What You’ll Learn
Is your church website ready for one of the biggest events of the year when guests visit your church? Do you feel overwhelmed with a never-ending To Do list to update your website for Christmas? Or maybe you find yourself avoiding even thinking of updating your website because it feels like you just don’t have enough time?
Tune into ChurchSpring Live, Episode 025 below for 5 easy five-minute tactics to prepare your church website this Christmas season.
Don’t leave your congregation and visitors in the dark this Christmas season. Rohn and Isabelle will unpack five easy ways to update your church website so you can increase communication with your members and create a welcoming environment for your guests.
And the best part? You can do each tactic in less than five minutes!
Bust out that crazy Christmas sweater and get ready for the ultimate de-stressor checklist to prepare your church website and equip your members and share the love of Christ with your community.
Watch Now
Helpful Resources
- Additional Resources to save time and prepare your church website for the Christmas season!
- What are the top 5 ways a church can prepare their church digital communications for Christmas? We unpack social advertising, website tracking, and more in ChurchSpring Live, Episode 016! Watch now.
- Learn the best practices that you should implement on your church website to drive guests to your local gathering this Christmas. Watch ChurchSpring Live, Episode 017 here.
- View ChurchSpring’s Christmas demo website at christmas.churchspring.org for an example of how to optimize your church website for Christmas
- Check out a sample Christmas Promo Landing Page for sample copy and format that you can use on your own church website!
- Tune into a free demo webinar to learn more about ChurchSpring or try us out for free
Show Notes
- Welcome to ChurchSpring Live Episode 024 – What to Expect (00:06:01)
- Let’s Learn: 5 easy five-minute tactics to prepare your church website for members and guests this Christmas season. (00:07:27)
- Use the Social Scheduler
- Update your home page
- Upload a sermon
- Create and schedule events
- Audit & test your website
- BONUS tactic: Create a blog article, Top 5 things to do in [CITY NAME] this Christmas in 2020
- Action Item & Commitments (00:35:08) Commit to taking action on at least 1 five-minute tactic this week to prepare your website for Christmas.
- Wrap Up & Sneak Peek at Next Week (00:47:58):Do you feel unequipped to create graphics for your church communications? Frustrated that you don’t have the graphic design skills to create stunning images for your church website? Tune into ChurchSpring Live, Episode 026 at 10am CT, Thursday, November 19 to learn how you can easily create graphics for your church—no design knowledge needed! Isabelle and Jen will introduce our favorite graphic design tools (that are free!) and will walk through each step to create graphics for your website and social media using Canva and Wordswag.
Video Transcript
Isabelle Faletti (00:00):
Hello, Hello and welcome to ChurchSpring Live episode 025. And I just have to say Merry Christmas because I am wearing a Christmas sweater preparation for today’s topics. So Merry Christmas, everybody. I see that we already have Andy introducing himself and welcome Andy. While we are waiting for our people to jump into the live stream, go ahead and introduce yourself. You can place your name, where you’re from and your church name, and we would love to say a special hello to you. So while you’re doing that, I do want to welcome a few new members to the ChurchSpring family. So welcome redemption City Worship from Little Rock Arkansas. We have Victorious Living Christian Center from Wisconsin and Liberty Baptist Church from North Carolina. So welcome. We see every single new signup to ChurchSpring, every new member, every new pastor and church. So we’re able to help when we have any new sign-ups. So thank you. Thank you for trusting ChurchSpring to help your church.
Isabelle Faletti (01:13):
If you’re new to ChurchSpring, then we have a very simple mission here at ChurchSpring and that’s to help churches build intuitive, affordable, and frustration free websites. So welcome to ChurchSpring. Welcome to ChurchSpring Live here. My name is Isabelle and joining me today is Rohn Gibson co-founder of ChurchSpring. Welcome back to ChurchSpring Live., Rohn, it’s been a couple of weeks since we’ve had you on last.
Rohn Gibson (01:40):
Yes, it is so good to be back. I’ll tell you, I really miss jumping on here and interacting, but you and Peter did an amazing job serving the church over those weeks. So thank you for all your hard work. So good to be back. Oh, it’s good to see this familiar names popping in here again, Pastor Andy. Welcome. We’re glad you’re here, Sheila, Dwayne, Kathy. Let’s see, from Stanley, North Dakota.
Isabelle Faletti (02:06):
Wooh! North Dakota.
Rohn Gibson (02:08):
North Dakota-we don’t live far from there. Reggie and Lynn from Community Bible Church in Arlington, Ohio. See this Buckeyes are in the house. Buckeyes they always show up.
Isabelle Faletti (02:20):
Just for you too. Just for you.
Rohn Gibson (02:24):
That’s right. They’re faithful, even though the Buckeyes aren’t going be playing this week, unfortunately because of COVID, but glad I’m you’re here, Pastor Lynn. And let’s see, we’ve got Tom from Pillars of Faith Tabernacle as well and NYC.
Isabelle Faletti (02:36):
Awesome.
Rohn Gibson (02:38):
We’re so glad to have you all here today. And we do want this to be an interactive session. We’ve we’ve got some super helpful things for you today. So we’re just super glad you’re here and we want to interact with you. So you can do us a favor. If we share something that’s super helpful for you, give us a like, or the love would love to see it share it, thumbs up, give us a comment. We are going to answer as many questions as we can throughout the episode today, as well as if there’s any we miss, then we will definitely hit those at the end to make sure that all the questions get answered and I have to give Pastor Lynn an IO, because that’s an Ohio thing. O-H-I-O. Yes, Pastor Lynn. Love it. I actually should do the IO that’s how it’s really been right there. So all of you who are not Ohio State fans- you got a little education there.
