 Okay. Good morning everyone and welcome to BC 314, our course on media and technology in ministry. Thank you for joining the class today. Just like to request somebody to pray with us and then we will get started. Somebody could pray with us please. We are heavenly Father, I come to you under the name of Jesus. Thank you for this day. Thank you for the class that you have given us Lord as we learn about media and technology Jesus. God I pray that you will help us to understand the things and to apply it in our ministry to know the positives and negatives and to apply it in the right way where it cannot edify your people Jesus. Build us up in this skill so that we can shine right before the kingdom. We give thanks to you for this life and for the valuable teachings that he is giving us and thank you for all my classmates. Give us a good welfare connection for the session. We give you all the glory and honor in Jesus name and faith. Amen. Thank you. Alright so let's pick up from where we paused last week. Share my screen, share the PDF and so last week we spent some time talking about websites and a little bit about emails. Just quickly run through it. So we said we need you know as we think about digital engagement that's relating to people online, we need to have a strategy and how we are going to reach the people, people inside the church, people outside the church, people who are the congregation, people are the crowd, try to understand them and reach them and then also evaluate progress how we can you know do how we do things and so on. So and there are a lot of examples, numerous people can share examples of how they have effectively used digital engagement to serve people, there are lots and lots of examples and yeah. So let me start talking about websites. So having a website is quite important these days. People expect a church or a ministry to have a website and that's where they will go to you know get information about the church and so I think my personal thought is it is the moment you know your ministry has started, it's good to have at least a basic website and let the website grow over time and so some thoughts we had shared, you can use what is known as a content management system, there are lots of different content management systems available, some are very simple to use, some have lots more features and so on. You can get some people to help you, choose a nice domain name. These days registering a domain name is very easy, you know it just takes a little amount of money, small money, you can get a nice domain name, use something that people will remember. So you use a hosting service provider, they will register your name and you know there's again many many hosting providers depending which part of the world you are in, you'll find something that's cheap and easy. Build a nice website, have some you know some logical structure, we call it information architecture, have a logical structure to your website and you know what people will be looking for, that information should be available, make it very pleasant, meaningful and you know some of the things that you can do is collect information, those are visiting your website and so on, connect your website to social media accounts, optimize your website for search engines when people search they'll find you and then keep in mind that actually you know how search engines are working these days are changing, it's always changing and now even more because of the introduction of artificial intelligence and related technologies, the way these search engines are working are changing. Before I'll just give you an idea of how it's changing. Before search engines used to look for you know words, phrases but now the search engines have become more intelligent, they actually do what is known as sentiment analysis and they actually not only read words and phrases that are being used in the website, they in some way understand the meaning of what's being said, you know so search engines are changing how they are working with content that's being put on the website so the meaning they're looking at the sentiments that are being expressed so on so forth so it's going beyond what I have written here it's changing and so we also need to keep our websites in a similar way make it you know more relevant to these engines and the other things you know use URLs that are search engines and friendlies the phrases that people search for you should have it in your URL in your content add your website to google business it's free you can do it link back to your website from other places you know if you know of other people or other places where you post the content to link back to your website and there are a lot of you know places that you can mention your website and link back to it and then submit your website to google search console it's also free just log in there just submit your URL the URL that you own you can submit and that the search google search what we call the crawlers they crawl through your website rank your pages and make it visible to other people keep your website content updated don't you know old content you remove keep it updated also use URLs that are easy to remember like apcw or this last service if you can always remember that and so and we also shared last week a little bit about our websites how it's been optimized and we've taken you know optimize our websites for certain phrases for which we want to rank very highly and on the world right so uh let's say emails I figured did we come with emails last week or we did we did a little emails okay so I think we just stop should we stop here all right let's pick up from here emails are an important way to keep in touch with people right and you can keep people informed sending them emails now of course the first step is to collect email addresses so you if you have a subscription form a small form where they get into the email and they subscribe you can add them to a list I'll show you the list we use um or so you can give you know if they want to subscribe to your weekly emails we send out a weekly email about