Speaker 0 00:00:00 Here in 2022, most churches have their services online, but in our experiences, most churches do not have what we would consider an online campus. Online campuses are taking your online services to the next level. And in today's episode, we're going to detail exactly how we think you should set yours up. We hope this conversation helps your church reach more people and grow. This is the retried podcast.
Speaker 0 00:00:36 You're listening to the retried podcast. The show dedicated to helping pastors and church leaders reach people the right way, hosted by me, Thomas Costello. And with me as always is my cohost Ian Hyatt. We're here to help your church see more visitors and grow.
Speaker 2 00:00:54 No
Speaker 0 00:01:03 Hey guys, welcome to the retried podcast episode number 89. I am your host Thomas Costello. And with me as always is my cohost
Speaker 4 00:01:11 Ian Hyatt. What's up Thomas.
Speaker 0 00:01:13 Hey, not much, man. Looking forward to talking today, we're going to be talking about how your church can create a connected online campus. Uh, I think this is something that you and I are hearing more and more because I think a combination of things like the pandemic and just an overall understanding, we need to get better at this that we need to do more than just having a place on our website that has sermons that people can watch or listen to, but actually looking at it as being like an online campus
Speaker 4 00:01:47 Where you can connect.
Speaker 0 00:01:48 Yeah, exactly. We had a conversation just a couple of weeks ago, uh, with a church that was starting a new project with us here at reach. Right. And I was really impressed with the way they were thinking about this. They were a church that was expanding and growing really quickly great church. Uh, they are just bought a great new facility. They had another campus on the other side of town and they really were thinking about their online campus as an equal third campus. Um, I don't know how I feel about that completely, you know, just to be really honest with you. Like, I, I don't know that I am ready to bite in hook line and sinker on being an equal of equal value. And I think most churches that we talked to are in the same place
Speaker 4 00:02:30 And I'm with you on that. Yeah. We
Speaker 0 00:02:31 Prefer people to come, but you know, if people are, uh, 4,000 miles away from us, um, then this seems like a pretty good solution on how you could be reaching them and discipling people and connecting with people. So today we're going to talk about how we would recommend building or at least getting started with taking your, your sermons page on your website or the place where you embed your live stream and turning it into, not just that, but an actual online campus. Uh, some differences there. Am I right?
Speaker 4 00:03:03 Yeah. There you are, right? Yeah. There are some differences between what we've seen, kind of be customary in that area.
Speaker 0 00:03:09 Yeah. Have you ever been to a church that had a, that you felt like it was like an online campus? Like, I don't know if your church's website, if you guys have like a campus that it feels like that's the way it is on your site.
Speaker 4 00:03:20 We're not quite set up that way, but of course, you know, as we've discussed, I'm a part of a large mega sized church. We, we definitely, we, we do consider that way, but we don't have it quite set up as a campus just yet.
Speaker 0 00:03:32 Right? Yeah. Yeah. And so, well, maybe they can listen to this and they can jump in on all of that. So you can coach them through how to do some of those things. So, uh, well, I can go ahead and start us off then, uh, and kind of talk through the, the first thing. I think that a, an online campus, uh, it has to start with getting serious about what you're doing on your website. Um, there really is no other way to do this. And we we've been in this industry for a while. We were here in the middle of the pandemic we saw when everybody went from in-person to online. Uh, and we like, I, we just had a conversation as a team today talking about how there is not one perfect solution when it comes to how, like a ready-made solution for an online ministry campus that just doesn't exist right now.
Speaker 0 00:04:19 So the only option you really have is today is to do something with your website and getting your website up to date and ready to go and building out an online campus on your own website. So there are so many options out there from, uh, the church online platform, right out of life, church, not TV there in Oklahoma. Uh, there are, uh, solutions like restream and there's many, many solutions for streaming services. And some of those are better than others. They have great tools and functionality built in, but there is always this limitation that you're not on your platform instead you're on somebody else's platform you're right. Their platform, and you're not really building your audience, you're building their audience and a lot of, so, yeah, so we hats off to all those companies. They're doing a great job doing really cool things there, but I think to build a true online campus, you need to get your website ready and make it work. So I don't know, maybe you have some ideas on how churches do that.