Isabelle Faletti (03:30):
I was a little confused. I’ll be honest when I saw that, OH I’m like, “I don’t know what that means.”
Rohn Gibson (03:37):
Oh, there’s so many stories I could tell you, but anyway, it’s so good, but good to be back. Hi Tom. So we are going to cover a lot of information today and I know that it can be overwhelming to try to take notes of everything and all that, and we don’t want you to do that. So we’re actually going to take the notes for you. So show notes for this episode will be available @churchspring.com/csl025. Can you believe this is our 25th episode?
Isabelle Faletti (04:05):
This is our 25th. That’s a big number.
Rohn Gibson (04:07):
Congratulations.
Isabelle Faletti (04:08):
Hey, I was just going to say the same thing to you. Congrats. We did it.
Rohn Gibson (04:11):
Yeah. And it really, the people that deserve the congratulations are the heroes who are watching this right now, which are those churches who are out there, faithfully serving and crazy times in this world. So, thank you all for joining us, sticking with us through these 25 episodes and our hearts prayer is just that you would find value from it, be able to implement it. You’ll be able to communicate better with your existing church members, as well as reach new people in your community. So we love to hear the stories of visitors coming to churches because of the things they’ve implemented from some of these tips and tools that we’ve shared. So again, show notes church, spring.com/cls025.
Rohn Gibson (04:51):
So are you guys ready? Are you ready to hear about the five easy five minute tactics? We tried to make it as much of a word vendor as possible, five easy five minute tactics to prepare your church website for the Christmas season. Are you ready if you’re ready type yes. In the comments below. So let us see it. And I know there might be a little delay, so type. Yes. If you’re ready to hear five easy five minute tactics to prepare your church website for Christmas, drop a yes in the comments and let us know you can hear us.
Isabelle Faletti (05:28):
I’m ready.
Rohn Gibson (05:29):
You’re ready. All right, Kathy, there we go. Kathy’s ready.
Isabelle Faletti (05:31):
Yes Kathy. I’m psyched about this episode, Rohn. I need like one of those fake snow machines so when someone asks that queston, I can just like cue the snow, cue the Christmas lights and oh, I can’t wait. Yes. And it looks like we, Andy, we got like five yeses from him and six exclamation points.
Rohn Gibson (05:50):
Yes.
Isabelle Faletti (05:50):
That’s great.
Rohn Gibson (05:52):
Awesome.
Isabelle Faletti (05:54):
All caps from Ron. Yes.
Rohn Gibson (05:56):
Ron Gardner.
Isabelle Faletti (05:56):
Ron Gardner.
Rohn Gibson (05:58):
It’s good to see you brother.
Isabelle Faletti (06:01):
Ah, this is great. Well, like I said, I am very excited about today’s topic. Christmas is less than 50 days away. I haven’t Googled exactly how many days it is from today, but I just know that it’s less than 50 days away. And Christmas really is one of the biggest events that guests visit your church for. So your church website needs to be ready this year for Christmas. So I know it can feel overwhelming when you think of all the things that need to get done for life this Christmas season, let alone for your church for your church, a website.
Isabelle Faletti (06:41):
So that’s why Rohn and I wanted to just break down what are some really easy, quick, but efficient tactics that church leaders can take to update their website, to really get their website ready to welcome guests and to ultimately increase communication with your current members. So that’s why we have these five, five minute tactics that you can implement literally this week you guys. I mean, that’s less than 30 minutes total. So get your Christmas sweater out if that helps, when you’re ready to do these tactics, get your hot cocoa. I believe in you, you can do this. So Rohn, let’s just dive right into this right now.
Rohn Gibson (07:27):
Awesome. So excited. So number one, use the Social Scheduler that’s built into ChurchSpring. Okay. So if you’re on the Flourish plan, you already have access to this. So make sure you’re using it. If you’re want on the sprout or grow plan, you don’t have access to this, but I would highly encourage you to upgrade. So you want to leverage the power of social media. Social media is a powerful tool when it comes to reaching new people in community, as well as communicating the message to existing church members. Okay. So I think everybody knows what social media is. Maybe this is the first time you’ve ever heard about what is a Social Scheduler. So Social Scheduler is literally built right into ChurchSpring. When you add sermons, when you add events, you can go ahead and schedule the posts that then would post to Facebook and your Twitter profiles.
Rohn Gibson (08:18):
So you can do more than just one post. You could create your Christmas Eve service and schedule 10 posts to be posted to your social media channels about that event prior to that event, even happening. It’s an incredible tool that really the benefits it’s going to save you a ton of time. How many times do we create an event on our site? And we’re like, “Oh, I got to remember to go back and schedule the social media promotion in this.” How many times we forget that, hey, I’ll raise my hand. I’ve done that so many times-
Isabelle Faletti (08:48):
Definitely.
Rohn Gibson (08:49):
Where I’ll publish something and have the best intentions to promote it. Just remember one rule of thumb is that, putting the information on your websites, 20% of the work, 80% of the work is actually promoting that piece of content, whether that’s an event or whether that’s a sermon that you’re posting after the fact, it could be a live stream event, even posting multiple times, hey, if you’re not able to join us live, do this it’s going save you a tremendous, tremendous amount of time.