our sermon they do that our first time visitors we have different forms different places contact points where people can give their mobile number email address and so on so we have several of these on our website first time their first time visitor we send them here they can enter their details if they want to volunteer again they enter their details so these are all different touch points where we are collecting people's contact information and it gets added to our email list so we send emails and emails regularly but don't send too many don't send email every day you know so our rule is two plus one that means every week maximum you send two emails plus one is an extra one which it's like on some special cases we will send an extra email right so example if there's a funeral or something or change in location or something like that then that's the plus one the additional one that we send otherwise these our emails are just maximum two emails to our community in a nowadays you can a lot of graphics that can be used along with the email keep it edit free keep your emails mobile friendly because a lot of people actually read their email on their mobile devices and use meaningful subject lines and we get them get their attention and also you can target your email like who you want to send it to you know if it's from a men's conference send it to the men if it's a ladies conference send it to the ladies etc things like that and you know and and look for optimal days like somewhere in the middle of the week is good because beginning of the week everybody's very visiting end of the week they're getting ready to come back to service and worship so somewhere in the middle of the week is a good point and then give people an option to unsubscribe they don't want to receive it they should be free to opt out of that so we always include that now use so use what we refer to as a list manager where so that means when you're sending an email you don't know you're not manually doing this but you have a software that manages your lists and you can send it from there just quickly show it to you so again this is an open source software php list let me just take a moment to share that with you now i got to just a minute let me just share my screen i'll just quickly show you the what i'm what i'm talking about so we use we use what we refer to as php list so this is our php list now this is where we manage our email from where we send out an email so it's just it's an open source software so you can have subscribers i mean these are people so when they subscribe through our website they get added in directly they get added into this mail list manager so let's say right now there are 37,477 people or email IDs right now if they are blacklisted that means they have opted out or their email bounced back you know maybe it's a bad email whatever so then out of that sorry this number has been blacklisted means we won't send it to them they either unsubscribe it or whatever you know so emails won't go to them so let's say about 33,000 effectively are there and then we actually can create lists that means you can put them in categories so for example and this is this is an example here we have you know by locations ministers in india and put two lists here but internal outreach outreach churches these people are in hindi ministers worldwide youth bible college etc so these are categories and let me see here so when people sign up on a website they go into these groups these are we used to have clean programs so those responses there but i think we have let me see here i'm looking for the sunday sermon we have a list called sunday sermon which so these are all first time visitors by year so these are people who come here and publication let me just look for sunday sermons so weekly sermon list it's about 14,000 people on in this particular list so basically when we set you know every week sunday or monday of every week we'll send an email to this particular list these are people who will receive that email and and you can see what happens when you send an email so it's called a campaign so we'll see some of the campaigns that are just over so this part of the spoken word was sent out and was sent out there no this statistics part is right now not working we've got a problem with our latest version but usually what'll happen is when somebody opens it up we'll get a correct count here so this one is not working so we're not seeing the correct statistics we have some problem with it but the email was sent out to about 14,000 people and it took about 11 hours 10 10 minutes to spool this particular email to all these people and we normally when if this part is working we'll be able to see you know how many actually read what comes back etc so basically when we set the email up here we can you know just click a button and it'll go to all the lists and we can combine many lists so the email can be sent to more than one person so this is our standard format of the email so we give a certain title we have a standard format so people are sending it they know what to do this is the content of that it's again following a standard format they enter these details the footer is standard so they this and then they send it we can select lots of lists and send it so this is more like an automated way for us to send email so just click the button and it sends it out to 14,000 people now when there is a different kind of announcement then we combine these lists so we can send it you want to send it to everybody all the you know all the 37,000 whatever that come for us number of people we can send it so we can you know send the message send the list the email to everybody on our list right so that's the advantage of using a list php list you can you know you can select what you want and use it okay let me let's go back to the pdf all right I clicked the wrong thing all right so that was our email list manager where you know we through which we send out send out emails now initially maybe when you have 50 email IDs or a hundred email IDs it's easy it's okay to do it manually