Speaker 4 00:05:18 Well, yeah, I do. And, but before then, I would also say, you know, cause the other day I had a conversation with another pastor, he said, yeah, we have an online campus. And I said, oh, okay. Uh, let me take a look at it. And he said, yo, it's on Facebook. And so that again does not quite count. Now we recommend Facebook live for all for it. Uh, churches really started using that, especially when the pandemic hit and all that, it's very effective. You will catch a certain segment of people there, but not only would you not catch everyone there and is that different than having it dedicated on your website, you're limited as to what you can do there. Um, so I think in that, that's a good segue to what you just said too, is, is what you need to do on your website is having a landing page for this, have a landing page for your online campus. So it, it, it can't just be, um, on like your sermon archive and then where you plug in your live streaming, it actually needs at least its own page. And that's just because there's a lot that you, that you can do on your website when it's, when you're online campuses on its own page opens up a door to do a lot of different things on there, but it definitely needs its own landing page.
Speaker 0 00:06:31 I think the way I would think about it is that we are trying to pull a lot of the in-person experience online. And so how can we do that? So for instance, so it's more than just your video embedded on a page. It has to be more than that. It's how do we pull conversation in the church onto the website? How do we, uh, have connection cards that people fill out in person? How do we pull that onto the website? Um, how do we do announcements, uh, that we give in person, how do we pull that onto the website or the bulletin
Speaker 4 00:07:01 That people
Speaker 0 00:07:02 Or prayer or any of those things, all these things that you could get in person, there are albeit maybe not as easy of a solution, but there are ways to do something like that online right now. And I think that's only going to grow as, you know, things get into the metaverse and that kind of stuff and all the things happening there. That's only going to continue to grow, but I think pulling all that onto your website. So you need to have a website, it needs to be a specific landing page. It's not going to be just a place where you embed your video, but it's a place where people will find sermon notes and we'll talk some more about other options and things in this conversation here, but, um, they'll have connection cards and ways to get prayer and ways to interact. And it's all going to be on here on this one page and it has to be on your website because you know, there's just a certain, like you mentioned Facebook before.
Speaker 4 00:07:54 Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:07:55 Facebook can do all of these things. Like you, you can have conversations on there. You can say hi, you can do all that stuff that you want to do,
Speaker 4 00:08:04 Reply to comments, all that. Yep. But
Speaker 0 00:08:06 You don't control it. Your reach is limited because they are actively trying to push promoted content. So I would recommend that you don't make your bed there because it's going to come back. You're going to have to pay for it at some point. Like, so a lot of people that we work with, and I know even for us as a reach, right, we invested a lot in building our Facebook page, getting lots of followers on there only to watch our, our reach go down and down and down because they want us to pay, to be able to reach people on Facebook. And so we don't recommend that you do those kinds of things, but your website has to be that home-based there. So,
Speaker 4 00:08:41 Correct. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:08:42 Why don't you get number two?
Speaker 4 00:08:43 Good transition. If you're taking this seriously and you're getting an online, you know, campus established, you need an online campus pastor. Um, so you do, and I mean, this doesn't necessarily have to be someone full time. It can be depending upon how far you take things, but you do need a face there. You Dean do need someone that can follow up. If, if we're talking about different ways for people to fill out connection cards, to submit prayer requests, to give, to respond, you know, all these different things, we're going to get into more of those and dig a little deeper with that, but someone's going to have to follow up. Someone's going to have to be a point person there. Even if that person's not the one doing the preaching, um, there's going to need to be a real person that interacts and follows up and leads people further into the life of whatever their next step would be at your church.
Speaker 0 00:09:36 Yeah. Do you guys have an online pastor at your church?
Speaker 4 00:09:39 Uh, we do have someone that yes. Is an online pastor.
Speaker 0 00:09:42 Yeah, I think for most of our audience, um, we, we don't at our church. We have people that, that are involved in online ministry, but we don't have someone with that title of online pastor. Um, you know, I think that for most of our audience, uh, this might be foreign because you hear the word pastor and you think that it probably means money and, and, you know, kind of putting them on a level place with other it's like, this is an important place where ministry happens. I mean, like it or not people, uh, whether you do this or not, people are making life-changing decisions based on relationships that they have online. And we have an opportunity to pastor people, uh, right there on your website or in the online experience. So this online pastor is someone who is kind of the face of the online ministry.
