 Okay, good morning and welcome everybody to BC 314, media and technology and ministry. Welcome everybody. Let's take a moment to pray and then we will start our class today. Okay, who can pray? Who would like to pray? Kanan, your mic is okay, wanna pray? Kanan's mic, it's not okay. All right, Prince, why don't you please pray and then we will get started. Amen, thank you. Okay, welcome everybody once again. So we are in this whole course on media and technology. We are in this chapter two, where we are talking about digital engagement. That means how do we engage people digitally online using media and technology to different ways. So we spent some time talking about website. You know, I just, I'm just sharing with you some ideas that you can make use in your ministry when you create a website for your church or for, you know, your Christian organization. The website is very important. It is probably one of the primary ways by which you can engage people digitally online. And so we went through some of those things. You know, to make your website, make it searchable, make it something that relates to the people that you are reaching out to and so on. So we went through that. We're going to cover a few more things today. And I've shared the PDF with you. And I will share all this information with you and you try to make use of these things because people these days are open to all of these different ways of engaging with them. Right? So, and these are not very difficult to do. Any church or ministry can use these different ways. Right? So we're going to go forward to some other areas or other ways by which we can engage people digitally. Right? So I want to talk about emails. Now, email, you know, if you go back in time, let's say 30 years ago, before 30 years, there was no email. And the only way to connect the people is we have to send post, it send letters, physical letters, you know, put it in the postbox, the postman goes and drops it in the homes of the people. And that's basically the way we would communicate. But then now we have email, which is very inexpensive. And it's also very fast. You can communicate with anybody across borders. I mean, anyway. So we must think about some ways, how we can use emails to communicate with people. Now, of course, we must do it in a nice way without becoming, you know, an irritation to people. If people get too many emails, they'll get, of course, irritated. So, you know, we have to use it carefully and keep some of those thoughts in mind. So you can use emails to connect with people. You can inform them about upcoming events. You can engage them in outreaches if you're planning submission trips or things like that. You can inform them. You can celebrate stories. You can raise funds if there's a need. You can share about what's going, you know, if somebody passes away, how do you inform people? Well, through an email, you can share information. This is where the funeral is happening or so on. And of course, you can pass on spiritual encouragement to people. So you can do a lot of things if you use email to engage your church congregation or the people you're serving. But how do we, you know, how do we think through on this? First of all, we need to get people's email addresses and build an email list, right? So what you can do is on your, in your website, you can have options to subscribe. So we have this in our APC website and also Bible College website. People can enter the email, they click subscribe. So that means they are willingly giving you their email ID in order to receive what you're saying, they will receive a weekly email. Or, you know, you can have another form like this where you can, you know, they can opt in. Like when they come to a website, they can click on a button and they say, I want to get your emails. I want to get your sermons and all they can give it. And you always give them the assurance that they can unsubscribe anytime. You know, sometimes people are afraid to give their email ID because they think, oh, if I give my email ID and I don't want to receive emails, what, how do I get out? Well, you can tell them they can always unsubscribe. Other things that you can do to collect email IDs is, you know, what we do at least is we have a first-hand visitor form. So we have, we used to use a physical card and it's still there, but nowadays we just tell people to go to the church website and to fill out an online form. We just collect the name, mobile number, email and city and if they want to give some comments, they can enter some comments. So basically we are collecting mobile number and email ID and where, where they are from. So this is our first-time visitor card. Also, when you, you know, we also have another volunteer sign-up form. This is online. So when people want to volunteer, we encourage people, you want to serve in church, just go up, fill up this form. This is through the website. So again, here we collect their mobile number in the email ID, right? And they can say, you know, where they want to volunteer. But the point is in different ways, we're collecting email ID and mobile number because then we can use this to talk to them. Now, the interesting thing is when people enter their email ID, you know, in the, any of these forms here, they enter here or they enter here in this form or they enter here. It goes straight to, here it goes to our, you know, our church management system and it also goes to our email list manager. That means it's connected to our church management system which I will share with you later on. So the point is we have many ways by which we can collect emails without being a nuisance to people. You know, people shouldn't feel like, hey, why is there, why are they taking away my email? You know, you know, on their own billing, you know, out of their own bill, they can share the email ID and you're building your email list like this, right? You know, I remember back in those, you know, maybe when we started the church in the early years, you know, our email IDs were just kept in a simple file and just a text file. I