep the content fresh and up to date.
We’ll also get you set up with InterestTracker, so you’ll have a CRM specifically designed for Adventist evangelism. We’ll include subscriptions to every module, including text messaging with 2,000 credits each month and AttendanceTracker. You’ll be able to send bulk text messages to specific segments of your list, or to everyone, and you can use AttendanceTracker to keep track of your weekly worship attendance, in addition to your evangelistic events.
Then, you have some options depending on how much ad budget you want to spend: We can run Facebook and Instagram advertising, helping you reach a wider audience. All these ads will lead back to your website, where you’ll be able to capture information about people who want what you’re offering, whether a Bible study or book or something else. When someone submits a request, it flows automatically into InterestTracker, where you’re alerted to that request so you can begin communicating directly with that interest.
We can also add in a YouTube pastor branding program, so we’ll handle all the mechanics of editing, posting, and running ads for your 90-second sermon summary every week. You’ll be able send us up to 4 videos each month depending on which YouTube plan you want to add, and we’ll provide coaching and feedback on every video so you’ll improve your own skills as the year progresses.
These digital bundles gives you access to 5 different skillsets at SermonView, including video editing, social media advertising, YouTube advertising, and search engine marketing. If you were to hire someone with all these skills to do this for you, that’s a full-time job with valuable skills that would cost you $30-$40,000 minimum. If you were to buy these products individually from SermonView, the cost would be about $25,000. By bundling the resources, you can get a comprehensive, recurring digital marketing funnel running throughout the year, with plans starting at $5,000 going all the way up to $19,000 annually.
A large portion of the cost is the actual ad spend, which we include with these program to give you a full package price. Every month we’ll be running ads across Google search plus you can add other programs like Facebook & Instagram, plus YouTube, depending on your church’s budget and growth goals.
We run all of these campaigns independent of each other all the time, but bundling all of these resources like this is a brand new program that we just started offering a couple of months ago. Because it’s new, we’re limiting participation initially to 5 churches, so we’ll be able to work out some of the production kinks. You’ll be one of the first churches to begin the digital transformation at a high level and implement these digital marketing funnels. I’ve talked with a couple of conferences who are offering funds for this, so even if it feels like a lot of money, your conference may be willing to subsidize the cost. In fact, if you talk with your conference leader and they have questions, I’m happy to personally talk with them to help them catch the vision of what you want to do in your community.
Contact us to learn more about the 3 Digital Church Funnel options and see which one is right for your church. We can also get you set up with more information to take to your church board, or to present to your conference if asking for subsidy assistance.
Reaching the Next Generation.
The digital transformation is happening all around us, whether we like it or not. And churches who don’t embrace this change are going to die, as the digital natives turn their back on our analog way of doing church. SermonView is at the cutting edge of powering the digital transformation, and we’d love to support you as your church makes this transition.
We are in the midst of a rapid, radical reordering of society, a digital transformation. Most churches remain an analog island in a digital sea, and if we don’t embrace this digital transformation, we are going to die. We haven’t lost the young adult generation. We never had them, because the way we do church in these analog ways are completely foreign to the digital natives.
When we embrace this digital transformation, however, it blows our ministry out beyond the walls of the church. We can become significant influencers encouraging people from all walks of life to take the next step closer to Jesus. We’ll go where the people actually are, and make a real difference in the community. I believe the digital transformation can truly change the world, as God works through us to reach new generations for Christ.
At SermonView we are excited to help you reach your community. Click below to learn more about your digital funnel marketing options or call us at 800.525.5791.
“Larry, what is SermonView doing for young pastors like me who don’t believe in public evangelism?”
The question caught me off guard. We had just wrapped up our first Propel Conference, where pastors and church leaders came to learn how to be more effective at reaching their communities for Christ.
I was debriefing with one of the few young pastors who attended, when he asked me the question that stumped me. The thing is, we know that public evangelism continues to be the most effective way to grow a Seventh-day Adventist congregation. Almost all of the fastest growing churches in the North American Division include public meetings in their evangelistic strategy, and the vast majority of current Seventh-day Adventist members made a decision to join the church at an evangelistic meeting.
But today, there are hundreds—maybe even thousands—of Adventist churches who simply won’t do evangelistic meetings anymore. They would rather die than hold meetings. So my colleague’s question got me thinking: If public evangelism is off the table, then what else can a church do to grow? What’s second best? And how can SermonView help churches do that really well, too?
Welcome to my annual Christmas letter, where I document the current state of SermonView and reflect on the ministry environment in which we operate. I write this mostly for myself, but you’re welcome to listen in. In my 2021 letter, I shared about a really tough year for me personally, and last year I talked about our 4 areas of ministry emphasis. This year, I want to talk about the future of evangelism. But first, let’s review 2023.
2023 Highlights
It’s been a pretty incredible year of growth for the SermonView crew. We started the year with 9 staff, but we’ve grown to the point that we’re adding our 13th employee next month, with 2 more open positions.
Over the last 12 months:
We ran 438 marketing campaigns, for both evangelistic events and to find Bible study interests for local churches.
We reached 8.5 million people through social media advertising and direct mail, with ads for our churches seen over 10 million times.
In InterestTracker, 56,603 new interests were added this year. Nearly 1,700 churches are now managing over 156,000 interests.
Since we started offering church websites in 2021, we’ve launched 52 new church websites. And as part of this service, the Google Ads we’re managing for these churches have received over 150,000 impressions leading to 6,564 interactions.
In May, we held our first Propel Conference, offering inspiration and training for church growth. Though it was a small start, with just over 100 people attending, the resulting Propel Podcast has a growing subscriber base, with nearly 1,000 episode downloads in 6 months.
Since July, when we started offering YouTube advertising, ads on behalf of our churches have received 1.2 million impressions, leading to over 200,000 interactions.
In August, we launched a new school marketing program, focusing on the benefits of Adventist education. We’re running campaigns now for 2 schools, with more in the works.
We love connecting with you in person, and our team has been out in the field attending a number of events this year. These included Adventist Ministries Convention, NAD eHuddle, NAD Pastor Evangelists BootCamp, NAD Educator’s Convention, Society of Adventist Communicators, Southern Union EC3, Pastoral Evangelism Leadership Council (PELC), and, of course, the Propel Conference.
Where We’re Headed
This brings me back to the conversation I had about helping churches who no longer recognize the value of public evangelistic meetings. If public evangelism is off the table, then what else can a church do to grow? What’s second best? And how can SermonView help churches do that really well, too?
YouTube Ads for Evangelism
In May, I heard Hiram Rester speak about the success he saw using short, concise YouTube ads to draw Millennials and Gen Z to public evangelistic meetings. I read his doctoral dissertation, then read it again. That led us to develop a new service for churches, handling all the technical details of YouTube advertising. In August we did a webinar with Dr. Rester on how to create engaging video ads. And we’ve now run a couple dozen campaigns over the last 6 months, getting our methodologies dialed in. I believe that in the future, online video advertising will be more effective at reaching people than direct mail, and it’s already found an important place in a comprehensive marketing plan.
Digital Transformation
As I’ve been working on my PhD, I’ve come to realize the profound change taking place all around us. Society is undergoing a rapid, radical shift, what Thomas Siebel calls the digital transformation. Yet churches continue to do things as they have for decades. Churches are now analog islands in a digital sea, and emerging generations find our expression of church community to be completely foreign. It’s not that we’ve lost the young adults in our church. We never had them. (If you missed it, watch the webinar on the digital transformation of ministry we did last month.)
So we’ve been exploring what the digital transformation might look like for church ministry. We’re working with 2 pilot churches on significant projects, integrating some of our existing tech and creating new tools. I’m really excited about where this is headed, and you’ll hear more soon.
Generative AI
When ChatGPT blew up last year, I wrote it off as another fad. But not anymore. In 2024, the entire SermonView crew will be doing systematic training in generative AI, looking for ways to leverage it for ministry. Frankly, I have no idea what that looks like, but I’ve seen enough to know AI will be a game changer. It has the potential to improve our production workflow, allowing us to offer our services at a lower price point. It might even drive an entirely new category of products that will help churches be more effective at ministry and evangelism.
Doctoral Studies
Let me close by talking about school. For the last 2 years, I’ve been working on a PhD in strategic media at Liberty University. This year, I found myself so sick of school that I decided to double up my class load to finish sooner. So I’m on track to enter the dissertation phase in May 2024, and, God willing, graduate in May 2025.
I’ve been amazed at how much direct application my doctoral studies have had to the needs of our churches. In my research, for example, I’ve found that uncertainty reduction theory offers a framework for effective church websites. Parasocial relationship theory explains the rise of social media influencers, and offers a methodology for using video to reach people who wouldn’t otherwise set foot in a church. And the digital transformation? That’s the future of church ministry, the foundation for SermonView’s future growth. We can clearly see how churches will be able to reach new people through digital communication channels, and our entire SermonView crew is excited to be part of the digital transformation in local churches.
I love my job! I’ve been blessed to connect with many of you at events this year, because I love seeing you and hearing your stories. I’m so grateful to you for the support you’ve given the SermonView crew over the years, and for allowing God to use you to reach your community for Jesus. I can’t wait to see what God is going to do in your church in 2024.
Thank you for letting us be part of your journey!
Merry Christmas,
Larry Witzel Founder & President SermonView Evangelism Marketing
P.S. What are your big dreams for 2024? I’d love to hear what God is doing in your church!
Learn how to adapt and unleash it to reach even more people in your community.
We are in the midst of a rapid, radical reordering of society, driven by big data, cloud computing, the internet of things, and artificial intelligence. Some churches have dabbled on the edges, with things like livestreaming the church service or communicating via social media, but few have truly embraced the digital transformation.
It requires a fundamental rethinking of church communication tactics and even the core metrics of ministry, but in return, it offers a wider opportunity for reaching younger generations and fueling church growth.
In this webinar, SermonView founder and president Larry Witzel lays out a vision for what the digital transformation might look like in a local church. He’ll share a digital communication framework that can be adopted by churches of all sizes. He’ll also talk about some specific digital tactics to use in this framework, like using your church’s website, email list, SMS messaging, search engine marketing, YouTube video ads, and social media.
You’ll leave with practical suggestions for adopting a digital communication strategy at your own church, reaching more people of all generations with the everlasting gospel.
Welcome to today’s webinar! We’ll be talking about The Digital Transformation of Ministry, and how to adapt to these changes and reach more people in your community. I really believe that a church who embraces this digital transformation can be incredibly effective at reaching more people for Christ, especially emerging generations. My goal for today is to give you a framework for understanding the digital transformation, along with some specific steps you can take to begin the process in your church.
For some of you who maybe aren’t tech savvy, this might sound overwhelming. But I’m going to break it down for you as simply as possible, and once you get it, I think you’ll see how much potential it brings to ministry in your community.
To understand what’s going on with the digital transformation we’re currently in, let’s look backward for a minute.
History: Stability with Bursts of Change
When you take a high level look at history, you’ll notice that there are long stretches of relative stability in how society operated, interrupted by periods of rapid change brought on by some technological innovation.
So, for example, think of how church ministry was done prior to the Gutenberg press. Imagine being a pastor with NO BOOKS on your shelf. Each copy of the Bible took years to write by hand, and that was it. Without books, even reading was a skill few people had. Then, in the 1450s, Gutenberg developed a method for mass-producing books. Now, it was still slow, and in the first decade Gutenberg only produced a few hundred Bibles. But it launched a radical reordering of society. Because of the printing press, knowledge became more widely available. Schooling became more important. And the Gutenberg press led directly to the Protestant Reformation within just one generation after its introduction. Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the Wittenburg door in 1517, about 60 years after Gutenberg first invented the press. It led to a radical reordering of society that took a couple of generations to work out.
Fast forward to 1837, when Samuel Morse first demonstrated a working telegraph between Baltimore and Washington DC. Prior to the telegraph, news could only travel as fast as a human, so news would take days to get between the South and the North of the United States, and it would take weeks to get news from Europe. With the telegraph, that time was reduced to minutes. By 1857, there were 33,000 miles of telegraph lines crisscrossing the United States, and the first transatlantic cable was laid. This radically accelerated the speed of society. It also contributed directly to the Civil War. Before there was naturally time for reflection, since it would take hours or days to travel between cities. But the telegraph made news instantaneous, leading to knee-jerk reactions. The telegraph led to a radical reordering of society, one based on speed.