Rohn Gibson (09:19):
So remember posting the content is one thing that’s 20% of the work. 80% of the work is then promoting that piece of content to spread the word. And you want to make sure, we hear it time and again, we want to increase communication with existing members. How many times have you heard it? I know I’m not alone in this where they’ll say, “I didn’t even know that that event was even happening at the church.” We’ve all been there. And sometimes I want to blow my lid because we’ve done everything from social media to put it on the website, to emails, to tech. I mean all the things we’ve done, all the things.
Isabelle Faletti (09:50):
A flyover with that banner at the end of that.
Rohn Gibson (09:53):
There you go. I haven’t done that one yet. That’d be a nice addition to the product. I can figure that one out. Airplane fly over. Anywhere.
Isabelle Faletti (10:01):
Our team could figure that out.
Rohn Gibson (10:02):
Yeah. So the Social Scheduler it can be a great tool and communicating to existing members. And then this is a piece that a lot of churches don’t do and it’s such a missed opportunity and that is encourage your existing church members to just share the social media posts. You can put that right in there. “Hey, join us for Christmas Eve and be sure to invite your friends to the service. We’d love to have them joining us for our candlelight service or whatever you do.” And “Hey, if you’re a member, please share this on your… just re-share it basically.” So encourage members to share that. Such a missed opportunity. And literally it takes somebody three seconds to re-share some piece of content like that.
Rohn Gibson (10:43):
So encourage members to share, and then one of the benefits of your members sharing as many times, let’s be honest, they have a ton of friends that are in their community that don’t attend. Maybe don’t attend church all. Maybe they’re not believers. So it’s an amazing way to reach your community and actually drive first time visitors to your church, which ultimately is one of the outcomes we want to see. Christmas is such a vital time. It’s one of those times where a lot of people, obviously it’s very heightened during that time between Christmas and Easter. So we want to make it as easy as possible for our church members to spread the word about our services as well as we want to make sure that they’re aware of what’s going on so we can make the biggest impact during this critical time of the year.
Rohn Gibson (11:29):
So number one, use the Social Scheduler. If you don’t know what it is, you can go to our website, churchspring.com, scroll down a little bit. We have a little tile there that says Social Scheduler. You can click a button that says, see it in action. And you can see exactly what it’s all about. The time that this tool will save you and the impact that it can make. It’s hard to even measure. So go check it out.
Isabelle Faletti (11:57):
And it’s fun. It’s fun to use. I’m a planner. Well, I’m part planner–part procrastinator. So I’m a hybrid and I love using that Social Scheduler because you just feel so organized and with it, and I’m sure there’s some stat that shows when you plan and organize, you get some endorphin rush, but that’s what it feels like. You just feel prepared. So like Rohn said, if you’re not using the Social Scheduler you’re missing out and you’re making your life harder than it should be to be perfectly blunt.
Rohn Gibson (12:33):
Yes. And it’s so awesome. And we have members here that are on the stream right now. Andy, “I love the Social Scheduler. Social Scheduler is great.” Larry “I have scheduled an announcement about a sermon series beginning of this month. So this is awesome.”
Isabelle Faletti (12:48):
That’s great.
Rohn Gibson (12:48):
Awesome awesome. And if you guys have tips, so this isn’t just about us, we’re a community of believers looking to help each other out. So if there are ways that you’re using the Social Scheduler or even you plan to use the Social Scheduler during the Christmas season, maybe that we don’t mention, because we just don’t have the time to go into that much detail, feel free to share it in the comments. That would be super valuable to share with the community. And we love when that happens, when the community is serving each other because ultimately we collectively are the church. So awesome to see. All right. We’re just getting started.
Isabelle Faletti (13:23):
I know. These are five minutes. We need like one minute though, for us to be talking about that. We love the platform that we’ve created because it can help churches. It can help you save time, reach your community. So sometimes we just get extra excited about it. I think the Christmas cheer is making me extra amped up. So thank you all for your patience today. Ooh, I see we have a question real quick from Ron Gardner. Ron, I think we’ll answer that at the end because it’s a really good question about Social Scheduler and I want to give a little more details about that. So, Ron, I see your question. And we’ll answer that more specifically at the end here. So our second tactic is to update your home page on your church website.
Isabelle Faletti (14:16):
Your home page is the first page that people visit, whether it is visitors or your current church members. It’s kind of the first impression that you’re giving off to guests. And again, it’s also the homepage, the landing place that your members are looking at to see what’s going on with my church, what you vents are coming up. Are there any updates maybe any updates with live streaming or any COVID regulations? So your home page has to be clear simple to the point and easily pointing people in the right direction. So one of my favorite areas of your homepage to update is your slider section. So for those of you who may be new to websites, your sliders, it’s that top section on your home page, and you see a couple of different slides rotating through. You can update, you should update, I should say your slides to reflect what’s going on within your church.
Isabelle Faletti (15:27):
So if you have an upcoming Christmas Eve service, or if you have an upcoming, let’s say clothing drive, or you have a new sermon that you just uploaded, update your sermons to really direct people to where you want them to be receiving that information. It’s similar to a billboard that you’ll see when you’re driving down the road. Another area that you can easily quickly update on your home page is just add a block. So with ChurchSpring, we have a feature called the block feature, and you can add sections on your website to customize it to exactly what you want. So you can add a block that links to your leadership page. This is a great opportunity for you to introduce your staff, your leadership, to add that human element to any new guests who are looking to learn more about your church, about really the people that make up your church, because it’s the people, it’s not the building that you guys are meeting, and that makes up your church.