Speaker 0 00:10:30 They're probably the one that is able to reach out and, and give things like prayer and doing those kinds of things for people as they come now, doesn't mean that you necessarily have to be a pastor. Uh, it could be a online ministry coordinator or online doesn't necessarily have to have like all of the schooling and licensing and get a, get, go to seminary to be an online pastor. We're not advocating for that. We're just saying you probably want someone that is a leader in your church to be a champion for your online service and doing, doing an online campus there. So yeah. Be thinking about who that is at your church. I think that's an important thing and pick that person and give them free reign. You probably want to have someone who understands both the digital, but there are real spiritual needs. They're going to be meeting. These are real people that have real souls and real problems and
Speaker 4 00:11:18 The questions about God and how to get close to them. So they do need to be able to be prepared to answer those things, for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:11:25 Well, they might not be there in person. They are the people you're administering to have real children that have real issues. And they're in real marriages that are,
Speaker 4 00:11:32 They're not digital people and they're not
Speaker 0 00:11:34 Just digital. People will say
Speaker 4 00:11:36 That's good. That's good.
Speaker 0 00:11:38 All right. Third thing is we need to focus on the online service experience. I think this is something that a lot of churches already took this leap. I think we saw this, like we had a, a blog post that we did called the ultimate guide to live streaming your church services. You can find it, uh, right on our site. And if you search for live streaming church or something like that, we usually come up number one on Google. And we went from seeing a couple of clicks a day on this post to in March of 2020. We like instantly had like 500 hits a day on this post because we saw that every single church was saying, oh my goodness, we were caught and we need to get this done. Right. And so I think a lot of churches invested in this area, what this means is you probably want to give, uh, as much, or maybe not as much, but a lot of attention to what the online experience is like and treat it similarly to how you treat an in-person experience, right?
Speaker 0 00:12:34 So you, you invest so much in your live sound system and everything, you know, your sound boards that are there and all of that, you invest a lot in those areas. You probably need to make some investment in the right kinds of cameras, the right kinds of switchers and the things that you need to pull off an online service there. Um, so microphones might be different. Lighting might be different. You know, an online lighting like for a video is different from lighting for in-person type event. So now all that to say, it doesn't have to be expensive. Um, we're not talking about it. I mean, you can get what you, you get what you put into it. But I would say that there are diminishing returns. So, um, I think for a normal, like for a average size church, maybe a hundred, 150 people, you could put in a few thousand dollars probably to making the video quality and the overall experience great there and get some really good results. Now, if you're a mega church, you can spend tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to, to pull that off. But I think for a few thousand dollars, you can pull something off with a decent DSLR camera that kind of a lapel microphone getting some lighting to help you a little bit. It doesn't have to cost you tens of thousands of dollars there. So I think that's an important part of it too.
Speaker 4 00:13:47 That's good. That's good. Well, I'll tackle the next one. I'm nothing more to add there. Um, inclusive language and experiences important. Now, what does that mean? So just means when you're preaching as a pastor, your online audience is different than your in-person audience. So you need to address your online audience. That doesn't mean you have to completely alter your message or anything, but you need to understand that you have people online listening as well. So addressing them, uh, you know, and, and acknowledging them also keeps them focused and engaged online because it is, uh, maybe often easier for people to be less engaged or, or start nodding off or paying less attention when, when they're online. So you do want to address them. Yeah, absolutely. So, so yeah, that's basically a big part of it is that, you know, and, and when it comes to things like your, you know, prayer response, tithing, um, giving those same types of, uh, you know, uh, updates for upcoming things, those people need to be addressed online to, uh, you know, cause if they're, if you are really creating an online campus, then this, they need to be treated as almost like their in-person meaning the same, they need to have similar opportunities.
Speaker 4 00:15:03 And so engaging them in an inclusive way and speaking the language that relates to them as important.
Speaker 0 00:15:09 Yeah. I just think that so often, um, people will, when we're, when we're pastoring, you remember the people that are right in front of you and you forget that in a lot of cases. I think even for, for most churches at this point, if you'd like add up all of the total online views that happen, maybe not just on Sunday morning, but everything that happens over the next year on YouTube or wherever you're putting it, you might have a hundred people that you're preaching to on Sunday, but 300 people might be watching this at a later time on YouTube or the live stream. And so if your, your focus has all what's, what's going on with the people in the room, I think you miss a really big opportunity. So things like, you know, having a side conversation with someone in the audience there, or, you know, calling out someone in the church or something that isn't on camera view, I think you seem to remember these kinds of things, but again, your impact very well might be larger online than it is. In-person in 2022. Yeah.