One more example. Let’s talk about television. In 1948, the first commercial television station was broadcasting to almost no one. A couple of years later, in 1950, just 1% of households in the United States had a TV set. But just 10 years later, in 1960, over 90% of households had a television, and they were watching almost 5 hours per day. The television changed how homes were built, and the furniture in the living room. It changed how we used our leisure time. It led to a homogenization of the news, with just 3 broadcast networks broadcasting essentially the same news stories. Television programming reduced the attention span of Americans, as the brain came to expect a break every 7 or 8 minutes. The visual imagery of television directly led to passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, when people saw with their own eyes the police dogs viciously attacking protesters in Birmingham, and children being sprayed with high-pressure hoses. This reordering of society once again caused unrest throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s.
The Digital Transformation in Society
This brings us to today, and the digital transformation we’re currently experiencing. Think about how much has changed in the last 25 years. When you wanted to find an auto mechanic then, you went to the Yellow Pages. You paid your bills with written checks sent through the mail. If you wanted to visit someone, you had to call using a landline and get the address, which you looked up on a paper map. Of course today, you use Google or Yelp to find an auto mechanic, you pay your bills electronically, you text your friends, and use Google Maps to get turn-by-turn directions to get to their house. Television viewing has been declining since 2010, and last year Americans spent more time watching online streaming programs than broadcast television and cable combined. The computer in your pocket is more powerful than the fastest supercomputers 25 years ago, and we have instant access to whatever information we want.
Companies who have not embraced the digital transformation are gone. I’m talking about major Fortune 500 companies, like Blockbuster, Borders Books, Kodak, Radio Shack, and Sears. They missed the digital transformation and went bankrupt.
The digital transformation has changed how we are entertained, how we learn, how we interact with each other, how we communicate, even how we experience community. I’ve watched my teenage children and their friends, all looking down at their devices, texting each other as they sit together in the same room.
Analog Islands in a Digital Sea
In the midst of all this, I’ve been asking myself this question: What does the digital transformation look like in a local church? If organizations that missed the digital transformation have disappeared, how do we keep that from happening to us? What does this digital transformation look like in a local church?
Now, I want to be clear: I’m not talking about creating an online-only church. This is not a cyber church, or an all digital church. People today crave in-person experiences and community more than ever before, and what the church offers is a face-to-face, present community of faith. I’m not talking about online church. I’m talking about church online. Those are very different things.
The digital transformation has not made society completely online. We still eat food, though today you can buy your groceries online and get them delivered. We still go to restaurants, but often we’ll order ahead and have it waiting to pick up. We still go see a doctor in person, though you can schedule the appointment online, and even do a videoconference visit for certain ailments. We still live in a physical world, and ministry still happens in this physical world.
However, technology has changed how we interact with this physical world. And today, churches are analog islands in a digital society. We expect people to get in their car, drive to the church, and when they walk in we hand them a bulletin printed on paper, ask them to sit in a pew, where they hear announcements about other activities, then they listen to a sermon that someone speaks to them, and then they leave. There is nothing digital about this experience.
And I’ll be honest, everything I just described is completely foreign to young adults. As I was reflecting on this, I realized something: We haven’t lost the young adult generation. We never had them. Our analog expression of the community of faith is totally foreign to the digital natives.
So again, what does the digital transformation look like in a local church?
Parasocial Relationships
To begin to answer that question, let’s talk about the rise of social media influencers. There is a phenomenon today, particularly among Millennials and Gen Z, where people build relationships with popular personalities through social media. The 6 influencers shown here combined have over 250 million followers just on Instagram, and literally billions of views on YouTube. My son is into Minecraft, and follows a bunch of Minecraft players, including this one, Technoblade. My son would watch YouTube videos of Technoblade playing Minecraft for hours, while playing Minecraft himself. Well, last year word got out that Technoblade had cancer. Here is a picture of him on hospice, showing off a plaque from YouTube that he got when we hit 10 million subscribers. A year ago last June, he passed away, and when my 13-year-old son found out he came into my room crying: “Dad, Technoblade died!” I spent the afternoon consoling him, and he joined millions of Minecraft players around the world who changed their skin to the pig king for a few days to honor Technoblade.
What in the world is going on here? My son never met Technoblade. Technoblade had no idea who my son is. But here he is crying over this person who died. What’s going on here?
Well, it turns out there’s a ton of research on this. My son had built what researchers call a parasocial relationship with Technoblade. A parasocial relationship is the illusion of a relationship with someone in the media. It’s a social connection that is one-sided. My son had a relationship with Technoblade, but Technoblade did not have a relationship with my son. Here’s the thing: parasocial experiences lead to reactions that are surprisingly similar to in-person social experiences.
One researcher put it this way: “Human brains are still unable to differentiate between interactions in real life and online virtual environments or with real friends and simulated or artificial friends, such as television actors, people encountered on social media, and even virtual influencers” (Munnukka & Reinikainen, 2023, p. 359).
Parasocial experiences were first identified in the early days of television, back in the 1950s, but over the last 15 years there’s been a ton of scholarly attention paid to this. A lot of research has looked at the rise of social media influencers and the parasocial relationships that are formed, especially in emerging generations. Social anxiety, loneliness, and depression are particularly prevalent among Gen Z, and one way they deal with this is by forming parasocial relationships with influencers online. In fact, I wonder if the social anxiety isn’t pushing Gen Z toward parasocial relationships, because they are safe. There’s no risk. They can sit back and watch their favorite YouTube personalities or TikTokers without fear of being judged. But the emotional reaction to parasocial relationships is almost the same as the emotions connected to in-person social experiences. It may be an illusion, it may be one-sided, but it is very real.
If you’re beginning to understand this idea of parasocial relationships, say something in the comments. Give me another thumbs up there.
Digital Transformation of Ministry
Okay, some of you already see where I’m headed, but let me make the connection explicit. Let’s go back to our question: What does the digital transformation look like in a local church? I believe the core shift is using digital media to foster parasocial relationships, then leveraging those parasocial relationships as a bridge to in-person community.
Stop and think about it. What does church offer people? A spiritual community, relationships with other believers. God created humans with the innate need to belong to community, and church exists to fulfill this fundamental need to belong. We are social creatures, and although church of course has a theological component, and a vertical relationship with God, church is fundamentally a social experience, with horizontal relationships between humans.
So our goal is in-person community. People today crave in-person experiences and real, life-giving community. But the digital transformation allows us to accelerate this relationship-building through digital media. It allows us to break through the social anxiety to connect with people right where they’re at. It allows us to get out of the church building and begin developing relationships with people in the community. When the time is right, we can then invite these people to an in-person experience where that relationship can be deepened.
A couple of months ago we did a webinar with Dr. Hiram Rester, a pastor evangelist in Columbia, Missouri. In that conversation, he talked about how he uses YouTube advertising to share concise spiritual messages in the community around his church. His goal was to get more Millennials and Gen Zers out to an evangelistic series, and he found great success at that. But one side effect he found was that people began to recognize him when he was out and about. People will stop him at the grocery store or mini mart. He told me about going into a smoothie shop, and the 18-year-old kid behind the counter recognized him. “Are you that YouTube Bible guy?” he asked. Hiram didn’t have to persuade this young person to have a spiritual conversation. He was ready! He had built a parasocial relationship with Hiram, and it accelerated the in-person interaction, because he felt like he already knew Hiram. And it became an opening for ministry, as Hiram got to know him. It went from a one-sided parasocial relationships to a true, two-way, interactive, in-person, social experience.
Hirem is using technology to build these parasocial relationships. He can go visit his daughter at college, knowing that the message of the Kingdom of God is being preached 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, reaching people where they are and building parasocial relationships with them. Then when the time is right, he can invite them to an experience where that relationship can continue in person.
One last thing about parasocial relationships before I move on to talking about tools for the digital transformation. When you think of “social media influencer,” what comes to mind? I know I think of a young, stylish person. But just this week, the Wall Street Journal had an article about a new trend, older influencers now called “granfluencers.” These are people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s who have built large followings on social media. The top 10 granfluencers on social media today have over 100 million followers combined, of which 74% are aged 18-34. So you don’t have to be young to build parasocial relationships with young adults. Anyone can do it!
Communication Channels: Control versus Reach
Let’s go back to the digital communication channels we talked about at the very beginning. When we look at digital communication channels, one of the factors to consider is control versus reach. Some channels give you tight control over how you present the message, but may not give you a lot of reach. Reach is how many new people does this channel allow you to access? Control versus reach.
So for example, your website gives you a high degree of control over how you present your message, but without any way to drive traffic to your website, it has very low reach. An Instagram post, on the other hand, has the potential to reach a large audience, but you have no control of who it actually reaches. Meta controls the algorithm that decides who will see that post. You can select the photo and maybe add a color filter to it, and you can write the caption, but that’s it. So high reach potential, but low control.
So we end up with two clear clusters on this graph, the ones with higher control and the ones with higher reach. Email, text messaging, a podcast, Discord server, Slack, these are higher control with lower reach. Facebook posts, TikTok, YouTube, these are higher reach with lower control.
Social media influencers spend a tremendous amount of energy creating content to build an audience through the social media algorithms. They create content that people will like and share, which the algorithm recognizes as good content that it then pushes out to more people. But they are relying on the algorithm, which is controlled by a big corporation and constantly changing. Facebook’s algorithm for deciding what to show in somebody’s feed uses AI to process 10 thousand different variables. It’s so complicated, even Facebook engineers don’t really know how it works.
I don’t want you to try to use the algorithm to grow an audience. First of all, it’s really hard. Second, it’s going to be a global audience, and most of your followers will be outside your geographic area of ministry. If our goal is in-person engagement, then you really want to focus on reaching people in your specific geographic area.
That’s where paid advertising comes in. If you run search engine ads, you don’t have complete control over the messaging in the ads, but you do have a fair amount of control, and it does give you a broader reach. So a website using Google Ads to drive traffic would be here. Facebook and Instagram Ads give you a high reach and a fairly high degree of control over the message. Same with YouTube ads.
So control versus reach is an important distinction, and different communication channels will have different value to you, depending on what you want to accomplish.
What’s the point here? I want to see you become an influencer, by building parasocial relationships with people in your community. But instead of using the algorithm to build a global audience through your social posts, you’ll be using advertising to grow an audience in the community around your church. Your church will be an influencer, but instead of using the algorithm, you’ll use advertising to reach people geographically near you.
Marketing Funnel
When we talk about the digital transformation in society, one of the key marketing concepts is the idea of a marketing funnel. There are a lot of nuances to marketing funnels, and I’m not going to get into the details today. I’m planning that our next webinar will be specifically about digital marketing funnels and how they can be used for evangelism. But I did want to mention it because it is a crucial concept in the digital transformation.
Essentially, you use organic posts on social media as well as advertising to offer something of value to people. You direct them to your website, where you collect their information and invite them to subscribe to your email newsletter or opt in to text messages. You’ve now moved them from a high reach medium to a high control medium, and you can continue to communicate with them in the future. That’s the gist of the digital marketing funnel. High reach channels lead to the website, which leads to high control channels. Again, there are a ton of nuances, but I wanted to mention it because it’s such a crucial concept in the digital transformation. I’ll be doing a webinar on the digital marketing funnel in the next few months.
Spiritual Communication
Okay, I want to talk about spiritual communication. I said I want you to become an influencer in your town. What is it you’re trying to influence? You want to inspire and influence people to take a step closer to Jesus. Isn’t that what preaching is at its core? It’s influence. You want to motivate change in belief or behavior. You want to help people be more obedient to the call of Christ. And this shouldn’t be limited to 30 minutes on Sabbath morning. It shouldn’t be limited to your evangelistic series. The digital transformation gives you tools to blow out the walls of the church and share your spiritual message to a wider audience.
Let’s take all this work you put into your sermon and do more than just preach it. You spend 10, 15 hours doing exegesis and assembling stories and key points and your call to action. Don’t limit the result all that work to just Sabbath morning. Let’s repurpose that for the digital world.