Isabelle Faletti (16:33):
And then also just update the welcome copy. So again, with ChurchSpring, if you’re on a ChurchSpring powered website, we actually give ready to go welcome copy right on your home page. So update that welcome copy just to make it related to Christmas. You can add a little blurb about welcome to your church, we’re excited to have you this Christmas season. And then if you do have any specific COVID regulations that your church may be following, this is also a great area to add that. You want to be removing any anxiety that visitors may be experiencing when they’re learning about attending your church. So your welcome pages is a great way to just reassure them that you’re ready to welcome them. And then for the home page, also make sure to update any images that are not your leadership images for Christmas.
Isabelle Faletti (17:32):
So you can update your homepage slider background image with a Christmas related image. You don’t want to go too crazy. My default is just upload everything Christmas related. That can be a bit too much, so Rohn says. But we ChurchSpring we have an image library with free images ready to go. So you can add Christmas images, no extra cost for you. So it just adds a little festive feel to your website. So homepage updates a couple of tactics there suggest make it relevant up-to-date and reduce anxiety for any guests wanting to learn more about you.
Rohn Gibson (18:11):
Absolutely. And there’s no reason as far as the Christmas related images, having just a beautiful Christmas related image right there in that main image. So people know your website’s up to date, you’re there. So it’s so important. All right. Number three, upload sermons. So what you do not want somebody to experience when they come to your website, like maybe a friend share the social media posts, they came to your church website. And the last sermon that was updated was like from six months ago. Because then they’re going to start thinking, “Does this church even meet anymore? What’s going on here?” So the last thing you want somebody to think is, “Is this church even gathering anymore?” And it doesn’t look good on the church if it’s not up to date. And you don’t want people struggling with the fact of, “Okay, well, I’m not going to go because I don’t even think they’re meeting because they haven’t updated a sermon in six months.
Rohn Gibson (19:11):
So make sure that you’re doing that, that you’re updating the sermon. Another thing that that does, and Isabelle touched on this is, a lot of people. Let’s just be honest, there’s fear. There’s a lot of fear about going to a church. I don’t know these people. I don’t know what to expect when I go there. So a lot of people, we hear it time and time again. I was actually, my wife was just sharing this about a month and a half ago about a friend of hers that they just moved into an area and they’re looking at churches. And the first thing they would do is go to the sermons and listen, because it tells so much about a church or even watch because they had actually posted videos. So now you know so much about that church, that it can remove a lot of that anxiety about what you’re going to experience when you go to that church for the first time.
Rohn Gibson (19:55):
So make sure that you have uploaded sermons and even better that when you show update sermons, obviously you can do audio or you can do the video embed. So if you can, and you should, if you’re live streaming, have those recordings that then you can embed and make available right there through the sermon. So make sure that those sermons are up to date. So when people come there, they can feel comfortable and confident that yes. Okay, this is the church I’m going to, I already know what to expect when I get there. And you remove any concern about, “Is this church even meeting?” Because your site’s up to date and they don’t even question that because they can see a message from two days ago when they come and visit your site. So make sure your sermons are updated.
Isabelle Faletti (20:37):
Exactly. And even for current members, it’s an easy way that they can here watch whatever kind of tool you have of previous sermon. So if you had members who were out of town or they’re a sick, your website is the place that they can always trust. That will be up to date.
Rohn Gibson (20:58):
Yeah. And pastor Andy right here, I mean, this is literally how easy it is with ChurchSpring. I spent two minutes on Sunday after lunch and update the sermons and add the morning sermons, easy piece. So with ChurchSpring, and again, regardless of whether you use ChurchSpring or not, we hope you’d get benefit from this episode today. But if you are a ChurchSpring user right there, you’re hearing it from one of our users, pastor Andy there, of how easy it is to do so really no excuse, make that two minutes of time to communicate effectively to remove some discomfort from potential visitors coming to your church for the first time.
Isabelle Faletti (21:37):
Yeah. I feel like that’s a bonus tactic that we just gave. It doesn’t take five minutes to upload your sermons it takes two minutes-
Rohn Gibson (21:44):
There you go.
Isabelle Faletti (21:44):
And we hear that from Andy right there. So we’re giving you back three minutes with this tactic. I love that. So our fourth tactic here is create events on your church website. Similar to what Rohn had just mentioned. You don’t want to hear from your members, “Oh, I didn’t know about that. I didn’t know we had that event going on.” Your website is, and I’m keep saying this, but it is your home base. It is where you are encouraging and telling your members to be going to, to learn about any updates, any upcoming events. It’s also where your visitors are coming to see, “Is this an active, healthy church? How are they having live streaming events? Are they meeting in person? Are they meeting my needs in my life season?” Your events is kind of a sneak peek into the culture of your church. If you have small groups, if you have cookie baking times.
Isabelle Faletti (22:52):
So with ChurchSpring, with other website platforms you can schedule your events that you have coming up. So make sure to always add your worship events that you have or your Sunday meetings that may seem not like a special event, but that’s still an event that you want your guests to know about. And also your members to know that you are still meeting, may be in person or it may be live streaming or may be both. So that’s another way that you can communicate that you may have various options for people to attend live stream or in-person and then make sure to add any special events that you do have coming up.