that you know you put it in groups of 10 or 20 or and keep sending it but when it's beyond that it gets a little cumbersome to do it manually so you need an email list manager like this to send now of course um internally when we are you know we communicate a lot with all our staff and all our people internally lots of emails come people from the church keep sending emails so now there's a lot of other personal email communications that happen that is also very useful the only point is that sometimes it gets too much so you know right now I personally personally I'm not I I'm not able to keep up with all emails that come to me personally it says too many every day um so we have other people handling a lot of the emails so for the church we have three or four people who handle different email IDs so when emails are sent it goes through other individuals and they are part of our communications team so somebody has those emails that are for publications that are for book requests that are for they are general contact email they come in for prayer for testimony those kinds of things our bible college and bible college support so there are different people handling those different emails so we have created different different different email IDs and different people handling those emails but the emails that come directly to me is also a lot and it's very difficult to keep up with all of those emails so I have to be you know I have to keep time to try and read them and try to respond to some some of them um another important part these days is text messaging so we talked a little bit about emails um broadcast communications um another part is text messaging sms and messaging through messaging apps there used to be a time when sms was a big deal um when we used to send a lot of sms's and all of that but then we all had a lot of uh government at least in India a lot of government regulations came in and we could not send short sms's freely to people uh because they they required that people have to subscribe and all of those kinds of things and so we moved from sending sms's to whatsapp messages um so uh and I just you know so basically a large number of people use whatsapp and we use that and of course there are other you know messaging apps as well that people use but we do a lot of our message messaging through whatsapp so we uh that keep these messages simple you can use graphics and videos of course you know people can opt in and opt out and we use uh bulk messaging um service provider we used to use sms service providers and we stopped doing that because of restrictions now we use uh bulk messaging on whatsapp so we can broadcast messages to people so remember we collect their email id and their passwords uh not passwords email id and their mobile numbers and similar the mobile numbers go go to uh a list mobile number list again we segment them over there that means um if they are uh regular members if they are visitors if they are you know different uh leaders etc etc so we have different um mobile number lists so we can send broadcast messages to targeted groups so usually it's our own people touch community that we send messages just to keep them informed you know about things example location or uh an event that's coming up for which we want them to register we send them messages on whatsapp so that's a good thing and again we follow the same rule a maximum two uh messages a week uh but not more only if it's necessary we don't send messages all the time but when there's a need we can send a whatsapp message but maximum two messages don't send more than two others there in people who feel that we are intruding into their time and space so we keep limit that to say so we use that but use it carefully use it meaningfully so just to give one example from back then like we're sending an announcement about about a song release in hindi this is how it goes a little graphic some text link to the youtube and so um the advantages of using uh multi-day messaging is you know it's very easy people a lot of people will check emails they may not or they may check at some other time but on their phones people check immediately or quite frequently so it's it's it's highly likely that they're going to see it um just follow some good practices when sending uh messages if you're using static images don't make them too big uh keep the dimensions that are optimal typical these are the typical nine and nine to sixteen ratio so you kind of fit one of these in uh use jpeg file format um don't use too many colors and don't add too much text keep it nice and simple and easy similarly if you're doing video if you're sending a video or a link to a video remember to make sure it's not too big keep the video short don't you know send a one-hour sermon people that they can go watch on youtube uh again these are optimal ratio for your video viewing right so just follow good practices when you're doing that another area now just changing another area where you can be used we can engage with people digitally is through virtual meetings so this is very good and especially we i mean a lot of us got used to this now as we went through the pandemic where we can connect with people online through video conferencing conferencing tools problems or slack or who will meet a lot of other conferencing tools are available and it's nice that you know we can connect with people so right now for example this class is on google meet and others are connected to the class it's a good thing that they can at least participate in the class uh and share so sometimes i may meet when when people want to meet with me one on one and we may just do a you know a zoom meet especially if you're somewhere far away then it makes it convenient saves a lot of time so i just get you a call and we meet just to be shared and so on so whether it's meeting with one person or meeting with a group of people makes you use of these video conferencing tools aren't a good thing uh we also when we do our weekend schools we make our weekend schools available on zoom so people far away can actually