So I want to propose a new sermon workflow. First, work on your sermon. Follow your normal sermon prep process. If you write out a manuscript, keep doing that. If you write out bullet points with key transitions and a call to action, keep doing that. Prepare your sermon the way you’ve been doing that.
Then, when you’re done with your preparation, take an extra 90 minutes to repurpose that content for the digital environment. Pull out your key points, your quotes, your scripture, your call to action. Then record short videos, each with just one of these things. Make 6 videos, which you will then post every day in your social channels. Videos are important, because they help to build those parasocial relationships. You could also create 6 graphics with these points, which you can also post on your social media accounts.
Also make a 90-second summary, with your key points and your call to action, and record that to use in your YouTube advertising. Put that video on your website, along with the written summary. Put that video at the top of your weekly email, along with the written summary, as a spiritual thought for the week. Send out a text message with a link to that video summary. Push that short, concise content out through every one of your channels.
With practice, you can get this all done in about an hour, after you’ve completed the rest of your sermon prep. Then post these each day during the the week after you’ve preached your sermon. You’re leveraging all that preparation you did to create digital content that can be used to influence a broader audience to take a step forward in faith.
Habituated vs Inspired Volunteers
I want to quickly mention something about change in a church. We’re talking about a digital transformation of your church, but I don’t believe this needs to be a core cultural shift, and I also don’t think it will impact your church volunteers.
Let me explain. The Sabbath morning activities at your church are powered by habit. The deacon knows how to unlock the church and turn on the furnace, and can literally do it half asleep, because it’s all habit. The sound team knows where the mics and cords are and how to set it all up, because they’ve done it repetitively for so long it’s habit. The Sabbath School teachers know where to pick up the Little Friend or the Guide magazine to distribute, the musicians know what to do. Church runs on habit, and once a habit is established changing it is hard work. That’s one of the reasons why the first few weeks of pandemic closures were so exhausting for churches who shut down, because there was no muscle memory for how to do church. Everything was different. People had to think, and it was painful.
So these habituated volunteers are running on habit. Then how do you make any changes? How do you innovate? Changing habits requires inspiration. Innovation in a church requires unleashing inspired volunteers to pursue their vision.
However, there is nothing so annoying to a habituated volunteer than an inspired volunteer changing how things are done at the church. So innovation requires creating some sort of firewall between your habituated volunteers and the inspired volunteers who are innovating. It requires careful management. Once the innovation has been developed, then there is a process for deploying it through your habituated volunteers to minimize the stress. It’s a whole process.
So when you hear about this digital transformation of ministry, you might be concerned about how this is going to impact your habituated volunteers. Well, here’s the good news. It doesn’t impact them. The only person who needs to make a change is the preacher, because you’re taking your sermon content and prepping it for distribution through your other communication channels, and your team who are actually handling the mechanics of those posts and ads. The core ministries of the church are actually untouched.
The digital transformation is an overlay that goes over your weekly activities. You’re not changing what happens at your in-person gatherings. You’re taking what happens there and pushing it out into the digital space. That means you can move forward with the digital transformation without impacting your week-to-week volunteers.
It also means that while there are things you need to do as the pastor, as you’re taking an extra step after your sermon preparation, you can literally outsource the mechanics of this digital transformation. If you have volunteers who can help you, that’s great. But it’s not required. You can work with an organization like SermonView to begin the digital transformation process, then move this work to your church community as God brings inspired volunteers to you.
While the digital transformation is a fundamental shift in how you think of ministry, we can help you with that execution. SermonView can help power the digital transformation in your church.
Tools for the Digital Transformation
CRM Software
Okay, let’s talk about some tools you’ll need for the digital transformation. First, as you can imagine, you’re going to have to manage a higher volume of relationships. In addition, parasocial relationships more tenuous. Because of this, you’re going to need some way to manage all this information, some way to keep track of everyone. That’s what a CRM is for. A CRM stands for Customer Relationship Software, like SalesForce, HubSpot, and Zoho CRM. One could argue that eAdventist is actually a CRM, though that is missing a much of features. To be really helpful, you’ll need a way to capture information about each person, and make notes each time you interact with them. Ideally you’ll have the ability to text and email directly from the CRM and set reminders to follow up with someone later on. These are all core functions of a CRM program. You need a CRM to be remain effective, particularly as you grow and develop new relationships.
SermonView has developed a CRM specifically for Adventist evangelism, called InterestTracker. It’s a robust CRM that allows you to segment your list, add notes, & track activity. It’s cloud-based so you can access it anywhere you have internet access, and it centralized so all your users always have the latest information. It offers multiple user roles for your whole team. The user-friendly design and customizable notification settings mean you never miss a new lead or reminder to connect.
It also seamless integrates with all of SermonView’s marketing solutions, like our event pre-registration system and our Bible study lead generation program. The basic features are free and always will be for every church in the North American Division. There are additional paid features, like text messaging and attendance tracking, that are also available. You can learn more about InterestTracker at InterestTracker.org.
Your Church Website
I already mentioned the key role your church website will play in the marketing funnel, but I want to take it a step further. Your church website should be the central, authoritative hub for all your communication, including the spiritual influence messages you’re trying to get out there. Your website should not be about your church, though that information does need to be available. Rather, it should primarily be a venue for evangelistic and discipleship content. If you’re preaching it, put it on the website.
Now this is harder to do if you have an Adventist Church Connect website provided by the NAD. So SermonView offers a website service, Evangelism Websites. It’s focused on reaching new people, but it also has features specifically for your members and leaders, too. It’s built on the most popular platform, WordPress. The service has multiple options, including content management as well as managed digital marketing.
Related to this, you don’t just want a website, but you also want to be visible out in the search engines. We do search engine optimization as part of the website setup. But we also offer Google search engine advertising to keep you visible as an add-on to our website product. The campaign is managed by one of our digital marketing coordinators, and we will run ads for general keywords like “church near me” or “church in vancouver,” those types of things. We also have a list of keywords we recommend specifically related to Seventh-day Adventist doctrine. So, for example, we’ll run ads when someone in your community searches for “Sabbath,” and we’ll direct them to a page on the website with an article about the Sabbath. Ideally, you’ll have a short video about the Sabbath, in addition to a short article, with a form inviting people to request a Bible study on the topic. We’ll do the same thing for other keywords, like “Second Coming” and “what happens when you die.” Each will send the user to a page on that topic, with a call to action to capture their information so you can continue communicating with them.
Google ads are available at discounted rates when bundled with your church website build.
YouTube advertising
Our newest service that we just launched is YouTube advertising. We can run YouTube ads leading up to an event, or run them systematically throughout the year to raise awareness for your church and help you build parasocial relationships with people in your town. We train you on how to record selfie videos, and we’ll provide coaching and feedback to help you grow in your skills. Once you record it, we’ll handle everything else: video editing, lower third graphics, audio sweetening, call to action slate, rending, uploading to YouTube, and running the ads. It’s all managed by a digital marketing coordinator, to help you get maximum results.
We have a year-long service that we call a pastor branding program. Again, you record the videos, we provide coaching and feedback with every video, and we handle the editing, rendering and uploading to YouTube. Then we’ll set up the campaign. We’ll also give you content ideas, based on what we’ve seen work best in other campaigns.
This program is not cheap. It ranges from $5,000 for the year, to record one video per month, up to $15,000 to record 4 videos per month. A portion of that service fee is allocated to the ad spend, so that includes the cost of running the ads on YouTube. We coach and give you feedback, so you’re improving throughout the year, and we handle all the mechanics of the videos.
Digital Transformation Bundle
We wanted to make it easy for you to get started with the digital transformation in your church, so we’ve created the digital transformation bundle. This is a collection of everything you’ll need to move your church into the digital realm.
First, we’ll build you a new outreach-oriented website, focused on your spiritual messages, like we talked about earlier. Then we’ll set up all the Google search engine ads for the keywords appropriate for your ministry. We’ll also include content management, so we’ll update the website each week for you to keep the content fresh and up to date.
We’ll also get you set up with InterestTracker, so you’ll have a CRM specifically designed for Adventist evangelism. We’ll include subscriptions to every module, including text messaging with 2,000 credits each month and AttendanceTracker. You’ll be able to send bulk text messages to specific segments of your list, or to everyone, and you can use AttendanceTracker to keep track of your weekly worship attendance, in addition to your evangelistic events.
You’ll also get our YouTube pastor branding program, so we’ll handle all the mechanics of editing, posting, and running ads for your 90-second sermon summary every week. You’ll be able send us 4 videos each month, and we’ll provide coaching and feedback on every video so you’ll improve your own skills as the year progresses.
We’ll also include Facebook and Instagram advertising using the same videos as YouTube, helping you reach a wider audience. All these ads on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram will lead back to your website, where you’ll be able to capture information about people who want what you’re offering, whether a Bible study or book or something else. When someone submits a request, it flows automatically into InterestTracker, where you’re alerted to that request so you can begin communicating directly with that interest.
We’ll even include an Unlimited Plus subscription to our biblical graphics library at SermonView.com, giving you access to art that you can use in your sermons and videos. This license also allows you to use these graphics in videos you post online, so you’re covered there.
This digital transformation bundle gives you access to 5 different skillsets at SermonView, including video editing, social media advertising, YouTube advertising, and search engine marketing. If you were to hire someone with all these skills to do this for you, that’s a full-time job with valuable skills that would cost you $30-$40,000 minimum. If you were to buy these products individually from SermonView, the cost would be about $25,000.
With this digital transformation bundle, we’ll do all of this for you for $19,900 for the year.
A large portion of this cost is the actual ad spend, which is included with this program. Every month we’ll be running about $700 worth of ads across Google search, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
This is a brand new program, which we’ve never offered before. We’re very excited to support you by offering this bundle to power your church’s digital transformation of ministry.
Embracing the Digital Transformation
Look, the digital transformation is happening all around us, whether we like it or not. And churches who don’t embrace this change are going to die, as the digital natives turn their back on our analog way of doing church. SermonView is at the cutting edge of powering the digital transformation, and we’d love to support you as your church makes this transition.
We are in the midst of a rapid, radical reordering of society, a digital transformation. Most churches remain an analog island in a digital sea, and if we don’t embrace this digital transformation, we are going to die. We haven’t lost the young adult generation. We never had them, because the way we do church in these analog ways are completely foreign to the digital natives.
When we embrace this digital transformation, however, it blows our ministry out beyond the walls of the church. We can become significant influencers encouraging people from all walks of life to take the next step closer to Jesus. We’ll go where the people actually are, and make a real difference in the community. I believe the digital transformation can truly change the world, as God works through us to reach new generations for Christ.
At SermonView we are excited to see how God can use the digital transformation to help you reach your community. Click below to learn more about your available options or call us at 800.525.5791.
Digital advertising including video advertising has a proven record of being more effective than just written word ads. Last year, online video made up 82% of all consumer traffic, a 15-fold increase in just 5 years.
At SermonView, when we see stats like the one above, it gets our wheels spinning. We wondered, how video ads would do for evangelistic meetings and how would it all compare to direct mail.
We decided to put it to the test.
We worked with a church to test direct mail vs. digital advertising using Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube for the same evangelistic event. We needed to know which method was going to be more effective at not just getting attention, but generating actual event pre-registrations.
The results speak for themselves.
Before we could do a full comparison, we needed to define which types of video ads were more effective. On one hand, there are ads that look professional and show highly-edited, “movie-trailer style” videos, and there are ads that feel more natural, “selfie-style” videos with the pastor talking into their phone, sharing a personal invitation. We honestly had no idea which one would do better, but we were shocked that the answer was so clear.
Here’s what we found from the first test:
YouTube split testing ran 10-0 in favor of Selfie-Style videos.
We had a clear “winner” as far as the type of video that did best, but how would it compare to printed mailers? Now we were ready to run multiple forms of advertising. There was a 15,000-piece bi-fold mailing, and the rest of the budget was split between Facebook/Instagram and YouTube.
The results were as follows:
Conclusion:
While mailings received the highest price-per-lead, there will always be a place for them in event marketing. (Multi-touch marketing is recommended for all campaigns.) This test showed that by utilizing a combination of digital marketing efforts across Facebook and YouTube, you’ll get a better cost-per-lead for your event marketing budget.