Isabelle Faletti (23:38):
So such as your Christmas Eve service or any kind of Christmas light, looking extravaganza that a small group maybe working on. This is a great way again to show, communicate to your members, what you have coming up and just show the culture of your church and show that there are different ways that visitors and members can get involved and get to know each other. I know, especially right now, we’re in a pandemic people are looking for things to do, and your events is a great way to communicate that to your members and to your community.
Rohn Gibson (24:19):
Absolutely. All right. So we have shared our top four so far, and we’ve got one more for you and possibly a bonus, possibly.
Isabelle Faletti (24:29):
Let see.
Rohn Gibson (24:29):
What do you think? Should we give them the bonus?
Isabelle Faletti (24:34):
Only if people want it. If people don’t want it, I’m not going to tell them about a bonus.
Rohn Gibson (24:35):
Yes. So let us know if you’d like the bonus. Because if you want, we’ll just save your time and we will give it to you. but it’s really good.
Isabelle Faletti (24:44):
It is.
Rohn Gibson (24:44):
So we’ll see what you have to say. So number five, audit and test your website. So I know that can say, especially when you use that word audit, because it’s like, “What!” And really what we’re talking about is go and review your site. So many times we just get so in the isolated, “Okay. I’m just going to go upload the sermon. I’m just going to go upload or add this event. I’m just going to go do this thing.” That we miss a lot of things that are just out of date. So now is a great time to go to your site, review it, make sure there’s no information that’s out of date.
Rohn Gibson (25:20):
A couple of the things specifically that we would recommend that you check out is go and test your contact form. So you absolutely should have a contact form on your site. And you want to make sure that it’s actually going to the right person. How many times do we set something up and then maybe the person that was in that role changed roles or there’s no longer, whatever. Just test it, make sure it works, make sure it’s going to the right person to make sure that obviously there’s follow up happening based on contact forms that are coming in. Many times at Christmas time, you’re going to get people reaching out for different reasons. Maybe it’s questions about COVID policies, maybe it’s questions about who knows what, but you want to make it easy for them to be able to engage and interact with you.
Rohn Gibson (26:08):
So make sure it’s up to date and make sure it’s going to the right person. And then just check your contact information. And I know that seems so basic, but you’d be surprised how many times the church’s phone number changed or even address. I mean, there’s a lot of more mobile type churches these days. So check the address, make sure that everything’s up to date there on that contact page, check your live stream, make sure everything’s working. The last thing you want to have happen is your live stream network during this critical time of the year. So now you shouldn’t be doing this every week anyway. So if you’re doing live streams every week, which we encourage you to, you’re probably good to go, but for those that maybe they’re only live streaming special services like this, make sure that your live stream is connected, everything looks good and you’re ready to go.
Rohn Gibson (26:56):
Next would be your giving page, make sure that you’re giving pages is up to date. Maybe you now offer online giving or you want to make it super clear all the ways that a church can participate in giving at your church. So just review the giving page, make sure everything looks good, click on the giving button, make sure everything’s working like you want it to, so just double check that. And then, and I know this may seem so obvious, but literally last week or the week before last, I forget which as we were talking about this episode, I pulled up a church and it still had information on there about an April COVID schedule in the service bar. The service bar that’s on every single page. It’s still had special April service times, whatever, because of COVID related things. That doesn’t communicate well to a first-time visitor that your church is still gathering.
Rohn Gibson (27:52):
So make sure, check all those things that many times I don’t know about you, but like when you’re editing something, maybe it’s a blog post or an email that you’re getting ready to send. And you’ve written words so many times that you just like blow right by him because I’ve seen him so many times. Slow down even just five minutes, literally take five minutes and go through your site slowly and just look at those main areas of your site to make sure that they’re up-to-date. Service times are up to date, location, phone number, giving page, the things that we’ve walked through to make sure that you’re communicating effectively, because that’s absolutely what we want to do during this very important time of year. So audit and test to make sure your website’s ready to go to receive those existing church members to make sure you’re communicating effectively with them as well as for potential first-time visitors as they visit your site for the first time.
Isabelle Faletti (28:48):
Yeah, this is so important. And I feel like when you’re not supposed to say that you have a favorite kid. I feel like that’s how I am here. I’m not supposed to have a favorite tactic out of these five minute tactics, but this might be my favorite one because it’s so important. And you can save so much time and stress by doing this testing and this auditing before. So if you find that your live streaming isn’t work, that’s okay. Isn’t working. That’s okay because you have the time and the mental capacity to deal with that. So you’re not finding out that your giving page isn’t working or your live streaming isn’t connected on Christmas Eve and trying not to panic. So if you want to not have stress this Christmas season for your church website, audit and test your website.
Rohn Gibson (29:41):
Yes. And Andy’s recommendation here is pure gold.
Isabelle Faletti (29:44):
Yeah.
Rohn Gibson (29:44):
So invite someone else, maybe even multiple people. I’m sure you all have people in your church that maybe if there’s a misspelling on the site, they kindly lovingly approach you and say, “Didn’t see there’s a misspelling on the site.” Those are the people who are volunteering and saying, “Let me help you.” So like Andy said, go and find those people that kindly and lovingly tell you when there’s errors on the site and invite them to participate in that ministry in your church, how awesome would that be to get them involved? So, anyway, great recommendation there, Andy. Couldn’t agree more. Let’s get other people involved in looking at it as well, giving that feedback. All right. Bonus tactic. Bonus, icing on the cake. And I absolutely love this one. So tell us what’s the bonus packet for today Isabelle?