Speaker 4 00:16:07 We have thousands of not to interrupt. We have thousands of people that watch our pastor's messages online, and we broadcast in to eight different correctional facilities on a Sunday. So to prisoners that that need hope and, and our pastor will often pause and directly address those people. And everyone in person understands why he's doing it too. And it doesn't have to be this awkward thing. It could be very natural, but it makes sense to do. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:16:36 I think people are smarter than we give them credit for a lot of times that they can understand it. I think if you should probably spend some time explaining it and say, Hey, you ever wonder why, you know, we take the time to address people on the camera here. Well, just because we have twice the reach online as we do right here on Sunday mornings. And so when you talk about that and, you know, making sure people understand it's for the gospel, it can really make a big difference. So yeah, I think that that's a good thing watching your language and making sure I'm always careful with the term inclusive and what we necessarily mean by that. But in this case, we mean, including both online and in-person people is what we're talking about here. So,
Speaker 4 00:17:13 All right,
Speaker 0 00:17:14 Next one is a live chat. I think live chat is going to be an important part of any online campus, giving people a opportunity to make conversation, not just one way, you know, pastor talking to you or worship team performing for you, but giving people the opportunity to have interaction and have live chat on there. I think that makes a huge difference and just think about it this way, that so much of the church experience happens, not in the one hour that we're sitting there in the pews, you know, listening to the sermon, engaging in worship, but it is that time after service, when you're talking with someone and following up on their prayer requests needs or seeing what they've been up to in their week or giving hugs in the foyer and doing all of those kinds of things and live chat well, to me, isn't the same.
Speaker 0 00:18:07 It's not the same as that, but I think it is as close as we have right now in the digital world to building that kind of community, that kind of interaction. I think the younger you are, the more comfortable you are with this. I think that'll be something that, um, especially our gen Z gen Z ears and your church, maybe millennials in your church, they'll be more likely to do this than maybe boomers will be. But I think having live chat built into there is really important. Now this is something that the church online platform does, but the problem again, is that it's on their platform, not on something that you have there for your own church. So I think embedding something like that into the site, I think is really important and that you need to have people there actually Manning it, uh, during service times and maybe yeah, for half an hour before and half an hour after. So people can be there and engage and have conversations with people. So, yeah, just building connection. It's really important.
Speaker 4 00:19:03 One thing I'll add is I think this might be one area where there's actually an advantage online compared to in-person. And, and what I mean by that is that when a pastor's giving a message in person, he can't stop in the middle of his message and address someone's question about what he just said. Or if someone wants to give someone may want to give their life to the Lord after hearing something in the middle of a message and not just at the end. Um, so, you know, if you have someone that's Manning this, they're getting people as they're impacted throughout the service and the message, and they can answer them real time often. That's, there's just more opportunities to minister to someone if it's live there. So, yeah, so again, we've said repeatedly, we prefer it were in person. People were old school like that, I guess. Uh, but I think this might be an advantage where, you know, your online campus can kinda, um, yeah, just have a little bit more edge over in person in one way.
Speaker 0 00:20:01 Yeah. I'm with you. I mean, I I'm for reaching as many people with the gospel and teaching them to be like, Jesus. Um, I I'll do anything to make that happen. Our saying here at the company is anything short of sin to reach people with the gospel, right? So we are all about that. And, uh, you know, well, it may not be the best for us. That's not to say I would fully anticipate that 15 years from now. We'll have a lot of this stuff figured out and there will be really, life-changing great. Maybe even equal experiences that are happening online. I just don't think we're quite there yet, but this is the step that we're starting to take with this. So, um, I will say too, when it comes to chat, I think there are tools out there that allow you to do general chat and then break out chat rooms. And that's important. I think if someone is in the middle of the message saying, Hey, I want to know more about giving my life over to Jesus. You know, you and everybody else in the chat is going to be quiet and wait for the pastor to start writing on that. And so you want to be able to pull them aside and maybe talk privately with them and not dominate the whole chat. So find a tool that will help you do some of those kinds of things. That'll be good. Okay,
Speaker 4 00:21:09 Good. Next one is you want to make sure with your online campus, you establish ministry connection. And what do we mean by this is that you really just it's about relationship here as well. Um, so it's, it's about connecting people, building relationships. And I know at first, uh, notion someone could be thinking, well, we really just can't do that the same way. Well, it is different. But remember, like you said earlier, these people have real they're real. When we joked and said, they're not digital people, they're real people. Uh, they are looking for relationship, uh, albeit it might be a different entry point into that, but these people have real kids. You need to engage in them, help them connect, uh, figure out ways to maybe even build relationship after the service is online. You know, uh, make sure you communicate on ramps for them. Maybe, maybe they, maybe they're online, uh, people on your own land campus and don't come in person, but they might be interested in your next kid's event for their kids, you know, in person. So remember there are people to engage with and build relationship when the connect with
Speaker 0 00:22:12 Yeah. The two primary ways I see this happening. Um, the first one is with whatever your in-person assimilation processes. Yeah. I think you need to think about that for online. So maybe you do a variation of Rick Warren's class, uh, system that he does where you do class 1 0 1 and 2 0 1 and all those things, right. Maybe you do a, um, a starting point like the Andy Stanley does, maybe you do a growth track, like a lot of arc churches, but how do you find a way to pull your membership process if we're call it that, how do you pull that online and give online people the same kind of experience? It isn't really that hard. You can do these through zoom classes. You can do prerecorded ones. There's lots of ways to pull that off. So I think thinking about that, that kind of ministry connection.