By adding YouTube ads to your marketing campaign you can now incorporate visuals, sounds, and even storytelling elements. This immersive experience not only leaves a lasting impression on your viewers, but also helps them establish trust and builds an emotional connection with your church.
Next-generation digital advertising to reachthis generation.
At SermonView, we have helped churches with over 6,000 outreach events. We’ve sent over 30 million mailers into communities and reached over 8 million social media users. So we know how to help you plan an effective campaign.
Benefit from a proven multi-touch marketing approach with your event marketing plan that utilizes multiple forms of print, mail, and digital marketing resources to promote your next campaign.
Click the button below or call us at 800.525.5791 to learn more.
Reach more people online with YouTube and social media advertising.
In this webinar, we were joined by Dr. Hiram Rester to discuss what he learned from his own research on video advertising. He broke apart key elements and practical tips so that you can start creating your own video content today. You’ll learn how to record better videos and understand the main principles you need to follow to ensure your content is effective and engaging.
And for those of you who don’t have time to edit your own videos or manage ads, SermonView’s new YouTube advertising program is designed to increase your exposure in your own community. We’ll edit your videos, add text in the lower third, and upload your content to YouTube. We’ll also set up your campaign and carefully manage it to make sure you’re effectively reaching people online.
This is next-generation digital evangelism that builds credibility for you and your church through valuable content and resources. Above you’ll find the recording and here is the transcript of our conversation with Dr. Hiram Rester.
Larry: Welcome everybody, to today’s Webinar, “How to Create Engaging Video Ads”. To begin, I just want to say something about innovation.
At SermonView Evangelism Marketing, we used to be all about innovation. That’s what we cared about. But it didn’t take us long after we started the company 18 years ago, we realized that the goal was not innovation. The goal is effectiveness. If innovation does not actually help us be more effective, then that innovation is actually hindering, not helping.Today we’re focused on effectiveness over innovation. And over the last 18 years, we’ve written hundreds of newsletters and blog posts. We’ve done webinars and podcasts, and we’ve always focused on effectiveness, and today is actually the first time that we’re going to be talking with someone about something that’s really cutting edge. But the reason we’re doing it is because there’s data that is demonstrating effectiveness here. I really believe today that YouTube advertising is going to have a significant role in the future of evangelism marketing. So that’s why we’re kind of breaking one of our rules, and we’re talking about something truly innovative, but we’re doing it because I think that there are opportunities to be even more effective in our evangelism marketing using YouTube.
Today I’m talking with Dr. Hiram Rester. He’s the pastor of the Columbia Adventist Church in Columbia, Missouri, and is also an evangelist who’s conducted over 100 series over the course of his career. He recently earned his Doctor of Ministry degree from Andrews University. And some of what we’re going to be talking about, he learned while working on his dissertation. He’s also the author of the cover story in the June 2023 issue of Ministry Magazine entitled, “Social Media Ad Base Video Outreach”. Hiram, welcome.
Hiram: I’m glad to be with you.
Larry: I don’t want to oversell this, but I do believe that Dr. Rester’s dissertation is one of those generational ideas that has the potential to shift how we do evangelism marketing. In fact, Hiram, as I’ve been working on my own PhD in strategic media, your dissertation has already had a big influence on the direction of my own research. I’ve already written two papers just in the last few months that cite your dissertation, and this semester, I’m working on my third and fourth research projects that are actually driven by your work. So this has been really impactful for me personally and for us here at Sermonview.
First of all, Hiram, tell us the problem that you were trying to solve here.
Hiram: Well, the problem is simple: Over the last couple of decades, especially the last number of years, we’ve faced diminishing returns when it comes to getting a crowd at our evangelistic meetings. Direct mail has not worked as well as it once did. We’ve gone from maybe preaching to crowds of 100 or more visitors, sometimes 200 or more visitors, to preaching to a couple of dozen people, if even that. This is particularly an issue when it comes to reaching the younger crowd. And so what do we do to get people out to meetings? What do we do to connect with folks? And what do we do especially to connect with the younger audience?
Larry: Okay, so in a nutshell, kind of give us the big picture of what you did with YouTube advertising.
Hiram: Well, what we wanted to do is take some concise videos because research shows that Millennials and Gen Z (our young adults today) prefer to receive their content, the information they gain as they interact with the world, via concise videos. So, we began to develop some concise videos that would be general gospel presentations and some teasers for Bible prophecy, and we wanted to put them on YouTube. We actually tried various forms of social media: YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. We ended up landing on YouTube as by far being the most effective in our research. And what we did is we boosted those videos as paid ads in our geographical location. And that was really what made the difference for us: the paid ads in our local area.
Larry: So I want to clarify something here. A lot of YouTube experts talk about things that you need to do to build your subscriber base, but that’s not what you’re talking about here.
Hiram: No, I am not really concerned with a subscriber base at all. With a subscriber base—let’s say you get, I don’t know, maybe 100,000 or 500,000 subscribers on YouTube, which we’ve got Adventist personalities that have that much and more—the challenge that you then find is they’re scattered around the planet. And when you get ready to do a live and local event, you may be lucky to find one or two in your local area. And so this bypasses that entirely where we used paid ads to put our content in front of folks within 20 miles of our church.
Larry: So instead of trying to build an audience, you’re just buying the audience that’s geographically located right near your church in your community.
Hiram: Yes, precisely.
Larry: Okay, so you did some testing, you did this testing as part of your dissertation. What were the results of this test?
Hiram: We started out primarily on Facebook and Instagram, and also put some stuff on TikTok and YouTube. Initially, we discovered that the views on Facebook were doing the best for us. And so we invested tons of money into Facebook “through plays”. It was about $30,800 we put into videos on Facebook. (We spent the kind of money on this that would be spent on a major evangelistic meeting to experiment and try to find what’s going to work.) Well, we initially eliminated Instagram as well as TikTok. And so we also eliminated YouTube because the videos that we were using were the “suggested next video feature” for them to click and watch, and it was costing more than twice as much as a view on Facebook. So we abandoned that. But then when we got near the end of our project, just a couple of months before the opening night of our live series that we were going to invite folks to, we came across some extra funding and as we looked at what to do, we decided to go back and experiment with YouTube again. And this time we used what’s termed as “skippable ads” the ones that play at the beginning of a YouTube video that you could skip after 5 seconds or they sometimes play in the middle of your video that you can skip after 5 seconds, or you can let play and that’s choosing to watch that ad.
When we experimented with those that’s when it really took off. We began to see views for half the rate on YouTube as what it was costing us on Facebook. In addition to that, the views were twice as long. A view on Facebook is called a “through play” (a Facebook term) and that’s 15 seconds. But a view on YouTube isn’t even counted as a view unless it hits 30 seconds or more (unless it’s the entirety of the video and let’s say it’s a 23-second video and they watch the whole thing, they’ll count it). And so as we did this advertising, we ended up with over 800,000 views in our area between Facebook and YouTube and that exceeds our local population by about five times, so we were definitely getting some views and by many folks, lots of views. And so then we did our evangelistic series. When we started our meetings we ended up with about 111 people, guests that came to the series. We did survey cards, (registration cards with a survey on them to find out what had brought people out to the meetings) and about a third of the folks that filled out cards didn’t do the survey portion which that’s pretty normal I think. Of the ones that did,we had about 40 folks out from the handbills and about 25 folks out from the videos. And so interestingly enough, most of the ones that came out from the videos were from YouTube and so that was our crowd base. It was the first time we had ever done anything, in our cultural setting, for advertising that had brought out a crowd that was not direct mail and so that was quite encouraging.
Larry: Talk to me about the demographics, what type of people came from this advertising?
Hiram: That’s what’s interesting. Out of the 25 folks,13 were Millennials or Gen Z. In other words, the majority of folk that came out from the videos were younger than me, the speaker. It’s the only advertising we’ve ever done in our Adventist evangelistic advertising, in our personal 100 or so full message meetings we’ve done, where a substantial group was young adults. The majority in this case were young adults that came out.
Larry: Tell me about the demographics of the viewers that you saw on YouTube.
Hiram: So on Facebook, unless we set it specifically to show it to a younger audience, it automatically showed it to senior citizens because they’re cheaper to reach. However, on YouTube, without having to set any parameters, roughly 74% of the audience was between the ages of 18 and 44. Now I’m 46, so about 74% of the audience on YouTube, with no specific parameters, just automatically fell younger than me. And then we also found that it’s about 65% male, at least in our video viewing, and about 35% female. In religious information, that’s very interesting because you show up at church and the church is full of who? The ladies, right? It was very interesting to us that with YouTube we’re reaching a majority male audience, at least with our videos.
Larry: You did Facebook, you did direct mail, and you also did YouTube. And the result of this was a younger audience that was primarily coming from YouTube.
Hiram: Yes. In fact, the direct mail brought mostly an older audience, and the videos brought mostly a younger audience.
And then when we got down to the end of the series, we had 13 decisions for baptism. I inadvertently entered an extra experiment into this meeting that I kicked myself over and over for. We decided to live-stream the series at the last minute. I know Livestream does a lot of good and it’s great for the shut-ins, but we ended up with, instead of people continuing to be part of our live audience, staying home and watching, and it affected our meetings. In fact, we suspect that that was even more the case with the people we had reached with video advertising because they’re already used to staying home and watching YouTube, apparently. And so we normally would have had a larger group of decisions in a meeting of this size. But anyway, when we got down to the end, we had 13 decisions the last weekend for baptism and to join the church. Of those 13 decisions, four were from the handbills, four were from previous church contact, pre-work, et cetera, and four were from YouTube, and one was from Facebook.
Larry: Okay, so you had four decisions for baptism from people that came from the direct mail campaign, and you had four decisions for baptism that came from YouTube. How much did you spend on each of those?
Hiram: We spent $21,000 on our handbills and we spent $17,000 on YouTube. Interestingly enough, the four that came from the handbills, three were from the same family. So if that one handbill hadn’t been delivered, if the post office had messed up on that one address, it would have been a tough series on that side of the advertising!
Larry: So that ultimate metric of decisions for baptism, you had a lower cost per decision from the YouTube advertising than you did from the direct mail.
Hiram: Yes. Now, one thing I will add is if you put the Facebook advertising and the YouTube advertising together, that would not be the case because Facebook just ended up being a total bomb for us. But when you factor in YouTube head-to-head with the handbills, the end result in decisions for baptism, YouTube outperformed it based on a cost-benefit analysis.
Larry: I want to kind of go down a side road and talk about our experience briefly. I want to talk about direct mail specifically, and as Hiram and I were talking before, he’s like, “I don’t want to really disrespect direct mail because it has a place and because SermonView does direct mail”… but here’s the bottom line: first of all, direct mail still had an impact, but it’s expensive. It’s the only way to guarantee that someone in every home has an opportunity to respond to your message. But it’s expensive. And ultimately, we’re a marketing company. We don’t care about direct mail. We don’t care about social media. We don’t care about YouTube. We care about effectiveness. And if YouTube is more effective than direct mail, and in the end, we end up shifting a lot of the dollars over to online marketing, we’re okay with that. We want to do what’s most effective. Here’s the thing with direct mail: There was a study done in 2004 that found that 96% of postal customers checked their mail every single day. We just did our own study earlier this year that found 40% of postal customers no longer check their mail more than once a week.
We went from 4% not checking the mail every day to 40% now checking it once a week or less. And that’s a huge impact! And when you look at the younger demographics, that number is even higher. So the post office has also made a change in some of their delivery commitments. So now instead of a three-day window at the local post office, it’s a four-day window. And the sectional facility used to have a two-day window that now has a four-day window. So you add three days there, and we’re seeing delays with the logistics of getting the mail shipped out to that sectional facility. And then people don’t check their mail every day. Suddenly you need to be getting that mailpiece out at least a week earlier than before and maybe even a week and a half earlier. And now you’ve diluted some of the effectiveness because it’s not this hit all at once in mailboxes. It gets spread out as people are checking it. Those are things that are just societal changes and cultural changes that explain why direct mail doesn’t have the same level of effectiveness as it used to.
You told me about something through this experiment. It raised your profile in the local community and has given you opportunities for divine appointments that have been really unexpected. Tell me more about that.