Isabelle Faletti (30:39):
I need a drum roll. A little drum roll-
Rohn Gibson (30:40):
There you go.
Isabelle Faletti (30:40):
Drum roll here. Create a Christmas blog post. So let me unpack that a little bit more for you. Create a blog post specifically of the top five things to do in your city this Christmas season. So this is a great way that you can really connect with your community in a low stress manner that meets their needs. So right now, myself included, everybody’s kind of looking for some fun probably affordable things to do this Christmas season. And your church for one thing has at least one thing that they can do this Christmas season. And that is, attend your Christmas Eve service. So just, it may be you or maybe a volunteer within your church who can write this blog article and do a quick search online, or what is your family like to do during a Christmas season?
Isabelle Faletti (31:46):
And add that to the top five things to do in your city, this Christmas in 2020. So some examples could be a Christmas concert, maybe at your church, maybe at a neighboring church of yours. Christmas light looking, a food drive, a downtown stroll, even to look at the Christmas lights and the Christmas shops. And then again include your Christmas Eve service as one of these tips. So create that blog article and then remember what we’ve been saying all episode long, share it on your social media pages, send it in an email blast that you include to your members and then ask your members specifically to share that blog article on their social media pages. So as Rohn had mentioned you want to be asking your members to be sharing your content because once they share on their Facebook page on their Instagram, they’re then reaching their friends, a whole new group of people that previously you didn’t even have any contact with.
Isabelle Faletti (32:57):
And this blog article, it’s a fun low pressure way for people to interact with your church. You’re giving them some again, fun things to do in your city. So I’ll just pop up the title here of what you can use right here, top five things to do in your city name. So from you be in Colorado Springs, this Christmas in 2020. That will also help search engine results. When people are typing in what to do in Colorado Springs for the Christmas, your blog article will appear in those search terms and what an awesome way to have someone find out about your church.
Rohn Gibson (33:39):
Yeah. And it’s, it’s a great way to serve people in your community. Because there may be a lot of people new in your community and they’re Google searching this and ultimately that’s the benefit. We here we’re at churches all the time. I want people when they do a search for church city name, that I’m the first one that pops up. Well, there’s a lot of churches want that same thing. So what you have to do is create content and put the right search engine optimized types of content out there that people also, one of the big factors in SEO is people linking to your site. So are you adding value to the people in your community? People will link to your page that you provide and that’s going to help those search engine rankings as well, as well as just providing a service, right?
Isabelle Faletti (34:20):
Yeah.
Rohn Gibson (34:20):
Just providing a service to your community about those things that are available. So we want to take action. I know we’ve got some questions. We’re going to come back to that. So if you any questions about the things we’ve mentioned, go ahead and add them in so we can make sure that we get all of those answer. But just to review, because we want to take action. We’re not just doing this for fun. We want you to take action on the things that we’re talking about. So these six things again, because we added a bonus. So number one, use the Social Scheduler. Number two, update your home page, number three, upload sermons, number four, create events, number five, audit and review and test your website to make sure that everything is ready to go. And then add that blog post to your site, the top five things to do and your city this Christmas. So in Christmas, 2020.
Rohn Gibson (35:08):
So question for you and I want to hear from you, what is the number one thing that you’ve heard today that you are going to commit to doing this week? Again, we’re talking five minutes and as Pastor Andy said, some of these are two minutes.
Isabelle Faletti (35:22):
Great.
Rohn Gibson (35:22):
Okay. So what are you going to commit to do this week? So I want to hear it, type it in the comments. You can even just give us the number. So again, Social Scheduler, getting those social media posts scheduled, updating your homepage, uploading sermons, creating events, auditing, and reviewing and updating your church website to make sure there’s no information from like April or January of last year on there. And then adding that blog post to your site. Great. Cathy is going to update events. Awesome.
Isabelle Faletti (35:55):
Yes. Wonderful, wonderful.
Rohn Gibson (35:57):
Larry’s, yes. Is going to do the blog post. Larry, when you get that blog post put out there, I want you to come back to this video. If you’re watching on Facebook, which you are, because that’s what it says. So come back and post that. I would love to give you a shout out next week to say, Pastor Larry. He did what he said he was going to do. Here’s a sample, an excellent example of taking action based on the feedback that you gave. All five. Yeah, I love it. Go Pastor Ron, going to audit the website. Sheila I’m auditing the website. This is awesome. Awesome.
Isabelle Faletti (36:30):
That’s great.
Rohn Gibson (36:32):
So it’s time to take action. It’s not just about, okay. We heard some really great information, but it’s actually taking action. Larry love that you’re going to come back, share that in the comments so we can review. I’d love to check it out. We may even do a quick review of it and even give you some tips on even how to improve what you’ve done, but we definitely want to give you a shout out and encourage you and taking massive imperfect action. That’s a problem. A lot of people, “If I can do it perfectly, I don’t want to do it.” It’s not about perfect action. It’s about massive imperfect action and implementing these things that we’ve talked about today.