used to save the email ID. So I should manually send emails. You know, it was about 50 people or 80 people like that. But later on, we moved to automating the whole thing, right? But it's good to be automated in these emails. So you send emails regularly. What we do is we send at least, we send one email every week which has the sermon. So those who have opted to receive that, they will receive information on the sermon. So it makes it easy. They can go and listen to the sermon again. And in that email, we would include any special events that are happening that week or in the coming weeks. You know, the advantage of the email is you can put nice graphics images. We keep the email short, make sure there are no errors in that. You can also provide links to the website. Nowadays, because many people read their emails on their mobile phone, you should make sure that, you know, the email renders properly in their mobile phone. As well so that they should be able to read it. The subject line can be very interesting, but of course, keep it factual. We usually limit ourselves to one church email. The only exceptions would be if there's a special announcement, maybe, you know, somebody passed away, a funeral is happening or something different. You know, otherwise only one email we send. And we also have different email lists. So, for example, if you want to target the men, you know, you send it to the men, you want to target a women's conference, you can send it to the ladies. Like that you should be able to segment your audience, your email audience. And you can do that with email list manager, right? So whenever you can, you know, it's nice that as a pastor you send an email, you know, especially during these times of pandemic, you can send them, hey, I hope, you know, all of you are doing fine. We are looking forward to getting back to in-person services, those kinds of things just to keep people connected, encouraged. And so you can decide, you know, what is the best time to send emails to people. Generally they say, choose to stay a good days to send. And also very important, people must be given the option to unsubscribe. So at the bottom of your email, always include a link where they can click on unsubscribe. Like, you know, this is an example. So that if somebody wants to stop receiving the emails, all they have to do is to click on unsubscribe and they won't receive any more emails from us. Make it easy for them, okay? Now, to automate sending of emails and I may have shared this with you in your second year as well, is to use a list manager. You know, so this is a free software that you can get from phblist.org. And I will show this to you how we have set it up. You know, so when people subscribe, the email ID is added directly to the list manager. And then also we create, you know, various groupings of these lists so that we can target our emails. And I will share this with you at least later. Another thing that you can do also is as an organization, you do a lot of, we do, we do a lot of communication through internal emails. Now, of course, the best thing is for us to meet face to face and talk, but there are times when emails are good, right? If you can't meet face to face, you send an email. Email also documents, it records a conversation or decisions or plans. So, yeah, and here's just some information on how we do good emails, you know, keep the content short, be courteous, emphasize only what's needed and be careful of your format, the message, right? So emails are good. Now, this email list manager, you can get somebody to set it up for you. And I'll just show this to us, I think. I did share it with us even in our second year. Let me see here. I think it's, but this is our email list manager. I'm logging in as admin, right? So you can have subscriber lists. That's how you categorize your list. So we have various lists, like, for example, in the public, I think, yeah. So we have a list that's called weekly sermon. That means you have people who have subscribed to get our weekly sermons, about 13,000 or something. People, email IDs, then we have, by different countries, if, you know, we're just slowly tracking people by countries if they choose to. These are people who've, on the e-learning, this is India Care Project, this is a different group. So people have signed in here. So suppose we want by our church location, so we can, these are those in Bangalore list, then by look central, south, north, west, so we kind of break it down like that. Then we could also do, by different cities in it. These are all Christian leaders in different cities. So those are Nasek, Nagaland, different, you know, so we categorize this. Again, suppose we want to send an email only to Christian leaders, we buy cities, we can do that. And these things are growing, they're not, you know, and of course we have the Bible College. So these are the students in the different years that we have also all Bible College or e-learning and so on. So if you want to send an email only to those groups, we can send email IDs. Yeah, so things like that, these are our outreach churches. So if you want to send an email to people in that outreach church, those who have email IDs, I mean a lot of people may not have email IDs for our rural churches, but those in cities will have. So this is our list manager. You can, you know, we could set up an email and send. So, you know, this was an email that was sent on the 20th of January, somebody passed away. So we sent an email. It was sent only to ABC Bangalore to about 1,952 people and these people have seen it and so on. So this was sent yesterday, right? So like this, you know, you set up the email and you send it to the list that you want so you can target who should get it. So having something like this, and I log out, having something like this is a very useful thing to communicate with church people and so on. It makes it easy. Now, of course email is one form of communication, but then another one is through messaging, right? So we have SMS short message service and also you could send multimedia