participate in the weekend school even if they can't come in person they can at least share in a fair amount of what's being taught and participate in it so webinars are a good thing to do just some general guidelines here when we are you know using video conferencing make sure lighting is good um and you know if it's a private meeting keep it private don't make it public use passcodes for people to connect uh people allow other people to share screen uh and when you're not speaking you might think all of us are kind of familiar with these good practices in video conferencing let's change a few more thoughts here now the advantage of digital engagement is that we can reach globally you know we can we can be in one part of the world and we can serve people all over the world and one of those ways is to use content distribution platforms so now we have platforms through which we can distribute content whether it's in the digital format so whether it's ebooks podcasts and videos and many of us are familiar with videos youtube and other channels but you know we're just mentioning that so let's talk about ebooks that means books that are in digital format whether they are in pdf format or with an e-pub or a mobile format different formats are there most common of course for us for people are the pdf format and our books and anyone can use these but i'm just mentioning that our books are distributed on all of these platforms i think we i don't know the exact number but i think it's somewhere like 30 or 34 platforms through which our books are distributed globally so it's a nice thing that we are here in Bangalore but we can distribute those pdf not only through our website but through so many of these distribution channels so people sitting anywhere in the world whatever they are comfortable about whether it's kindle or iBooks or google books or bands and noble or whatever google play books whatever they are comfortable they will find the other books and they'll be able to read it so you can actually distribute your digital content your books on so many of these this is a few of these channels and there are many more that you could make your books available and becomes available globally and people can find it and read it similarly for audio if you want to do podcasts you can do this now google podcasts this is then they're kind of taking it down and they're now moving integrating it with youtube music but you know whatever's there can just be moved so you know the audio that conversations audio files that you want to release you can release it through online channels right so google podcasts or youtube music apple podcasts what you find so many so many channels are there and beef set again are some and audios are distributed on all of these channels again in addition to our website so people have access to it so whatever they are comfortable with they can listen to the podcast now the fact is all of these spaces are crowded meaning there are literally hundreds of thousands probably millions of people releasing digital content whether it's books or audio or video literally millions are releasing content so it's important that these should be searchable people should find that i mentioned that a little later on all of these distribution channels whether you're distributing your pbs or you're distributing your audio files or you're distributing videos they should be searchable and and and we will talk about how we know how these algorithms actually present your content to people who are looking for similar content right so we'll talk about that a little later but now just understand that we have all of these channels are accessible to people and you can release your content on this whether it's your church sermons or your own podcasts or the books that you write and we are also familiar with the distribution channels for videos youtube is the biggest that we're all familiar with a huge huge audience Bimeo is also good it's almost on in terms of features it's pretty almost compatible to youtube and then of course you know we have other places that Facebook and Instagram where you can share your videos that that you do a lot of other channels of course right so we are familiar with these so the point is that you know um we today in in digital engagement we've got numerous options you can create content digital content the sermon can be in digital format and you can push it out you can distribute it to lots and lots of people on through these digital platforms and so many of them are available for free okay the last thing is a church app now at the moment we've taken down our apc church app because we we were using a service provider they got bought over and a lot of transition happened we are rebuilding our apc church app but the church app is going to become a very important part of what we do that we're going to be moving a lot of our engagement from the traditional website to the app because we you know people are getting more and more comfortable using apps on their phone and you're doing a lot of things through an app that's running on their phone so i won't be able to show you about our church app right now but this is something of focus a lot of focus and effort and what we're doing so you can build a nice app for your church and there are platforms available or you can get people to build it for you and engage through the church app so these are some ideas for digital engagement what we've talked about is yeah you can use websites emails messaging multimedia messaging services you can use a distribution of digital content through in different formats pdfs audio video distributed you can also use an app as another form of engagement right any questions on this before we go to our next chapter which i think is on social sorry i'm going to share with you some guidelines for graphics and videos and then we get into social media any questions so far any thoughts everybody's with me so far okay so i'm just giving you an exposure to various things you're not basically getting into all the technical details but these are options and and you