Rohn Gibson (37:07):
So take action. At least one of these tactics, take action on it this week and then come back and let us know what you did. If you’re brand new to ChurchSpring. And maybe you have no idea what we’re talking about. Well, we’d love to invite you to a demo of myself and our co-founder will literally walk you through how to launch a church website in 90 seconds, as well as we’ll walk you through many of the top features of the program, so you can know. When you say Social Scheduler, Social Scheduler, there you go. What are you even talking about?
Rohn Gibson (37:37):
Well, we will literally walk you through it. You can join us ChurchSpring.com/demo. Sign up for a time that best fits your schedule and join us. And we have live chat support in there during normal business hours, eight to five central time. And we’d love to serve you in that way. Maybe you’re the type you don’t want to see it. You just want to jump in and get after it. Well, that’s great. We have an option for you too. We offer a seven day free trial.
Rohn Gibson (38:02):
So you can go to churchspring.com/trial, select the plan that best fits your needs. Sign up, kick the tires on it for seven days. Test it out. If it’s a great fit for you. Wonderful. If it’s not, you say this just isn’t the right fit. Hey, I’ll be the first to say, “We’re not the right fit for everybody.” We’re a right fit for a lot of people, but we’re not the right fit for everybody. And that’s okay. No feelings harmed. You can just cancel the trial and move on to whatever is the best fit for you. So if you’d like to start that trial again, seven-day free trial church,spring.com/trial. Okay. I know I flew through quite a bit of those things. Man, his has been a great session. Any questions? Things we need to circle back on before we wrap things up here.
Isabelle Faletti (38:49):
Yeah. So we have one question from Ron Gardner and he asks the question. “Is there a way to share both on our church, Facebook page and personal page on the Social Scheduler?” So Ron, there is not right now a way to schedule to multiple accounts on your Facebook page using the ChurchSpring Social Scheduler. You do have to link your Social Scheduler account to a business page or a group. However, just like we had talked about today, you want to be sharing this content. So connect your Social Scheduler to your church Facebook page, and then you go to facebook.com on your personal account and share your churches post on that Facebook account. And then when when your friends see the posts that you, that you shared, it will be linking back to your church, Facebook account. And that’s ultimately where you want to be directing people to.
Rohn Gibson (39:53):
Awesome.
Isabelle Faletti (39:56):
I don’t see any other questions, so, o, I do like this comment from Larry. Larry, you said we anticipate a different Christmas Eve, possibly two or three services. We will more than likely use the registration tool to make this happen. Yeah, that’s exactly it. So Christmas Eve will probably look a little differently for a lot of churches this year. And so your website is the best way to communicate multiple Christmas Eve services. If you need people to register any other expectations that you have, that people need to be following. So that’s awesome. Yeah. Use your events on your website to be posting about multiple Christmas Eve services that you may.
Rohn Gibson (40:41):
Yeah. And we’ve got another great question from Cathy. How soon do you recommend updating Christmas images across your site? So, number one you should have your Christmas related events on your site right now with correlated Christmas images. Obviously there’s show up on the events tabs as well as when you promote those events. If you use the Social Scheduler specifically, you’re going to send people directly to that events page that provides the date, the information, the location, and all the details that you include there. So those should be added as soon as possible. What I would recommend as far as like your main website, kind of your main hero image, some of those sorts of things would be right after Thanksgiving. So literally Thanksgiving’s on Thursday on Friday, I would go ahead and start updating those and then keep those through really after Christmas, even through New Year’s even. You can absolutely do that depending on what services and kind of the different activities you have going on at your church.
Rohn Gibson (41:43):
So that’s what we would recommend you do, however, right now, so I know you were specifically asking for images, but I would recommend that you add a block right now to your site. We did a previous episode where we talked about a landing page, creating a landing page for your church, and it’s specifically geared around Christmas and what’s going on around Christmas.
Rohn Gibson (42:04):
So what I would recommend that you do right now, in addition to adding the specific events is actually add a block on your homepage and go crazy without one. It can have the Christmas background image on it, or an image depending on which style you choose, and then you can send them over to that landing page, or you could even send them over to one of the events, related to Christmas, but just putting something on there that if people are starting to think about, “Okay, where am I going to visit this Christmas?” That it’s very easy for them to come to your site and see, “Okay, here’s what’s going on. Okay. Yeah. I want to go to this place. I’m going to start checking it out, watching sermons maybe even attend a live stream.” Those sorts of things before that event actually comes up. So yeah, just a couple of tips there.
Isabelle Faletti (42:54):
Yeah. And then Kathy I will add the link to the Christmas landing page in this episode’s show notes. So later this afternoon, you can go to our show notes at churchspring.com/025 and you can link directly to that Christmas landing page that we’ve created.
Rohn Gibson (43:13):
Great question, Kathy. And I just want to encourage you all. This was just the honestly, kind of praying about this episode before we jumped on here and even thinking about it throughout this week. We just want to be an encouragement to you. And I know some of the times some of this can maybe seem a little overwhelming. So just take one thing. You don’t need to do all of it, and don’t compare yourself to other churches. This is about you. So just pick one thing that you can take action on. And I just want to really encourage you. It’s been a year. Let’s just be honest, 2020 has been a year.
Isabelle Faletti (43:45):
And I got an Amen.