Hiram: Oh, my! I’ve never seen anything like this as a pastor before. We do evangelistic meetings (though I did travel in Evangelism for a number of years, I’ve actually been a settled pastor longer than I was on the road in Evangelism). And so you’d send out the flyers in the mail, and once the flyers have gone out, once the dates for the seminar have passed or the series has passed, I didn’t really see much benefit. Sometimes people would attend and they say, “Oh, I saw your flyer last time and wanted to come”. So there was that. But I never got recognized in town from the handbill ever. Well, from the videos, it happens all the time! The bus boy at Olive Garden, someone random at the grocery store, a guy at the gas station, at my daughter’s soccer game. A guy’s like, “Hey, are you the fellow on YouTube sharing the Bible prophecy videos?” I go into Chipotle to grab some lunch and a guy comes up: “Man, I was going to attend that series you were doing, the one you were on YouTube about. Are those recorded anywhere or are you going to do it again? I want to be there.”
Then, you know, I’m at a smoothie place, and the young man that’s bringing out the smoothie, he’s like, “Are you on YouTube doing the Bible videos? I accepted Christ. I gave my heart to the Lord. Because of your Bible videos on YouTube.” I’ve never had an impact like this as an Adventist pastor in the community, like from these videos! And so our church leadership now sees this as more of an investment for the future as we’re running these videos, as compared with other forms of advertising, which seems to lose most of their effectiveness, if not all of their effectiveness the moment the dates are passed.
Larry: I want to talk about the early days of It Is Written, when George Vanderman, before he even started the It Is Written television program, was an evangelist working for the GC Ministerial Department. And this was the early 1950s. TV had just come on the scene. Bill Fagel was starting Faith for Today with some dramatic vignettes. There were others, The Quiet Hour was just getting started on television. But he was an evangelist, and he decided to try something. He created 30-minute films. There were actually a total of 30 half-an-hour films that he created. Before he would go into a city, he would buy airtime on the local TV stations and play these evangelistic films for several months prior to actually showing up. And the results were astonishing, the number of people that were coming out. One of the first tests was in Bakersfield. I ran across a Recorder article from 1956 that talked about this in Bakersfield. They ran these films on TV for about three months prior to the evangelistic series. And they had like 200 baptisms, which even back then was an astonishingly high number. I’m not sure that the brethren at the GC got the right idea from it because they decided, “Hey, you know what? It’s planting the seeds of Bible prophecy, the three angels’ message is getting planted. We need to do this national TV program so that way all the evangelists can take advantage of it.”
But I think part of the power of this was it was George Vanderman on the screen, and then George Vanderman shows up in town. And that was a really expensive proposition in the 1950s. Today, you’re able to do that in your own community for just a few thousand dollars. For the amount that you spend on a direct mail campaign doing this, getting on YouTube, you’re reaching a younger demographic. People are actually seeing you. They feel like they’re getting to know you a little bit. And when they get invited to come out to the meetings, it just reduces the friction for them to go, “Yeah, I want to go out there”. So this is taking a very old thing that was proven with It Is Written and George Vanerman in the very early days, and now applying it in 2023 in a really effective way. And this is why I’m so excited, Hiram, about what you’ve done: it’s taking something that we know has worked, but finding a new way and new media to be able to do it today. I’m so excited about the potential here.
Hiram: Oh, I can tell that you are. And I have a couple of thoughts. I remember when you told me about that, I was unaware that George Vanderman had done that. And that’s awesome. And yet back then, there would have been, what, three TV stations probably, but society has changed. Where are you going to get everyone? I guarantee you that you’re getting more people on YouTube right now than you are the 100 and something channels available spread across cable television, satellite TV, et cetera, these days. And so you’ve got a place where they’re funneling in, and then using concise videos. Now technology, all the wonders of technology, and our interaction with it have caused young adults these days, the “digital natives”, you could say, to be to the point that they have a fairly short attention span for non-entertainment. I want to emphasize non-entertainment. They’ll still watch a three-hour-long entertaining movie. But with non-entertainment, they have a very short attention span in most cases (unless they’re already really interested in something). And so that’s why we focus our videos now instead of 30-minute programs, we do 30 to 90-second videos. That tends to be what’s working best according to the research for young adults today.
Larry: Let’s talk about some mechanics. Let’s do some training to help the pastors be able to do this. When you and I have talked about this, there are basically three areas that need to be considered for doing this. And it actually falls into the categories of traditional video or television production. You’ve got pre-production, production, and post-production. Pre-production is writing your script, and planning for your actual shoot. Then production is the actual recording of it. And then post-production is all the editing and everything like that. So in this context we’re talking about, the first category is defining your video content, deciding what the content is going to be how you’re going to approach it, and that type of thing. Then how to record your videos (we’re going to talk about that in a little bit more detail). Then the post-production is where the editing, adding the lower thirds, the audio mixing, rendering, and uploading it to YouTube and all that. We’re going to talk about a service that SermonView offers to handle all that technical post-production stuff.
So let’s take this in this order: Let’s talk about content first. When you did content, what did you say? You said 30 to 90-second videos. Were you recording your Sabbath morning sermons or taking a snip from the sermon or what was this content? Where did it come from?
Hiram: We wanted to do targeted special content for the YouTube audience. And so we wanted good general gospel-focused material as well as, since we were doing a Bible prophecy series, things that would hopefully build an interest in Bible prophecy because we wanted to advertise and do the meetings in a way that was congruent between the two. And so we did gospel presentations. One we stole from, I believe HMS Richards years ago. It’s been around a while called, “The Four Things God Doesn’t Know”.
Larry: Can you give us an example of what that would sound like?
Hiram: So on a skippable ad for YouTube, you have 5 seconds and then they can skip. So you have 5 seconds they have to watch. And then if you can hook them in that time, they’re going to watch most of your video. And this one is one that has a view rate where folks watch the entire video about 60% of the time. So about 60% of the people chose not to skip it. And so here’s how it would start:
“Did you know there are four things even God doesn’t know?” Well, there you go. What do you mean by what God doesn’t know? And for those of you that you’re wondering what that is, it’s really simple:
1. He doesn’t know a sin He doesn’t hate. 2. He doesn’t know a sinner He doesn’t love. 3. He doesn’t know anything else He could do to save you. 4. He doesn’t know a better time than right now.
And so that ended up being about a 23-second video with a 60% view rate and just a great little nugget that has worked in the community and put us forward as people who are focused on Jesus and the Gospel and that was powerful.
For another one that we did, we got a SermonView picture (we purchased it properly through your graphics program) and we put it up and we were going to talk about Bible prophecy. Just curious how it would go. Some of them we did, we didn’t think they would work, but they did. And some of them we didn’t think work, didn’t. But some of them we thought would do really good. Well, they didn’t pan out. So here’s one that did really great: put up an image of that antichrist beast, that ugly beast, and it simply said, “Check out this picture of this artist’s depiction of the antichrist beast of Revelation 13 in Bible prophecy.” Well, I don’t know, I guess a lot of folks haven’t seen it. There was a lot of interest in that. That one also had about a 60% view rate and it ended up being about a 90-second video that explained and talked about beasts and prophecy just a little bit, and it just kind of planted some seeds and got some attention. And then we did things on “The Daily Walk”, how to have victory in our life as Christians. I did one on “Signs of the Times: Why is the world going crazy?” That kind of stuff.
Larry: Okay, so these are evangelistic or personal growth types of topics that are going to catch people’s attention and actually provide some value to their lives.
Hiram: Yeah, certainly that’s what we’re looking for ultimately, when it comes to things like YouTube and the online world, the social media world, people are interested in seeing more of what adds value. The whole idea was we didn’t want to just start a week before the evangelistic series, just advertising, “Come to this meeting, come to this meeting, come to this meeting!” We wanted to spend several weeks adding valuable content for people so that when a meeting came, they would go, “Okay, I got to go see this!” And so that was kind of what was behind our approach.
Larry: Okay, so that’s the content. Let’s talk about how to record these videos. So let’s start with preparation. Did you actually write out this script and then use, like, a teleprompter? How did you do this?
Hiram: I experimented with teleprompters and written scripts, and it was pitiful. It was absolutely pitiful. The people who read the news on teleprompters go to school for years to get good at that. When I say pitiful, you can tell most of the time when people are reading that they’re reading. And so I learned a method that is actually taught by some Hollywood actors that do a training program. I bought it and I went through it. It was put together for entrepreneurs who want to do video stuff to promote their businesses. So I said, it’s going to overlap. I got that, went through it, and learned to basically—talk about all the high-tech stuff we have—get a sticky note. That’s right, a yellow sticky note, and write bullet points on the sticky note. And we’re only talking about a 30 to 90-second video anyway, right? I mean, I’m talking right now without notes, you talk to people on the phone without notes, you don’t need a lot of notes if you can relax and talk about your content. But you do kind of need prompts for where you’re going. And so that’s what the bullet points were for. I would basically think, and put bullet points down for what I wanted to cover on my video and then I’d go on a walk and I would just preach to the woods, preach to the houses. I say “preach” but I’m just actually, in a conversational tone, working through that material until the point that I can sit down in front of the camera, and within three takes, I can hit a good one. It’s called the three-take method. If you can’t nail it in three takes, you didn’t prepare enough. It’s better to go back and spend more time preparing than to have these frustrating recording situations and then have a bunch of video that has to be overly edited to piece things together. And then when we got ready to film the video, we took that sticky note and put it right under the lens of the camera and it became the teleprompter.
Larry: All right, tell me about the camera that you used.
Hiram: I used an iPhone 7 because my iPhone 14 had too much stuff on it. An iPhone Seven. I mean, it was in the drawer and hadn’t been used in like three years and it was still better than (unless you wanted to spend really good money) a lot of cameras that you’d go buy at Best Buy these days. And by the way, a lot of the stuff you’re seeing on Facebook, on YouTube, on Instagram, it’s smartphones these days. You can certainly spend all the money you want on recording equipment, but you can do phenomenally good videos on almost any smartphone these days.
Larry: I just saw a thing in one of my classes. There have been a number of Hollywood feature films that have been shot 100% on an iPhone using the iPhone camera.
Hiram: Wow. I believe it.
Larry: And what you’re talking about is using the back-facing lens, not the front-facing one. This is a better-quality camera. And so you would set it on a tripod or whatever and just put the sticky note right underneath it and record?
Hiram: Yeah, because if you didn’t, I’m on my phone right now, so I can see you and I can see me. Well, the problem is the lens is over there, but I keep looking here at the screen because that’s where I see you and me. And so it’s going to constantly show you not really looking right into the camera if you have the picture where you can see it. It’s better to frame it up and then look right into the lens of the camera. Put your sticky note right under it and it’s not just a sheet of paper, it’s a sticky note – it’ll stick right to it (talk about high tech, huh?). Then what you want to do is, as you’re doing the video, imagine you’re talking to a friend. You don’t have to have notes and you don’t have to start and stop 100 times when you’re talking to a friend on the phone. Imagine as you look directly into the lens, through the lens, that lens is a window and your good friend is on the other side there and you’re just talking to a good friend. So go over your material, do three takes, take the best one, use that one, and you’ll be set. That works really good.
Larry: I actually have a degree in video production, and mass media from Walla Walla University. (Shout out to my friends in the communication field!) There are four things when it comes to recording that you need to be paying attention to: one is the camera. Two is how are you going to keep that camera steady? (So how are you going to mount that? Is there going to be any camera movement or things like that, but sticking it on a tripod or some way of fixing it so that it’s solid.) The third thing is your lighting. (How are you lighting the subject?) And then the fourth is the audio.
So we’ve talked about the camera. Tell me about how you mount the camera when you record.
Hiram: I picked up a little tripod, you can get them for about $30. And it’s spring-loaded. You just hold it open, put the phone in there and it holds it. You kind of frame up the shot and you’re good to go. And so that’s what we did for that. It’s worked very effectively. You really don’t need camera movement for something like this. A 30 to 90-second video, a still image with you talking, that’s all you need.
Larry: And as we’ve been experimenting since your dissertation came out, we worked with one pastor who did his video walking, and he was literally just holding it out. The difficulty was there was a lot of shaking that was going on. I’ve tried using a selfie stick walking around and even then it shakes. The best that I’ve seen is just stick it on a tripod, no movement. Record into that and call it good.