can think about you know if you create two ways to do a podcast or use any of these other channels and it's it's a wonderful way to reach people let me know just talk a little bit about some some practices that we try to follow for our graphics and videos so that's lesson number 12 just some guidelines right and i've also given you some links there that you can go online to to you know to learn about how to how to use these effectively now remember it's it's not enough just to produce something it's got to be good it's got to be done well for people to make use of it and to engage with the content so that's why we have guidelines for graphics and videos so thinking about generally from any form of media try to you know stay current with the what's happening the the way it's being done today the style the the look the feel how people are doing so we need to stay current with the latest trends in terms of how things are being done without compromising right the word and how we are what we are communicating so it's a communication process when you're using a graphic so video you're actually communicating to people so be clear about the message you want to convey and to whom you are speaking our fonts using simple readable fonts keep the fonts very simple don't you know use fancy things if you don't understand keep color choices that relevant sensitive and and you don't overcrowded with colors don't put all kinds of colors in it because people are paying attention to all these things they're seeing all this so you know it's not just a random mix of colors there has to be a liberal use of space don't overcrowd your material video and and understand visual hierarchy that means you know when somebody sees something their eyes will go first to what's biggest right the heaviest and then they will begin to read the smaller smaller things so what is stated in the heaviest must be impactful right so for example if you're looking at the speed here you see that this is big right so you're going to read this first what is a general guidelines using media so that's what will you read first then after that you start reading the smaller points so the heaviest should be the most important when you're saying something then first down right um graphic design there are lots and lots of different software packages that are available we use Adobe Creative Cloud the entire suite of things our team uses it there are also free applications today can go on and so on and a lot of these also do AI generated images which are interesting that we can tap into if appropriate some guidelines when you're working with graphics you know keep the style keep it contemporary keep it relevant by staying true to the word be careful of the images that you use because you're a church or a ministry images must be cleaned it must not be suggested questionable inappropriate violent indecent or provocative right so be very careful be thoughtful about the images that you're using because we are a church or a ministry the font and style it must be clear and legible don't use things that will strain the eye they can't read but just you know what's on it there has to be uniformity so try to keep things uniform across all expressions whether it's graphics and video or other formats keep the font uniform so people see you know what we call as a brand or a certain way in which this organization is communicating so that consistency is important and then also wherever possible use it use faces of pictures that are relatable to the audience right so wherever possible i'm not saying it's always possible wherever possible the faces that you show should be relevant relatable to your targeting of your primary audience similarly when you're creating videos be careful about the images videos and songs don't put anything that's inappropriate because people are going to ask hey how come you use this kind of an image or video so you have to think about it very carefully and you know don't use if you're in doubt check with the pastor say hey is it okay is not okay so on and and if you're using people from the congregation show them a good light and don't don't show bad things and all that because you know it's it's being public you don't want to do something that's not appropriate and be careful don't show you know things that could be violent or could put people at risk like children doing jumps or things that they know be careful on that sometimes unknowingly people include those things in their videos that they're doing and then there's a reaction from people uh of course you can be noticed that keep your video short and depending on the platform in which it's being released you make subtitles available and nowadays a lot of these are automatically generated by the platform uh use transcripts so you know again this is a nice thing these days all of this is automatically generated so in our sermons on our website they just choose the transcript option there's automatically vimeo generates a transcript youtube generates a transcript so that that's very useful uh where you're using audio voices keep the voices clear uh it should be exciting uh the voice re re-trades the message that is coming across through the graphics and through the video and again when you're using graphics and video use consistent fonts and also we standardize a lot of things for instance um when we mention date time venue we we we use a standard format like so we use short forms like month for the day of the week uh we follow uh 12 or 2 p.m so it's easy for people to understand we don't use the 24 hour format and then the way we put the month day month time in here you know it's it's something that uh we we follow a standard format and we keep it international so we don't use Indian format or American format or because the dates are all a different format so we intensely put day like Tuesday January 23rd so Tuesday January 23rd you know uh the year right so then because people can be looking at it from any part of the world so it should be clear it shouldn't be any confusion oh is that date an Indian format is that day