Creating church content that’s meaningful and engaging isn’t always easy. By utilizing many of the digital tools already found in your current workflow, your church can build deeper connections and boost engagement with your surrounding community through mission-driven content. Follow along as we cover the significance of 7-day-engagement, the best digital tools for cultivating meaningful church engagement, and three practical ways you can create compelling church content from your livestream, resulting in meaningful engagement everyday of the week.
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Create church content that gets engagement seven days a week
While many churches solely focus on producing an incredible service every week, many don’t realize the importance of engaging with their congregation past Sunday mornings. Like any meaningful relationship, the way you engage with your community should hold significance in their daily lives. But with ministry interaction often limited to one hour, one day a week, the spiritual growth and guidance your church can offer is seriously limited as well. But it doesn’t need to be this way!
By creating engaging church content everyday of the week, congregants can interact with your ministry on a deeper, more personal level, and gain a rich and impactful church experience. So how can churches begin building seven-day-engagement? And what tools are out there to help them do this?
The Best Digital Mediums for Meaningful Church Engagement
In this digital age, what do people interact with the most throughout an average day? Technology. Almost every person in the world interacts with some form of digital medium, platform, or resource during a single day, presenting churches with the perfect opportunity to leverage tech’s power. Here’s a list of some of the best digital mediums your church can use to begin building meaningful engagement that spans everyday of the week:
Email is an amazing digital medium that can send any type of impactful message directly into the lap of whoever you’re trying to reach. This means that after your church collects the necessary contact information, you can connect with your community everyday with powerful messages and written encouragement. Plus, since most people can access their email straight through their cell phone, congregants can easily engage with your church on a regular basis and begin incorporating your ministry into their daily lives.
Social Media
Social media is a resource unlike any other. This digital medium equips churches to share their message with people all across the world and engage with their community in a familiar, natural format. Whether it’s through liking pictures, sharing videos, or simply following your church’s profile, congregants can engage with your church at any time and in any way they see fit. This allows your ministry to seamlessly integrate itself into the lives of members and newcomers every week, and build meaningful engagement through quick and easy content.
Video
Providing video content, whether that’s through your church livestreams, on-demand content, social posts, or more, is one of the best ways to engage with your congregation throughout the week. In fact, people watch an average of 17 hours of video content per week. So by creating church video content, your ministry can engage congregants through a means they already use daily, and can provide them with an impactful, spiritual, and visual experience they have unlimited access to everyday.
Source: DASH, 2023
App
Did you know that roughly 90% of total mobile usage takes place within an app? By engaging with your congregation through a digital medium they can use directly from their phone (like a church app), your church has the ability to interact with community members on a day-to-day basis through easy and practical means. Whether you want to use push notifications with daily bible verses, digital sign-up sheets for local home groups, chat rooms for community connection, or more, your ministry can create meaningful engagement in a personalized and scalable way. Over time, even these small digital interactions can lead to huge impacts on the strength of your congregation and their engagement with your church, both in-person and online.
Source: buildfire, 2023
Three Ways to Use Your Church Livestream to Create Compelling Content
You should already know how extraordinary livestreaming is for creating a comprehensive and engaging church experience but if you don’t, check out our post on how to Maximize Engagement with Streaming Live Church Services. However, what you may not know is how a church livestreaming platform is also the ultimate digital tool for creating compelling content that lasts all week. By using different streaming capabilities, your church can create various types of content, and engage with your community across a multitude of different platforms and mediums. This strategy ensures your ministry’s impact never falls flat and instead, touches the lives of congregants and visitors alike through interesting and distinctive engagement. Let’s jump into the top three ways you can use livestreaming to create compelling and diverse content that can be used any day of the week.
1. Simulated livestreaming lets you easily rebroadcast church content during the week
Simulated livestreaming is a method of church streaming that’s quickly growing in popularity due to the versatility it offers church production. With sim-live, you can take previously-filmed video content and stream it to audiences as if it were live. This means you can begin broadcasting multiple livestreams throughout the week (not just on Sunday) without needing to film and produce a live event. Plus, in contrast to actual livestreams, sim-live allows you to edit and polish your content before the footage ever goes “live”. This makes producing content as stress-free as ever, as production teams won’t need to worry about a live event going perfectly since they can clean up the footage before releasing it. And with Resi’s Resi On Demand, you can use our Automated Scheduling feature to schedule a livestream from a saved video in your library. That content will then automatically broadcast on the date you set, allowing you to sit back and relax while offering your congregation a live experience multiple times a week.