Rohn Gibson (43:46):
So I just want to thank you all for your faithfulness, for sticking with it through all the difficult times of COVID and the unrest in our world and all the things that are going on that you’re sticking with it. And I know many times in ministry, you don’t have anybody that really is that person. I’m grateful to be part of a church where man, I’m blessed to be in a church full of encouragers. But I want to encourage you stick with it, stick with it, walk in the spirit, be in the Word every day, be in prayer, be in community with other believers and keep on keeping on. I just want to thank you all for the work that you do, because you are making a difference in this world. One that we may not see on this side of heaven, but you are making a significant impact.
Rohn Gibson (44:38):
So stick with it, keep on keeping on, we’re getting into that. We’re in the fourth quarter, we’re in the last lap of the year. Let’s finish strong, not through our own strength, not through our own energy, but walking in the spirit and doing what He calls us to do. And we want to be here to support you every step of the way. So thank you for what you’re doing to spread the gospel and your communities. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. So keep on keeping on, stay faithful to what the Lord has called you to do.
Isabelle Faletti (45:16):
Yeah. And I would love to know how can we further support you? How can we further equip you with your church with reaching your community? Ron and I are planning for 2021 for ChurchSpring Live. And ultimately our goal for ChurchSpring Live is to serve you. So that you can serve your members, your neighborhoods. So I would love if you could just drop a comment right now, letting us know what are some topics that want to learn more about. It may be Instagram, how do I get my church website to appear in search results? Or maybe something I don’t know, maybe something completely random that isn’t necessarily about a church website. So that would be a huge favor for us so that we can make sure that we’re equipping you in the way that you need with this ChurchSpring Live. So whether you’re listening live right now, drop a comment, or this is on a replay, also drop a comment of what are areas that you feel like you need more understanding, more education or more encouragement on even. And we want to be there to help fill that space for you.
Rohn Gibson (46:41):
Awesome. And I know we got a great question here. They’re already coming in and this is great. Larry, when are you doing a stream yard presentation? Soon.
Isabelle Faletti (46:49):
Yeah. This year.
Rohn Gibson (46:50):
I don’t know if we have the exact date set yet, but I know-
Isabelle Faletti (46:52):
We do but it may change I’m not going to give out a date right now.
Rohn Gibson (46:55):
Yeah, there you go. We’ve talked about it. We actually talked about it this week specifically. So it is coming very soon potentially before the end of the year. So I’ll just leave it there. We love stream yard and it is a great tool that can be used in the church. So anyway, we will circle back around on that one for sure.
Isabelle Faletti (47:14):
And for those you’re not sure what Stream Yard is, it is a live streaming platform. So that’s actually what we use right now. We’re using Stream Yard to live stream, to Facebook, to YouTube. You have multiple channels that you can live stream to at the same time. So very easy to use. We’ve talked about it in the past, but just so everybody’s caught up on the same page on that.
Rohn Gibson (47:39):
Very good.
Isabelle Faletti (47:40):
Yeah. Awesome.
Rohn Gibson (47:43):
Good ones coming in.
Isabelle Faletti (47:44):
Yeah, it looks like we have some good ones coming in, so thanks everybody. Keep that, keep that coming in. I document them, I record them. And we’ll be including that in future episodes. So thank you so much.
Isabelle Faletti (47:58):
I do want to invite everybody to next week’s ChurchSpring Live for one of our, I would say one of our most frequently asked topics for us to talk about. So maybe you just feel a little unequipped to be creating graphics for your church communications. Maybe just honestly feel frustrated or overwhelmed that you don’t have the graphic design skills or you don’t have a graphic design staff member on your team to create stunning images, to resize images for your church website. Well, I have good news. Even if you are not a designer at all, if you don’t know what colors go together, if you don’t have a budget for design software there a solution.
Isabelle Faletti (48:48):
And that is my favorite tool, a couple of my favorite tools, Canva AND WordSwag. So next week ChurchSpring Live episode O26, Thursday, November 19th, myself and Jen. Jen is on our customer happiness team. She’s a wonderful woman. You all probably have interacted personally with her. We’re going to bring her on at ChurchSpring Live next week. I cannot wait. It is going to be such a fun party. And she loves helping churches create graphics for their websites. So we’re going to introduce our favorite graphic design tools, Canva, WordSwag…
Isabelle Faletti (49:33):
Knowing us, We may just throw in another tool there. And we just walk through each step that you need to know. To resize images, create social media graphics, using these tools with no design knowledge; no budget or a limited budget so that we can equip you and you can again, reach your community, just making a difference in this sphere of influence that God has placed your church. So that is next week, episode 026, 10:00 AM, central time, Thursday, November 19th. So mark it on your calendar. You’ll meet another ChurchSpring member, Jen. She is excited to hop on here and just interact with our members and churches all around the nation in this unique way that we have.
Rohn Gibson (50:24):
Yes, I cannot wait for that episode.
Isabelle Faletti (50:26):
Yeah.
Rohn Gibson (50:26):
Jen loves serving the church and yeah, you’ve got a massive cheerleader in Jen. So I cannot wait for her to jump on here, and you get to meet her through a live episode like this. So until then, you all have a blessed week. Let’s take action. There are things to follow up on. As far as action items, we had some people making some commitments to come back to this episode, share those so we can review them, but keep on keeping on, stay faithful, stay faithful. We don’t need to be easy, but it is absolutely worth it. So thank you all for joining us today. We look forward to seeing you all next week. God bless everyone. Bye-Bye
Isabelle Faletti (51:03):
Bye-by