Hiram: Yeah, and that works great. You can get a gimbal thing that takes some of the motion out for the selfie sticks and all. I’ve seen those used with good success. One thing you got, if the camera is shaking all around while you’re holding it like this, you’re certainly coming across as authentic. That at least counts for something, but your sound is probably your other big issue. We did several of our videos just like I’m doing now, without a microphone. However, if dogs start barking or a vehicle drives by and you’re by the road, you get this background noise. You want good video, but studies have shown people are more tolerant of imperfections in your video than they are in your audio. Your audio needs to be good. And so we ended up looking on Amazon, looking at lots of reviews, and got a mic that we could use, and that helped with the quality of our videos. I think you may share some options on that.
Larry: Yeah, I’ve got two mics that we’ve been using. [Links to products at the end.] One is just in a little case and it clips on the end of the iPhone. It’s got a windscreen on it, but you would just clip it on the end and you’re good to go. And the quality there is pretty good, certainly better than the internal mic. But the issue there is it’s kind of a shotgun, so it’s picking up all the noise behind you as well as your voice. Did you try something like that?
Hiram: Yeah, we used one like that. And if you just want to make sure you’re picked up better and there’s no background noise, that’s great. If you are out near a road and an 18-wheeler truck drives by, a mic like that can just kill you. But there are settings where it’s very good inside mostly, I would say.
Larry: And that mic that I just mentioned is about $60, highly reviewed. The other mic that I’ve been using more recently for videos is a wireless mic and this plugs into the bottom of my phone and then I’ve got a lapel mic that I can just clip on. The quality of this is really good. I think this cost me about $120 and it actually includes two different mic packs. So you could do an interview with somebody or that type of thing.
Hiram: Excellent!
Larry: Let’s talk about lighting. What did you do for lighting?
Hiram: I mostly use natural lighting. Mornings and evenings are really good. When you can get good shade throughout the day it can often be lit pretty well. Even inside a lot of times you can open up windows and such and get some pretty good lighting. I will say that most of the cameras in this day and age are so good that they’re very forgiving on lighting. Is lighting still important? Yes. Is it as critical an issue as maybe back when you were at Walla Walla? I don’t think that it is, because the cameras are so much more forgiving. But you don’t want to get silhouetted. You don’t want to have a bunch of bright light behind you and it silhouettes you and that kind of thing. But you don’t want harsh lighting either, so you don’t want to be out in direct sunlight. Typically that’s in the middle of the day that’s not going to do good for you. If you set up your phone and you start doing a video, typically I’ll just do like a few seconds of whatever, and then look at it to see how it looks. If it looks good, then you’re good, and if it doesn’t, then keep experimenting, you’ll get it.
Larry: I had to shoot a video for one of my classes a couple of weeks ago and I planned to do it outside, so I was going to wait until evening when you have that golden hour, it looks really good. And then it got overcast and I could see that it was clearing up. So I had like about a half-an-hour window here where it was overcast. And so I ran outside and did it. The great thing about overcast light is that it’s really diffused, so you don’t have those harsh shadows. It ended up looking good.
Something else I heard somebody say once, if you take a car phone mount that you stick to your windshield, you can stick it at eye level on your sliding glass doors out back if you’ve got those. Or if you have a big window, bay window, or something like that, stick it at eye level. And now all that natural light that’s washing in is going to light you really well. And if you’re using the camera on the back of the phone, there are ways that you can actually reduce the depth of field. So the background behind you is more out of focus. On the newer cameras you can do that then it doesn’t matter what’s behind you, you’re well-lit. This is a really simple method, it costs $15 or $20 or something less.
Hiram: I love it. That’s a great one.
Larry: Now talk to me about energy. You said something interesting to me in a previous conversation. When you talk, can you just talk as if you’re talking to a friend? How’s that?
Hiram: You need to amp it up just a little bit. We tend not to be as vibrant on camera as we think we are. One of the things that is good to do, especially when you’re practicing, is push yourself out of your comfort zone (which by definition means you’re doing it in a way in which you’re uncomfortable). And then as you kind of settle back, hopefully, you’ve raised your energy a little bit. Some of us, especially on camera, need to up the energy a little bit. Sometimes rehearsing might feel a little unnatural, but come on, when you learned how to drive a vehicle, which you do so naturally now, did you not feel totally out of control the first time you started down a hill at about 35 miles an hour? I mean, practice makes things develop. Have you ever played golf? I’m not a good golfer. I don’t have the patience for golf. I go about three holes real serious, and I just start knocking the fire out of them. That’s my personality, right? But learning how to hold a golf club, I mean, talk about something that, when you first learn, feels totally unnatural. But then as you continue to do it, it becomes natural. You may need to add a little bit of energy to catch an online audience, especially a younger audience at first. And it may push you out of your comfort zone to do so, but it’s well worth the effort. And what doesn’t maybe feel natural at first will come along in time.
Larry: I found that if I don’t have the biggest smile possible while I’m recording a video, (if it doesn’t feel like a fake big smile) then it doesn’t look like a natural smile. It just looks like a little bit of a smirk. And it’s really interesting how, yeah, the camera zaps some of that energy. What you think is projecting a nice natural energy, comes across without as much energy as you think.
Hiram: And you’re not going to hold the young audience on YouTube today with that. You don’t have to be standing on your head shouting, over the top. In fact, that doesn’t come across as genuine. You’re looking for authenticity, that is what they’re looking for. And you, having a little more energy than you might normally have, that’s not going to come across as inauthentic. You’ve got to be somewhere between too much energy and too little energy. You need to have a “Goldilocks” video: not too hot, not too cold, just right.
Larry: And that takes practice. In order to find that line, you have to cross it. And this is something that you can experiment with while you’re recording. Go over the top and you may find that that’s the sweet spot where you feel like you’re over the top, but just try it and see how it looks.
Hiram: Yeah, but don’t be afraid to get started. Don’t let this intimidate you. Get some videos done. Put them out there, and see how they do. One of the things about YouTube is it will show you how well people are viewing. You can see when you run the ads where people are dropping off and how quickly. Another thing we did was we put together a committee in the church where we would review videos that didn’t do well to try to understand why we call them “Autopsy of a Dead Video”. And so in the Autopsy of a Dead video, we’re looking and go, “Oh, around 12 seconds, almost everybody left what was happening right before that?” And then we took some of the videos, some of them we didn’t even rerecord, we just edited and they went from duds to studs in the way that they performed. So experiment. Learn to be catchy at the beginning. Sometimes we would do what we thought was a catchy introduction, and before we got to the meat and potatoes, everyone was gone. And if we just trimmed off what we thought was a great introduction and went right into the meat and potatoes, we held them. And so just start doing it, experiment with it, and you’ll find some stuff that works really well. I know you will because we have.
Larry: I want to actually show a couple of these videos. We’ve talked now about the content and we’ve talked about the recording. I want to show two of your videos. And these are available at StudyRevelation.com if you want to go take a look at them. Here’s one:
[One of Hiram’s videos:]
“I’ve heard people say they don’t go to church because there are too many hypocrites there. Well, where else do you want the hypocrites to be? We go to the grocery store and guess what? There are hypocrites. We go out to eat. There are hypocrites at restaurants and sporting events. Yeah, the hypocrites are there, too. You don’t let the hypocrites keep you away from anywhere else. Don’t let them keep you away from church.”
Larry: That’s one, and I love this one as well:
[Another one of Hiram’s videos]
“I invite you to consider four ways to fix your spouse. Number one, quit trying to fix your spouse. The only person you can fix is you, and you can’t even do that on your own. The Bible says, ‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me’. Number two, don’t fixate on your own needs: focus on the needs of your spouse. ‘It’s more blessed to give than to receive’. Number three, communicate with kindness. Proverbs says ‘a soft answer turns away anger’. And number four, the best way to fix your spouse is to fix your spouse’s spouse.”
Larry: All right, so you got a hook at the beginning, you have interesting contentthat adds value to people’s lives. The lighting is good. The audio is good. Yeah, this is what we’re talking about!
Hiram: Well, we put a lot of thought into them. Again, they don’t all have to be prophetic. A lot of it has to do with what you’re building toward. But I will add this: Whether you’re building toward a Bible prophecy seminar or a community event: the general Christian ones, like the “Four Things God Doesn’t Know”, “Hypocrites at Church”, “Four Ways to Fix Your Spouse”, this is still good for any audience because it shows that you’re adding value to people’s lives. It shows that you’re gospel-centered, that you believe in the Bible, and that you believe in Jesus. The importance of those things can’t be overemphasized.
Larry: All right, so we’ve talked about pre-production, we’ve talked about the type of content that you want, we’ve also talked about production: the recording, and some of the things related to that. I want to talk about a new service that Sermonview is offering where we will work with you to put your videos online.
So you write the content, you record it, and then we take care of all the technical details after that. You send us your three raw takes and we’ll edit it. We’ll add the lower third, we’ll add other graphics, we’ll render the video, we’ll take care of the audio, we’ll create the thumbnail, we upload it to YouTube, we set up all the advertising, we do all that stuff. And part of the cost of this annual program includes an advertising spend. And we have three different levels that I want to share with you, depending on how active you want to be. And there are a couple of reasons why we want to do it for a year. One is that it takes time to practice and get good at this. And we don’t want to be working with someone and a month or two in have them just go, “I can’t do this anymore.” Pushing through that discomfort is going to be an important piece of it. But the second thing is having these ads running year-round is actually building that foundation for ministry and increasing your visibility. And it gives you these opportunities through divine appointments to do ministry in your community.
So we’ve got three levels: if you do one video per month, that’s the small package, the cost is $5,000 for the year, and that will get you between 30,000 and 50,000 views over the course of the year. (Based on the cost per view that Hiram has seen.) You can do two videos per month for $9,000 for the year. That will get you somewhere between 50,000 and 75,000 views during the year. Or we can work with you to do four videos a month, basically one per week, the cost for that is $15,000 for the year. This will get you about 80,000 to 120,000 views over the course of the year.
We provide feedback for each video that you send us so you can improve your own skills over the course of the year. With each video, we actually give you one thing to work on for the next one. Maybe it is something like “You need to get a better mic so that the audio is better.” or “Let’s work on the lighting this time around to see if we can get light your face a little bit better”. So we give you that feedback, we edit the video, we add the lower thirds and the other graphics, we render the video, we handle balancing the audio, we create the thumbnail, upload it to YouTube—we set up all the advertising.
We’re also compiling content ideas from Hiram and others who want to participate to help you jumpstart developing your own content. If you’re willing to contribute your own work to this collection, then we’ll give you access to all these ideas as part of SermonView’s YouTube service. You can learn more at EvangelismMarketing.com/YouTube.
Let’s go over some questions. The first question is, “Do I need to create my own YouTube channel?”
Hiram: For the purpose of the advertising, I recommend that you do. I also recommend as a pastor that you have your own. The question then comes, should my church have a YouTube channel or should I? Well, maybe both should. My church has one and I have one. But what’s going to happen is, as pastors, we tend to move in a few years. The next pastor usually does not do the same outreach as the previous pastor or use the same stuff. And if as a pastor, you’re only on the church’s account, you may have to just start fresh again. And so I recommend you have your own channel for this.
Larry: Let’s talk about the “skippable” ads, why those are preferred, and could you do “non-skippable” ads?
Hiram: The first thing we did on YouTube is we use the ads where it recommends “the next one to view”, it’s up at the top right there on YouTube. And it’s suggesting that you click on it to watch it. It does label it that it’s an ad. And we’re doing some of those right now, but we have found that those cost two to three times more than the skippable ad. It just wasn’t cost-effective.
Another thing is the volume. You’re stuck with only the number of people who would choose to click on that video in a day. Well, you might show it to everybody in town, and only a few click on it. In fact, the view rate is very low on those, whereas with the five-second skippable ad, you’ve got 5 seconds whether they want to watch it or not, that you’ve got to get their attention and to make a connection and to hook them to watch the whole thing. And look, I was skeptical of a skippable ad. So much so that when we first experimented, we went with the other format and we eliminated YouTube entirely from our research based on the cost of the other method.
