Most churches today recognize the benefit of live streaming their services, see how it’s creating new avenues for engagement, and are actively seeking out ways to refine and maximize these platforms’ effectiveness for ministry.
Let’s explore some strategies around improving your church’s live streaming engagement and getting more views each week.
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Why You Need a Church Livestreaming Setup
If your leadership team and congregation haven’t yet experimented with church livestreaming, or have tested the waters without fully committing, it’s worthwhile to acknowledge the benefits. After all, the 89% of churches currently livestreaming worship services must be doing so for a reason!
An engaging church livestream expands reach and impact
While some ministries are wary about doing anything that might keep members and visitors away from their physical locations, the truth is, livestreaming worship services can actually boost your in-person attendees. Many people explore the world first through digital experiences—checking a restaurant menu before driving over for dinner, looking up hotel ratings before booking, reading movie reviews before going to the cinema. It stands to reason that many would also feel the same about your church! Instead of first-time guests blindly heading over on a Sunday morning, they first want to “meet” your ministry online, and livestreaming your service is a great way to introduce them to everything that makes your church special.
Church livestreams make it easier to connect with remote congregation members
A church livestream doesn’t just cater to new faces. Your existing congregation will inevitably appreciate this additional option for engaging with your church.
Not every individual member or family can attend services in-person every Sunday. Sometimes they’re on vacation, or a family member’s sick and can’t be left home alone (or they become sick themselves). So, instead of feeling left out of the community and companionship, they’re able to remotely access service through your livestream and remain connected to the church.
How Do You Start Creating an Engaging Church Livestream?
As you begin your church livestreaming journey, you’ll probably discover a huge amount of options and an absolute flood of technical language. It’s virtually impossible not to be overwhelmed—but don’t sweat it. That’s what we’re here for! First, let’s start with some church livestreaming must-haves.
Look for reliable and high-quality livestreaming technology
Even if you’re not a tech whiz or a regular viewer of online video, you’ve definitely dealt with slow, glitching streaming in the past. Nothing’s more frustrating than the climax of a movie suddenly becoming fuzzy or cutting out completely.
Through their patented technology and years of expert development, Resi’s 100% “ridiculously reliable” streaming solution delivers consistent church livestreams that can even function through a full internet outage.
Suffice to say, if you’re hesitant about livestreaming for your church because of technical considerations, don’t be. There are trusted and reliable solutions out there.
Include engaging features in your stream to foster connection
Many churches are moving to custom video players because they’ve realized the distractions associated with streaming on social media. Even if one of your remote congregants fully intended to watch your Sunday sermon live on Facebook, they’re going to be bombarded by advertisements and cat videos.
Custom video players remove those distractions—but Resi takes engagement features even further. Through app integrations, livestream viewers are able to multitask by taking notes, looking up Bible passages, filling out forms and more, all while the video’s still playing!
Check if there’s seamless integration with your church platform
Check if there’s seamless integration with your church platform
Working with a custom church streaming solution like Resi can seem overwhelming, especially if it needs to be integrated into so many systems you already lean on. Not to worry; Resi seamlessly integrates with all your favorite platforms, including Youtube, Meta (Facebook), and other social media sites, as well as Pushpay’s church app, and their team is always standing by to help you set up and optimize your tools.
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Maximizing Engagement with “On Demand”
Resi On Demand is a great way to maximize engagement and reach more people in your community. It helps you to organize all of the videos and clips that churches create so they are easy for congregants to find and access.
People want (and even expect) to consume information and content on their own time. When you provide them with On Demand, your church community can do just that. Members can
- revisit a favorite sermon
- catch up on a missed service, or
- explore thought-provoking discussions
This gives them the resources they need to grow their faith at their own pace.
Why people love On-Demand features
- It’s Organized: One of the valuable features of On Demand is its ability to organize videos into playlists, making it easier for viewers to find the content they’re interested in. Churches can categorize videos based on topics, themes, or events, ensuring congregants can easily find what they’re looking for. With playlists, you can create a more engaging experience for your audience and ensure they can easily find the content that matters most to them.
- It Saves Everyone Time: When people think of their church livestream, they usually only think of the final product they get to view online. What they don’t see are the hours spent planning, producing, editing, uploading, and sharing it so it can be viewed time and time again. Resi On Demand is one tool that makes it easy to engage your congregation, while saving you time.
Features like Playlists, Autosave to the Library, and Schedule from Saved Videos make storing, organizing, and sharing archived video content easy. And when you use Resi’s Resi On Demand feature, we help you save even more time by transferring the cue markers you make public to your video player, which will be immediately visible on your VOD scrub bar. This feature saves you and your audience time. You won’t need to re-establish cues you’ve already created, and you’ll have streamlined your audience’s experience so they can quickly navigate to the parts they want to watch. It’s just one more way we want to help you save time while still delivering a powerful and engaging experience for your church.
How to Implement Church Livestreaming in Your Ministry
Let’s walk through some of the first steps for setting up livestreaming for your church.
Choose the right streaming platform with the right features
A lot of considerations go into selecting a church livestreaming platform because there’s no one-size-fits-all technology solution for churches. Making decisions on the best match for your ministry requires research and diligence.