Speaker 0 00:23:00 And then the last one I think is a good segue to the last point is building, um, giving people an opportunity to serve, uh, if they are just online members, right? If someone is only coming online, what does, like, if we ask people in person, if someone's been at our church for two years in person, you better believe they've been asked to contribute and be a part of something, uh, some kind of active service there at the church. So the same thing should be happening for online people. And I think a great opportunity is inviting them into the online campus team. That's the last one here. So building an online campus team, we talked about before about having an online campus pastor, um, as this grows, one person won't be able to do it. And one person isn't the right way to do it. Like every ministry, it should be done as a team.
Speaker 0 00:23:49 And so having people around that online campus, pastor there to kind of help with the work of the ministry, having more people chat. Here's one thing I've learned about chat is that everybody's afraid to use it until everybody is using it. So if you have an online chat, uh, it makes sense to have a team of a good size, one like 10 different people that you kind of have, have ping them and said, Hey, I need you to get the chat rolling today. Let's kinda just start conversations. Let's chime in with emojis when something great is said or whatever it is, you kind of get the chat rolling on things, and then other people will feel more comfortable to chime in. So that's a great way. Having more people there to pray, help people get connected, but building a team around this I think is really going to be important for churches.
Speaker 4 00:24:36 That's good stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:24:38 Awesome. Anything to add as we wrap up here?
Speaker 4 00:24:40 No, no, I think just, uh, this can be, I would say this can be done more easily than probably the maybe average pastor a ministry leader thinks, again, this, this can be added. It doesn't have to be high cost. Um, you know, there will be some costs associated to do it. Right. But I think, you know, I would just encourage that pastor ministry that are out there, Hey, you could do this. And it's a good thing to do. You're going to engage more people for the gospel.
Speaker 0 00:25:05 Yeah. I, I would say it's not for every church. I mean, I think that not every church necessarily needs to do this because we are reaching such a broader audience when we're able to do these kinds of things. And so I think that my encouragement is to count the cost and I don't necessarily mean financial. I mean, to pull this all off, you you'll probably need a minimum of a couple of thousand dollars. If you don't already have video equipment and lighting and those kinds of things, if you have all of that, it's mostly just time, but that's what you need to count the cost on is that it does take resources and time and staff hours and these kinds of things to pull this off and to do it well. Now we just got done saying that most churches out there have the potential to reach more people online than they do on Sunday mornings.
Speaker 0 00:25:50 They can get more views on a YouTube channel or on an online campus here than they have people in the seats there because it's such a broad audience. Your reach is so much further when you do it online. So I think it is something every church should consider. Uh, and if it's something that you have counted the cost and you feel like you can do, uh, we're all for it. We think it's a good idea. I hope this guide has been helpful for you today. Uh, if it has been helpful, you could let us know in the comments, you can leave us a review, a rating, like subscribe, do all those great things that helps us to get the podcast out to more people. Uh, thank you guys so much for being a part of our retried family, and we hope to catch you next week. Thanks for listening to the reach right podcast. We hope this episode will help you reach people the right way, looking for more resources for your church. Check us out
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Speaker 2 00:26:59 I'm ready to get food.