It was only, and I believe it was a God thing, that we had that windfall of some extra evangelistic advertising money come through with a couple of months left, that we circled back and even tried skippable ads and it turned out to be the bread and butter that worked for us. So try the others, it’s certainly a good thing to try. But for the number of views you get, the impact that it’s going to have, right now the five-second skippable ads, I don’t believe can be beaten.
Larry: Yeah, and there’s another reason, an economic reason to do these five-second skippable ads, and that is as an advertiser, you don’t get charged for a view until they watch 30 seconds. So if they skip after 5 seconds, you don’t get charged for that ad. If they watch 25 seconds, you don’t get charged for that ad. It’s not until they actually watch 30 seconds. So your audience is self-selecting whether they’re interested in this content or not. So if you hook them and get them to the 30 seconds, well now that’s a valuable view to you and that’s when you get charged for it. And I don’t think either one of us knew before, part of the reason why YouTube is so powerful: Google is the number one search engine in the world. The number two search engine is actually YouTube. There are tons of people who just go straight to YouTube and search for content. Then when they look at it, if you bought that ad in front of that content, then boom, you’re right in front of them.
Next question: “Can we use the content that Hiram used in his videos, such as ‘The Four Ways to Fix Your Spouse’, et cetera?”
Hiram: Yes, you can copy anything that I’ve done, just don’t copy it verbatim. Put together your little sticky note, walk up and down your own driveway, get your own way to say it, and then do it. The thing is, I’ve learned in ministry, that my creativity increases when I give away the ideas God gives me. And I believe my creativity diminishes when I try to keep it to myself. You are welcome to it if it’s something that blesses you, that you think is worth building upon, by all means, take and use it. And by the way, with this approach, I might not be so ready to say “yes” to that if I were focusing like some YouTubers are. I’m glad to have subscribers all over the place, but that isn’t my focus. My focus is within 20 miles of the Columbia Seventh-day Adventist Church in Columbia, Missouri. You doing one that’s almost identical to mine, 500 miles from here, that’s not going to affect my audience. If I was trying to develop a channel with 2 million followers around the world, I might not want folks using stuff similar to mine.
But one of the things about Adventist evangelism is we’ve always borrowed heavily from each other. And that’s the tradition I come from. You’re certainly welcome to use anything that I have and go and make it better. What needs to happen is you need to steal it from me, and then when you make it better, I’m going to steal it back.
Larry: If you want to see the 30 scripts, they’re actually in an appendix to the dissertation, which, if you go to Andrews University, search for Hiram Rester, his dissertation will come up. It’s a very long and complicated academic-sounding title, but it’s the only dissertation by Hiram Rester.
Someone is asking, “How often are you posting to YouTube?” Or how often let’s rephrase this. “How often are you changing the content on the ads?”
Hiram: Boy, I don’t have a set amount. Right now I’ve got several ads running at the same time. I just have the frequency settings, which this gets more advanced than most of you are going to want to fool with, but I have mine set so the frequency won’t give them an impression more than three times on a video in a day, and then it won’t let them view that same video more than once a week. And so if they’ve watched it all the way through, it’s not going to show it to them again for seven days, but it will show them one of my other ones. So they might watch seven or eight of my videos right now in a week, but they’re not going to watch the same video more than once a week. But this is so new, we’re experimenting with it. We don’t know for sure what works best. That’s one of the reasons I’m excited that SermonView is getting this out there and getting pastors to do it, because we need more experimentation to know what is working best.
Larry: We have the low package, the $5,000, where it’s like one new piece of content per month, but I think really the sweet spot is the twice-a-month option, where you’re putting new content out every other week. If you wanted to do more that’s why we also have the larger package.
We have a question specifically about that service, “What are the lengths of the videos that SermonView will help with?” We want to limit these to 90 seconds. Did you tell me that you saw a precipitous drop-off between 75 and 90 seconds, so you ended up keeping it below 75 seconds? (Maybe that was somebody else who told me that.)
Hiram: It’s according to the video and the content, and if they believe that, the last thing you tell them is going to be the most important, they’re more likely to stick around. And several factors like that. Mine are typically 30 to 90 seconds, even as short as 23 seconds. But the shorter the better. I mean, 45 seconds to a minute really seems to be a better sweet spot. Here’s a philosophical thing, at least in my mind. If I can get them to watch the whole video and not click to leave it, I want them to do that because I don’t want them mentally clicking to leave what I’m doing if I can help it. I want to quit before they start wishing and I had quit. So it seems like it should be around 30 to 45 seconds a minute. I do intentionally do some longer videos because I have content that I want to get out, and I’m willing to take that risk that more of them are going to leave for the ones that do stay by and watch the longer content.
One thing I wanted to circle back to is when you talked about how many videos to run. See the thing is also let’s say you do one every two weeks or do one a month, well, by the time you get nine months into this, you’ve got several videos you could bring back. Several of the videos I’m running now are ones that I recorded in my doctoral dissertation and I’m just using them again. Have you ever noticed on TV a major corporation will have an advertisement and they run it to the point it just about drives you nuts and then it disappears and then nine months later it starts again? So you can bring them back. And so then when you first start, you’re only going to have one video, so you’re only going to run one. But when you get further down the road and now you have a library of videos, then it starts to get fun at that point.
Larry: So the service that I described from SermonView is a year-long program. There are 2 reasons why we do a year-long program. Again, the two things are it takes time for you to get better at doing the videos yourself, and the second thing is it becomes like a foundation for ministry in your community.
We have been doing some experiments with specific event marketing. We’re going to be working with an evangelist to do a sequence of videos that will run like eight to twelve weeks before he shows up in a town. So this is basically the “George Vandeman model” and we don’t have data on that yet, but that is one thing that we’re going to do. So we have someone here asking, “Do you have video advertising packages that fit and draw people into a specific event or to a specific evangelist?” If you have a speaker coming, you want that speaker to be getting to airtime. If it’s you as the pastor, you need to be the one being on camera because it’s about increasing your visibility and just people being comfortable with you. They recognize you, they see you. The social characteristics of “celebrity”, there’s some really interesting research on that. You have no idea who Tom Hanks actually is as a person, but you know who he is and you think you know who he is because of all of his visibility, as an example. It’s using the way that God wired our brains to be a foundation for ministry in your community.
Hiram: It wasn’t something that was on my radar or something I’d ever really put any thought into whatsoever before I did this, but there are worldwide celebrities, there are national celebrities and there are local celebrities like your newscasters and stuff locally. Well, all of a sudden I’m getting, I mean, I’ve had people act totally weird toward me now because they act like they’re around a celebrity and I’m like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I’m just a guy, let’s just calm down here.” But there is that aspect. Do you want that? Well, when you’re advertising for a meeting, if folks already know who you are and you have that little bit of “local celebrity”, it remains to be seen, but I believe over the next few years as we continue to do this locally, that we’re going to see our meetings grow.
Hiram: One of the things I saw was throughout the year one of the things we plan to do is like when we do different things, anything that I’m going to be assisting with, even if it’s like a health class, I can be like the host of it and introduce the doctor that’s going to speak. And that kind of thing is we’re going to use it to invite folks out to those things. Another thing that we have done is we’ve done stuff around Thanksgiving and Christmas on the theme. There are people who will watch a concise video, especially if you have something kind of catchy that’ll watch it around Christmas time or watch it around Thanksgiving so you can hop onto those seasonal things. So even if you’re promoting a live event, this is great if you’re wanting to get community awareness of your church and you as a pastor for future ministry context. This is phenomenal. At least it has been for us.
Larry: That’s awesome. I have a question about the SermonView service. “Are the prices for these videos just for the video or is there an extra charge for how large of an audience it reaches?” These three packages include ad spend, so it includes carving out part of what you’re paying us is money specifically to spend on advertising. Now, if you wanted to do like the small package and you wanted to boost your ad spend, we could certainly do that. But the larger the package, the more money is carved out for the ad spend as well. And that’s why we think you should be able to be able to get 30,000 to 50,000 views. That’s based on the cost-per-view that we’re seeing that we think the amount of budget that we’re talking about, we can get you about that many views.
Larry: Another question: “You mentioned TikTok. What’s been your experience with TikTok?”
Hiram: You know, with my Doctor of Ministry program being completed now, it goes back several years. TikTok was more in its infancy and as we experimented with it, we did put videos on TikTok, but we were not able to access their advertising features at that point for local geographic. I believe they’ve got that going now, but it’s the new kid on the block. I mean, it’s dominant now, it’s come along, but here’s what I’ll say: I think it would probably do about the same as Facebook. Here’s why: Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram are platforms where people go solely for entertainment. For the most part, YouTube has entertainment value, but people aren’t just scrolling every 15 seconds to something new, they’re actually settling down and spending time with some content. You have the same users on these different platforms, people that use YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok – but the viewers on YouTube, the same viewers that are on the others, just when they’re on YouTube, they’re in a mindset to spend some time with what they’re watching. And I think that’s made all the difference.
Larry: I was talking to one pastor who’s built a fairly substantial Instagram following and he said he’s experimented with TikTok. Of course, you need to experiment, you need to try things out, but you want the experimentation based on a reasonable theory, a reasonable hypothesis. Just don’t go out and try stuff willy-nilly. The thing that I don’t like about TikTok for this purpose is that there is research on TikTok that there’s kind of a trance-like zone out where you’re watching a 15-second video and you’re not really paying attention, you’re just kind of in this zone. And I don’t think that an ad appearing in that environment is actually going to break through that trance as well as, like you say when someone’s on YouTube, they’re expecting something more educational. And the data show that certainly, YouTube is doing better than Facebook and Instagram. We’re not planning any time in the near future to experiment with TikTok for that reason.
Okay, the last question is, “What are your thoughts on the background of the videos?” So when I looked at the various videos on your page, it looked like they were in different locations. What’s your thinking there?
Hiram: I love a good outdoor setting. It’s easy, you don’t have to put time into building a studio. You don’t have to think of exactly what you’re going to have behind you. I like a good outdoor setting. It’s not conducive all the time. It’s not conducive in the dead of winter, at least in some locations, to be able to do that. But if you can get an outdoor setting, otherwise, a simple setting. If you’ve got a setting where you can just blur your background, it doesn’t really matter too much what your background is. You do need to make sure you stand out from it though. Like, I’ll show you something you don’t want. Look how close my jacket is to the tan wall behind me. That’s not good. But if I scrunch down a little bit, and I’ve got this dark couch that outlines me. So you want to look at what you’re wearing and how that fits with your background so you don’t blend into your background too much. I wouldn’t let this work for one of those videos. But anyway, yeah, nature can be great if you can get in nature without too many background sounds.
Larry: Okay, as we wrap up Hiram, give us some words of encouragement. What are some words of encouragement you can offer us?
Hiram: Do it. Just do it! Get started. How do you do a video? Well, do a video. Don’t spend all this time analyzing. As Adventists, we tend to be over-educated and under-experienced in actually doing things. Do it! Record a video, and then record another one. Get up in the morning, record a video, and don’t sit around and think about it to the point that you become absolutely, totally paralyzed. Do it! You’re going to reach people in your community that you’re not going to reach any other way. There is nothing else I can do where I’m preaching while I’m sleeping right now. I take a day off, and I’m preaching to people on YouTube. I go to Union College 5 hours away to move my daughter into her new house for senior year, and I’m still back in Columbia, Missouri, preaching to people on YouTube. It’s reaching people I wouldn’t otherwise get in front of, and it works when I’m not. Boy, I feel so much better about taking time off now since I’m still working when I’m off. It’s great!
Larry: Awesome. Well, that’s our webinar today. I want to thank Dr. Harm Rester for joining us and sharing what he’s learned about YouTube advertising. We are seeing some very positive results from this platform and I truly believe that YouTube is going to be a cornerstone to effective evangelism marketing in the future.
If you’d like to learn more about how Sermonview can help you with YouTube, you can visit EvangelismMarketing.com/YouTube. If you are planning to work with us for an upcoming Bridge event or Reaping series, this is a great way to build your online presence leading up to the event dates. You can also talk to one of our campaign managers by calling us at 800-525-5791.
At SermonView we are excited to see how God can use YouTube to help you reach your community. Click below to learn more about our YouTube service options or call us at 800.525.5791.