Figure out what factors are most important at this moment in time. Perhaps you’re just wanting an entry level platform, so you can test the waters? Or you might prefer an affordable, high-quality church streaming tool like Resi, to make sure your leadership and congregation understand your investment in creating a digital presence for your church.
Ensuring effective communication and promotion
When you start openly discussing your livestreaming initiative, you’ll need to highlight the benefits. Explain how much more flexibility livestreaming church services will provide for the existing congregation, and how it could act as a digital front door for future visitors.
Don’t be coy about this process! Make sure that you’re open and honest about the how, why, and when of livestreaming for your church, through all the communication channels you can. Consider sending personalized invitations to your congregation—who can in turn share the exciting news with community members who might be especially impressed and interested by your engagement channel.
Importantly, remember to stay open to follow-up and feedback. Your small groups or other leaders may have valuable insights; make sure you encourage suggestions about where the livestreaming experience could improve!
Embrace accessibility and inclusivity
As mentioned earlier, a major benefit of livestreaming worship services is its ability to include those who may not be able to enjoy your ministry otherwise. That’s a simple principle, once explained—but others in your congregation may not have considered that angle before.
Be sure to share the value of livestreaming to those who may be temporarily long-distance (check out how Resi streaming facilitates connection for a remote, predominantly military community in Alaska!), those who sometimes struggle to leave home, and anyone else who’s unable to regularly attend worship service.
Other considerations for implementation
When implementing live streaming, here are a few other considerations to be aware of:
1. Define Your Goals and Audience
You’ll want to start by clearly defining your goals and audience for your livestream. Those goals might range from inspiring spiritual growth to providing practical resources for everyday life. Once you’ve got clear goals, it’s important to know your audience and what type of content they want to see. Are they looking for Bible studies, podcasts, or tips on living a faithful life? Having those two pieces of information makes it easy for you to tailor your experience to your audience’s interests and make it a valuable resource for your church community.
2. Upload Your Content
Now it’s time to gather your files, take a deep breath, and start uploading your content to the library. The good news is you only need to do this bulk upload once! When you add Resi On Demand to your current Resi plan and enable Autosave to Library, your video automatically downloads to your library. So, by the time your livestream is coming to a close, your content is instantly ready to post or share from your library!
3. Organize and manage your content.
After initially uploading all those files, you know firsthand that there is a lot of content there. It could be so easy for viewers to get confused, lost, or just feel overwhelmed as to where to start. Playlists help you showcase different types of content and group them under themes or topics. Consider creating playlists based on themes, topics, or series. This allows your viewers to easily find and watch related content. And don’t forget to regularly review your library, archiving older content and updating your playlists to keep everything fresh and relevant.
Measuring Church Livestreaming Success and Adjusting Your Approach
At this point, you’re well on your way. Livestreaming is up and running in your church, it has (hopefully!) been accepted by leadership and the congregation, and it seems like the heavy lifting is finally over.
But wait! You should be generating analytics data from all your livestreaming efforts. This information needs to be sifted through and understood, so that you can ensure you’re using your platform to its full potential.
Analyze engagement metrics
Just as you reconsider and react to the health of your church, you’ll need to regularly evaluate the health of your livestreaming efforts. You’ll want to understand how many people are tuning in, how long they’re watching for, where they’re watching from, and more. That information is invaluable for adjusting your church’s approach.
Adapt to feedback and evolving needs
Even if you’re comfortable with the analytic data you’re seeing from livestreaming, you’ll also need to be open and responsive to community feedback. Sometimes the hard data doesn’t paint a complete picture; the insights of the people actually engaging with your livestream are just as critical.
Keep in mind, your church’s dynamics and its goals might change over time. It’s important to regularly reassess if the livestreaming strategy that worked last year is still meeting your evolving needs.
Celebrate success stories and lessons learned
All great leaders know to embrace both the wins and the losses, because they both have value. Expect that to be the case as you dive into livestreaming.
There will be times when you can excitedly share how a congregant with a health condition feels reconnected to the community. Other times, acknowledging that a stumbling block provided a needed lesson will increase transparency and inform your future with livestreaming.
The Future of Streaming Online Church Services
When the internet took off in the ‘90s, and even once online video first gained traction, livestreaming worship services seemed ridiculous. Few leaders seriously considered it would become a ubiquitous tool for the Church—but look where we are today!
Point being, there’s no telling where online church services may move in the future. You can, however, start preparing for what shifts may come.
Embracing hybrid worship experiences
The first step in getting ready for the future is actively engaging with the present model of hybrid church. That means leaning into livestreaming, in whatever form and to whatever degree your church feels comfortable. By simply starting down that path, you’ll learn so much about technology and your congregation’s attitude toward digital discipleship—setting yourself up for success whenever the next church tech breakthrough arrives.We’re here to help you build deeper connections in our increasingly digital world. With Resi’s livestreaming, it’s easier to connect your community, amplify engagement, and make an impact that resonates beyond the physical walls of your church.
Book a demo today and see for yourself how easy it is to livestream your church services with Resi.