2. Cut up your long-form video content into chunks to use later
Fostering meaningful engagement that spans seven days a week has never been easier thanks to the power of long-form, video on-demand (VOD) content. On-demand video content refers to content that can be accessed through a VOD platform and watched by viewers at any time. Simply save your livestream footage each week, edit it and remove any portions you don’t want included (copyrighted worship music, weekly announcements, offering, etc.), and finally upload it to a VOD platform, like Youtube.
You also don’t need to keep all of your long-form content to just your full livestreams. By chopping up your livestream into longer portions or using other video content you may have, you can make a variety of content, like sermon series, mission-work videos, small group discussion videos, and more. Offering diverse, long-form content can help ensure that your community, as well as newcomers looking into your ministry, can experience the full breadth of your church’s message at any time throughout the week, not just on Sunday mornings.
Plus, by finding a VOD service with features designed for efficiency and quality, your church can easily produce a variety of engaging VOD content every week. Resi’s video on-demand service, Resi On Demand, has a ton of amazing features to help make your workflow as efficient as possible, like Autosave to Library, Autofill Playlists, Autofill Dates, and Public Cues.
3. Use your livestreams to pull short-form content from, like quotes
Your livestream footage is chock full of opportunities for short-form content. Just go through your livestream and look for portions to use, like quotes, powerful moments from the sermon, engaging reactions from the congregation, and whatever else you find impactful. From there, you can chop up the footage into bite-sized pieces that you can then post to different platforms, like your website, Youtube, social platforms, and more! Plus, you don’t have to only stick to creating content for platforms. You can also generate short-form content that can be used by a number of groups in your church, like small group discussions, youth groups, groups away on mission work, and more! By creating little pieces of content that every part of your congregation can engage with, you provide them with a robust ministry experience they can interact with seven days a week.
Each platform has a sweet spot when it comes to video length. By pulling clips from your livestream that coincide with these times, your content will have the best shot at peak performance and engagement. Take a look below and find out what video lengths are shown to be optimal for every type of short-form content on each platform:
- Instagram video: 1 minute
- Instagram story: 15 seconds
- Instagram reel: 15-60 seconds
- Facebook video: less than 1 minute
- For episodic web series, developing stories, or livestreams: 3+ minutes
- Facebook story: less than 20 seconds
- Facebook reel: 15-20 seconds
TikTok
- TikTok video: 15 seconds-1 minute
- Twitter video: 44 seconds
Youtube
- Youtube video: 2-15 minutes
- Youtube short: 15 seconds
- LinkedIn video: max 30 seconds
Source: Hootsuite, 2022
“We’re looking for all kinds of different ways to engage people, not just on a Sunday, but throughout the week as well. And (with Resi) it’s opened us to saying ‘if it’s really this easy to stream to all these platforms, we’re getting as wide of a net as possible with our online services.”
Frank Grand, Web Director at Newspring Church
Check Your Church Livestreaming Analytics
Church livestreaming offers an array of unique benefits for content creation, but it can also equip churches to grow closer to their community in non-digital ways as well. With features like livestreaming and VOD analytics, your ministry can gain an in-depth understanding on how your congregation is interacting with content. Tracking different viewer metrics, like watch times, viewer location, social analytics, and more, can reveal what type of spiritual guidance your congregation is looking for, both in-person and online. This insight can help your church tailor its spiritual leadership to meet the unique needs of your community, leading to deeper and more prosperous connections.
Resi’s Resi On Demand includes Real-Time Analytics, which offers in-depth information on valuable metrics, including your VOD performance, your social platform performance (currently only Facebook), reports on drops/spikes in viewership, location heat maps, and watch times/viewer stats. Plus with exporting and data segmentation capabilities, your church can easily organize all of their data and effectively reflect on how to best serve your congregation with meaningful engagement. Interested in learning more about the importance of stream analytics? Check out our post, Top 3 Reasons You Should Pay Attention to Livestreaming Analytics, and transform the success of your ministry’s messaging with viewer metrics.
Create church content that goes beyond Sunday
Fostering meaningful engagement seven days a week is integral to making your ministry more than just Sunday. By consistently developing compelling church content, you can reap a ton of different advantages, from gaining greater spiritual impact, to expanding community involvement throughout the entirety of the week. Just make sure you also develop an effective strategy for releasing church content in order to achieve the best results possible. By using our suggestions and implementing a textured digital presence through church livestreaming, as well as other digital tools, your church can foster meaningful engagement that outlasts Sunday mornings, transforming the total success of your ministry.Learn more about how you can use livestreaming in your production workflow. Contact our team of streaming experts to discover how Resi livestreaming can help you build meaningful engagement from the ground up.