messages these days. And so text messaging is also important. So once again, collecting people's mobile numbers is very useful and you create a mobile number, now create a list of mobile numbers of your church people and then you can use any messaging app to communicate. We'll just talk about SMS, phone SMS and WhatsApp, okay? Now, of course, there are many other ways that you could connect with people. Now messaging is very useful because a lot of people today prefer just seeing things on their phone. They're not so excited, maybe your phone calls or emails. A lot of people prefer text messages and if you can write your message very well and you can get the message across to people very fast and they're more likely to read the SMS or WhatsApp message than go and check their emails. And it's a very unappreciative way to reach people. So what are some good practices about SMS and WhatsApp? You can let people opt in if they want to opt out, they can opt out, they can say, we don't want to receive anymore. And it's important to use proper templates and formats for different occasions. So we have standard formats. When somebody passes away, this is how you send a WhatsApp message or an SMS message. We have standard formats so people get used to the way the message is brought to them and try to keep it to one or two messages per week. So actually, there are many weeks we don't send any SMS or WhatsApp. We only use it when it's necessary. Now, there are service providers who can help send bulk SMS. So suppose you have a hundred or 200 or 1,000 or several thousand mobile numbers, you can't manually send it to all of them. So you use bulk service providers who can send bulk SMS. These are some people in India that you can use or you could use WhatsApp, right? So right now, we used to use SMS for several years but we've kind of moved away from SMS too using WhatsApp messages. So again, so you could set up an account with these people and then you could send, you can send a broadcast message to, you may have several thousand people, you can send them a WhatsApp message just right away. And they can also have conversation, they can reply and through the web interface they give you, you can actually reply to their questions and so on. So it's not just one way, it's two-way communication through WhatsApp, through their website they give you. So you can set up an account with them and do it. Whereas SMS is usually one way, you just send a broadcast in close to people, it's one way. Whereas here in WhatsApp, you can do two ways. So here's an example, we sent this out on 15th. We launched, I mean, the worship team released a Hindi song and so we sent this out to several thousand mobile numbers. So it's a nice thing, you could attach a nice picture, a lot of information you can give a link to the YouTube. And you can also have almost like a button, but when they tap on that, it opens up better where you want them to go to. And in this case, it takes them to the YouTube video. So we just send this out. So this is a nice thing to do, it's very attractive and it's a WhatsApp message that you can send and we sent it through our account with what team, right? So this is a good thing to set up and to use. Now there's of course a lot of advantage with multimedia message, people are going to like to receive WhatsApp messages like this, it has a nice graphic and all of that, they won't mind receiving it. But we just have to make sure we follow some standards when you're sending images or when you're sending videos. It's, you know, don't send very heavy or large images, but don't send huge videos. Got to be mindful of people's bandwidth and so on. Keep the text as minimal as possible. Be basically say, be as minimalistic as possible in what you do and in videos, you could probably give a link to the video that's rather than sending the video to them and you try to keep the videos as short as possible when you're doing an announcement, okay? So that's about text messaging and multimedia messaging. Let me just pause here, I know I'm talking a lot, so let me see any questions, any thoughts so far. Everybody's with me, you're following me. It's all okay, all right, any questions? All right, I'll just share a few more things that we could do to engage with people. Some of these things are already familiar. The next thing I just want to bring our attention to is virtual meetings. So that's another way to engage with people. And I think many of us are very familiar with these things. We're all familiar with Zoom and we're all familiar with Google Meet, so we already have at least two of these tools that we are very comfortable using and then there are other tools as well to have video calls and so on. This is good, especially given the situations that we're going through, video meetings are good, webinars are also very good, people are open to it. Except that I think because there's been so much happening the last two years or so, there is some amount of tiredness in attending more video meetings and webinars, but generally we still use it to keep in touch with people and interact with people. So here are just some good practices when you're doing video meetings, try to keep things at your eye level. If you're having a private meeting, then use a passcode and you have proper lighting, use your microphone and you can filter out background noise, okay? The last thing or maybe the second to last, I wanna just run through some content distribution platforms. I'm not spending much time on virtual meetings, that's something we're all familiar with, but content distribution platforms is if you have digital content like you have eBooks, you have MP3 audio or you have video, you can actually distribute it worldwide through these distribution platforms. And these of course are very useful. For example, eBooks. So you can write a book, put it in a PDF form and then of course some of these use their own format and you can convert it from PDF to their format online for free and you can distribute your books globally, right? So we have a tremendous opportunity that