and you know uh what what format so to use an international format which if it's clear to anybody from any part of the world uh it makes it easy so we should be mindful of this because a lot of busy content is available to everybody right and uh we make sure that the venue where the event is happening is stated very clearly we can give them a google map link and so on and where are possible use faces of people are eligible to the audience and be sensitive you know if it's pictures of people from the church take consent especially when it's children or teenagers take consent we're excited there are a lot of places where you can get free free graphics with your responsibility so I just listed given a big list of things where you can download some maybe licensed but many of them are free and you can get graphics and videos from these websites if you would like to use them the last point which I had mentioned earlier is that whenever you're creating graphics and videos remember it's like a huge ocean of content that's out there in the digital world so it's important that what you put out is searchable and it is presented to the people who would be looking for those kinds of content so how do we make that happen here's some simple things that we can do first of all use type what titles do you use for the videos because the search engines start here they look at your title so the title should be relevant it should be something that people would search for and a use of course title should accurately represent the content you can't put some random put different content no should represent what it is but it should be searchable and then you also use relevant hashtags now which tell basically saying this is what this content is about right so use relevant hashtags again very important is the description so there is a description section to a lot of these videos and images what you put there is going to help search engines present the content to people who are interested right so even if you're using images how can your images be you know ranked high so one is use high quality customize the file name the text on the image and the file name are important so you use something that that would be you know searchable use give it and don't tell you know just what image one dot jpg no use a file name that's intelligent and something to help in your searches right use relevant keywords on the text of the image use alt tags because in some places that's used rather than the image itself to present it to people and and better or possibly try to host these images on your site that's for your site similar thing for videos you know if there's a transcript it'll help there's a thumbnail image that'll help what title and description you're giving for the video will help and then so if you're putting the video on a page you know focus make focus that video in that page and don't put the video out in so many places then google this and it sees that it's just duplicate content so understand you know basically just a quick idea here how all this happens there's millions of videos out there millions so google has to suggest a few to the user of course there will be google is stacking this user's behavior the history and the context and then it's going to you know in in in literally in milliseconds pull out of this millions of videos and rank them and then present a few to the to the user how does it happen well keywords are important these keywords are what you put in your file name your title your description your scripts so that's how is there enough of course nowadays it'll actually go through the content of video thumbnails so you know use compelling keywords and then there is the hashtags that you use that are used to also rank or link the web that video to relevant to what's relevant to the user so use hashtags intelligently and yeah so here just ideas to you know to make these videos or to promote your videos online and so on so just i think the things that would be very important or useful for us to understand is that what you put along with the video in addition to the content of the video of course there are times and so on will will enable the search engine all about them to take it and present it to people of course the user's behavior is also the history and their interest is also important okay but what we can do is the in the first six seven things are things that we can do every time you post a video take care of these things and then from there the video is presented to users the last point that i want to mention is that whenever you're using songs make sure that you give credits and so on some other bands or copyrighted songs and i've just given a sample here of how you can give a credit to a song as part of your description right um details for credits uh so you say credits song artists so on so it a pc worship team may be singing this song but then this this is what will be in that description of the video that means we are saying that our team is singing a song by these people so we are acknowledging their copyrights to the song we are just using it so when you do this then youtube will not block the video that has the song if we don't do this then in parts of the world where the copyright is important that video will be blocked people won't be able to see the video it'll be blocked by youtube because of copyright infringement so just keep this in mind so the best thing is if you're using any of these songs when you want the video to be made visible give credits in the description of the video and it'll keep things safe all right any questions so far all right so um let's take a break and then when we come back i will spend a little bit of time talking about social media right again this is a big area it has you know lots and lots of people are doing it so how can a church or a ministry just engage with social media platform just some thoughts on that and then people pause for today right so let's go for a break come back in 10 minutes then we'll talk about social media and then we'll close for the day right see you in 10 minutes thanks