For over 75 years, when churches have been hosting evangelistic series, they have utilized handbill mailings to promote them. Why? The reason is simple: because it works.
Even though direct mail still stands as one of the leading methods in event advertising today, things have changed dramatically over the last decade. Things like how often people check the mail and when your mailing should land in mailboxes are major factors worth re-evaluating when utilizing direct mail as an effective tool for promoting your evangelistic efforts in the current age.
In 2005, 98% of the US population checked their mail daily. Today, that number has dropped below 60%.
The new, ideal mailbox landing window
For years the standard ideal landing window was to have your mailing to arrive in the mailbox just a few days before your event. It created a sense of urgency or FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and it limited people from taking the mailer to their spiritual leader who might persuade them not to attend opening night.
We are starting to see a shift in a campaign’s overall effectiveness when people are given more time, not less, to respond to a mailing.
It makes sense that people are busier today than ever before and they don’t check the mail as often as they used to. People are only checking their mail a few times a week, if not once a week. If we ignore this and stick to the old mentality of trying to land just a few days before the event, we actually increase the risk of people not learning about your event until after opening night!
By sending your mailer a little earlier rather than later, you decrease that risk and significantly increase the likelihood of your mailer getting seen before your event date, which always outweighs it getting seen after your event has already begun.
The lasting value of the mailbox
40 years ago, the main way people could hear about an evangelistic series would be through direct mail. While now we have more options thanks to digital media, direct mail is still the only way to ensure everyone in your area can see your event details (whether or not they are ever online).
Not only can direct mail reach every home in a carrier route, bifold mailers and jumbo postcards dominate the mailbox and perform best when paired with stirring visuals and a strong, clear, call to action (such as event pre-registration). But most importantly, they work best when used in a multi-touch marketing campaign.
Multi-touch marketing offers a full-scale solution to your event marketing strategy.
Multi-touch marketing means more visibility which creates more credibility and awareness for your event. Multi-touch marketing for event marketing gives your church top-of-mind awareness in your community anytime someone sees a banner, road sign, social media ad, mailer, or personal invitations for your upcoming event.
Plan your event marketing sooner rather than later.
We are still seeing an impact on the print production supply chain and with freight transit times. With this in mind, we are encouraging everyone to contact us early to get started sooner rather than later to help reduce the risk of delays for your event marketing campaigns.
At SermonView, we have helped churches with over 6,000 outreach events. We’ve sent over 30 million mailers into communities and reached over 8 million social media users. So we know how to help you plan an effective campaign.
Benefit from a proven multi-touch marketing approach with your event marketing plan that utilizes multiple forms of print, mail, and digital marketing resources to promote your next campaign.
Click the button below or call us at 800.525.5791 to learn more.
We are all busy and the last thing we want is to be on our phones more. While we want to connect with our interest list, the idea of sitting down to text several interests can feel like a lot of work. Who needs contact today? What do I say to help encourage engagement? Has it been too long since I last texted them or is it too late to text them right now?
Rather than being glued to your phone toggling through numbers, consider creating a strategic communication plan.
You’ll save yourself time, create a consistent cadence, and develop your church voice for your team to use when connecting with leads—all while intentionally connecting with your full interest list (not just the ones at the top).
Below you’ll find 3 key steps to consider when you create a strategic communication plan plus 5 easy ways to start connecting with your leads using the scheduled text message feature in InterestTracker.
3 key steps to getting started.
Plan on setting time aside to schedule several of your text messages within InterestTracker ahead of time. This is going to be a major element for your strategic communication plan because it allows you to dedicate focused, extra effort ahead of time when you’re most ready to prepare messages that are more likely to encourage engagement.
1. Identify all of your various audiences.
Your interest list probably has a mix of leads from a variety of sources. Decide who your audience for each message should be, then you can write a more thoughtful message for each audience. You can reach “warm” and “cold” leads by filtering from past events or other customized tags to create groups you can bulk text to. (If you aren’t using tags yet, it is a lifesaver for staying organized!)
2.Take time to write a thoughtful message.
How does my tone sound? Am I staying within the character count for my SMS credits to use those wisely? What exactly am I asking my interests to do, is it clear? If you take the time to craft your message with these things in mind you can write a more engaging message that can help you get the response you hope for.
3. Review a calendar before you schedule.
Identify key days of the week and times for when to send your messages. While Monday evenings might be better suited for invitations, Friday mornings might be a better option for a bit of inspiration heading into the weekend. Then you’ll want to be sure to avoid major holidays plus other days that might impact how your message is received or skipped.
5 SMS Connection Ideas:
1. Ask for Prayer Requests
If you have leads that are cold (maybe you haven’t heard from them in a while or have never gotten a response) then prayer request appeals are a great way to encourage engagement. Starting your communication by offering to personally pray for someone is an easy way to soften hearts and can immediately begin breaking down barriers.
2. Send Weekly Inspirational Verses
No matter where someone is at on their spiritual journey, this is another great way to engage or stay connected. You never know what someone is going through, so bringing some Good News to their phone might be the way God speaks to them this week. (Keep these short, hopeful, and limited to just once a week so it doesn’t feel like you are spamming them.)
3. Invitations for Upcoming Events
If you have an event coming up this is another way to connect with your leads. If someone pre-registered and attended an event with a similar theme, then send them an invitation. Those who pre-registered but missed the original event can get an invite too but as a different message—something that feels more personal to them. You can let them know you understand they missed the first event, but thought they might be interested in this one.
4. Prepare Hearts for Decisions
If you plan on making an appeal for decisions during one of your meetings you’ll want to use AttendanceTracker to build a custom report so you can communicate with those who have been regularly attending and anyone who missed a night to help encourage attendance at this particular meeting. (You’ll also want to follow up personally after someone has made a decision!)
5. Offer Free Giveaways
Whether you are running a Bible study lead generation campaign or you’ve purchased resources to give away at your evangelistic meetings, chances are you have some extra materials laying around. Why not send out a message to your interests offering a free book or DVD? If they say yes, then put it in a gift bag with a card letting them know you’re praying for them and drop it off at their door. This small act of kindness will speak volumes to your leads (and it can help you work through some extra resources).
Technology Designed to Foster Connections
Use Merge Tags to show your leads just how much your church cares about them specifically!
Merge tags allow you to add a personal touch to your bulk text messages—getting your heart across the text while saving your team time creating personal messages to each of your leads. Any field in the interest record (including custom fields) can be used as a merge tag, in the format %mergetag%.
To address your interests by name, you can simply type “Hello, %firstname%!” and the message sent to the interest will come through with their name.
95% of text messages are opened and read, making them one of the most effective communication methods available.
With the Text Messaging Module from InterestTracker, you can easily send SMS messages to one, some, or all of your guests with one button in the software. You can also have messages forwarded to your own cell phone for a more natural conversation experience for your users.
Merge tags are an easy way to personalize your texts, and increase your response rates.
Want to learn more?
With the Text Messaging Module from InterestTracker, you can easily send SMS messages to one, some, or all of your guests with one button in the software. You can also have messages forwarded to your own cell phone for a more natural conversation experience for your users.
Click the button below or call us at 800.525.5791 to learn more.
Before we dive in, know that SermonView has you covered.
US Postal service systems and regulations have been changing at a faster pace in the last 5 years than ever before. We work hard to keep up with everything, so you don’t have to worry about it. As policies and postage rates change, we’ll let you know about what impacts you, and we’ll find the solutions for the rest.
For most of the people reading this, you can stop here knowing that we’ve got you covered. However, if you are thinking about doing a mailing yourself, continue reading for some things to keep in mind as you plan your next mailing.
The unique way Adventist churches do mailings
We know the Adventist church is already different in our message to the world, so it’s no surprise that the way we do bulk mailings is just as unique. In 2022 SermonView sent out event invitation mailers on behalf of churches to over 3 million homes. Those are the kinds of numbers you would see mostly from businesses, not churches, who would need to hire a professional mailhouse to handle that kind of volume. And while secular mailhouses handle business and non-profit mail all the time, most don’t handle Adventist mailings very often, which they don’t realize needs additional effort and care, especially when they are time-sensitive for reaping or bridge events.
What exactly is specific about how our church does mass mailings? We don’t stop at “non-profit” or “saturation” like many other churches do, we utilize all of the USPS systems established to reach more targeted areas of our communities. It takes a bit more work and understanding of the postal systems, but you can optimize mailings even more to get the best postal rates available, and increase the likelihood of timely delivery that many commercial printers don’t take the time to utilize for their church customers.
What to ask if hiring a secular bulk mailing company not familiar with Adventist needs.
If you decide to hire a secular bulk mailing service provider in your area, here is a list of specifics we recommend you check on up front to make sure they are going to be able to provide your church’s unique mailing needs:
Can you use the Adventist denomination’s non-profit church status? As part of the denomination, I have access to get non-profit saturation mailing rates without requesting my own permit. (Be sure to have paperwork ready for them if needed.)
Can you create my targeted list of direct mailing names and addresses that is: saturated, presorted by zip code, carrier route and uses walk sequence, or is that something I need to provide?
Confirm they can ship your mailers to the local SCF(s) and that they can get delivered there within a short, specific window before your event.
Confirm your postage rates are the best you can get.
(If they are printing the mailers) Can you design my marketing mailers or do you have templates that include mailing area so I can have it designed according to USPS mailing regulations for non-profit flats?
(If they are not printing your mailers) Find a professional local printer who can design the shape and size of your mail piece to still guarantee your mailers are setup according to USPS regulations and that they can deliver the product on time to your bulk mailing company for processing the addresses.
Give your mailing list a final review to ensure the recipient addresses are set up correctly.
Confirm the mailhouse transported your mailing to the post office, and that they are tracking it to confirm its delivery.
How to do it yourself
If you are not going to use a bulk mailing service, you won’t be able to get the same lowest non-profit bulk postage rates, but you can still get a discount from standard first-class mail through something called Every Door Direct Mail, or EDDM for short. While this is a great option, it does come with limitations and requirements that may not work for your church’s needs.
The Biggest advantage to EDDM is you won’t need to get your permit cleared ahead of time. Mailing permits can be pricey and add another level of complexity to the standard mailing process. EDDM mail can be taken to your local post office and with the right setup, can be given to a standard postal worker at the front counter.
Here’s some basic information about what you need to know about this service:
EDDM allows you to send targeted mail to specified areas with flats at a discounted postage rate. As of February 2023, according to the USPS website, the cost per EDDM mailpiece is 18.9¢. The current USPS postage rate that you get from SermonView for non-profit, saturation mailing is 10.2¢ for jumbo cards or 11.5¢ per piece for bi-folds. (For reference, standard-sized, rectangular postcard stamps start at 48¢. Oversized postcards need letter stamps, which start at 63¢.)
EDDM is for “small” mailings. It only works if you are mailing less than 5,000 pieces. You can do more, but only if you are willing to break it up and go in over multiple days for larger quantities.
Since EDDM is for small mailings, it can go fast. They typically go out within a day of being turned in to a local facility, making them a better option for churches with little time before a meeting.
EDDM mailings have specific requirements:
They have to be a flat (min. 11 ½ inches long and 6 1/8 inches wide)
You have to have this special information in the mailing area:
Church mailings can be confusing, both for the local church as well as many of today’s print and mail shops. (We’ve even seen USPS employees struggling to keep up with all the changes.) SermonView has spent years exclusively working with local churches and building relationships with USPS professionals to better understand and define the ins and outs of mailing for Adventist churches.
SermonView stays on top of the rapidly changing USPS policies so we can continue to provide the service you know and love.
Bags or trays? Shipping to the SCF, DDU, or BMEU? Form 3624 or 8125? That’s not your problem, that’s ours. And we don’t mind doing the research needed to stay on top of the rapidly changing USPS mailing policies because that is our ministry gift to you. No matter what changes, SermonView is committed to providing you with the quality marketing, design, printing, and service you’ve come to know and love. As policies and postage rates change, we’ll keep it simple and only let you know about what actually impacts you, we’ll find the solutions for the rest.
If you are considering running a mailing in your area soon, give us a call. We would love to connect with you and see how we can help you share the message of hope and wholeness through Jesus Christ in your community.