you can sit in whichever part of the world you are and you can write books or create audio files or videos and it can reach anywhere in a global audience. So I'm just listing some of these channels so that you have some awareness and you can make use of it if you want and we distribute, we make use of all of these channels for us when we distribute our PDF, our books or our audio files or our videos. We use a number of these channels so it's actually going out globally and it's available. So Amazon Kindle, you can release your books there and you can indicate that you want to give it for free. That's what we do. So we don't charge for our books and it can go reach globally, of course they do have and all of these people have certain specifications to follow if you want to upload your book over there. Apple Eye Books, again a good usage, may not of course, may not be as wide as Amazon Kindle. Bonsy Noble, again we make our books available through Bonsy Noble. It has some amount of market share, Kobo. The interesting thing is that through Kobo you can reach about 190 countries which is quite amazing. Of course Amazon Kindle also has huge reach but through their Kobo partners we can reach a huge number of people and of course, Google Play. Again our books are available through Google Play as well and you can almost everywhere people access it and then there is script through which again you can distribute your books for free. So these are some of the top or the main distribution channels for eBooks. So I want to encourage you, if God enables you to write even if it's a simple book, a small book you have the opportunity of distributing it on all of these channels and who knows somebody may pick it up and read it and be blessed. So you could distribute the book globally through these channels. Similarly, there are channels for audio. There's MP3 files. Of course, Google Podcast and many of these are very well known, used. Google Podcast, Apple Podcast iTunes, Spotify. And again Spotify has a big reach and Stitcher. So I would encourage you also if you know you could just, if you record your sermons, Sunday sermons, you set up accounts in these channels and you release the same message on all these channels. It gives you access to people around the world and God can use it to bless many people. Lastly, sorry, similarly we have video channels which many of you are familiar with YouTube and you're already probably using it. It has a huge reach globally. What probably is less known is Vimeo but Vimeo also is a good platform to put your videos out and we have our videos on. And we have our videos on YouTube and Vimeo so that those who are using Vimeo will be able to access our videos. And then all of us are familiar with putting up videos on Facebook and Instagram. These are again good channels to reach young people and Pinterest and also small videos on Twitter. And Daily Motion is catching up, us getting a little bit popular. So I want to encourage even your Sunday sermon videos which I think many of us will be doing to try to give it more exposure by using more platforms. You know, we do, I think many of us are already using YouTube by trying to get your videos out on other channels like Vimeo and maybe on Daily Motion as well so that it reaches different audience, people who have a different interest. The last one I just want to mention in passing not go into much detail is, you know, if possible you can create a church app and people can, that's another way to engage with people. Okay. So this brings us to the end of chapter two on digital engagement. What we have done is we've said, look there are many different ways to engage people digitally. And some of the main ways that we talked about are websites, then emails, then text messaging whether SMS or WhatsApp. And then you have the video conferencing and then we have digital distribution channels that's when you create PDFs, MP3s or videos. There are channels by which you can reach globally. And lastly, also if you have people who can help you put together a church app, you can also create an app and release your content through that. Okay. So I'm going to pause here for today. And next week I will share some, I'm just thinking whether to get into the guidelines. The chapter that you're supposed to get into is on guidelines, like just best practices on creating graphics and so on and so forth. I'm thinking whether to get into that or what I do want to do, go into is the specifics like audio, so how do you set up an audio system? We're going to get into that video, live streaming, all the equipment that we use for all of these things. Just to help us get familiar with this, you may be already using some of it or some of it you may use in the future, but just to share with you these details that you can use and some of the free open source software that's there, which you can use for live streaming and other things. And then we will cover all of that in the weeks to come. Any questions on this chapter? All good? Okay. So let's end here for the day. I'd encourage you to think about making use of as many of these methods and engagement strategies for your church and your ministry so we can reach more people. Okay. Let's close in prayer and we will dismiss, we'll meet again next week. All right. Dave, are you able to pray? Sure, Mike, okay. Sure. Okay. Father, we thank you Lord Jesus. Thank you for this class Lord Jesus. Thank you that you have given us each opportunity and given us the strength to be in this class Lord Jesus and you have given us the wisdom to invent things and create things. You have given us this technology and we'll be thank you Lord Jesus and help each one of us to follow it, use it for our, for your kingdom and bring glory to you Lord Jesus. We serve 500 people within bridge between people to bring them into your kingdom. And I think it was like that, amen. Amen. Okay. Thank you everybody. Have a good weekend and God bless you all and see you again next week. Thanks. I know. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you everybody. God bless.