CSL 005 – How do I Select a Content Management System for my Church Website?

Isabelle Faletti (00:00:00):

Hello. Hello, welcome to ChurchSpring live episode zero zero five. We are so excited to have you here today. We are going to talk about the number one pain and frustration that pastors and church leaders experience with their church website. And yes, we will talk about what you can do about it. Don’t worry. We won’t just focus on the pain and frustration! When Rohn and Mike our co-founders of ChurchSpring founded ChurchSpring. They polled hundreds of church leaders and they found that church leaders and pastors, they were super frustrated with the church website because it had outdated content. They didn’t even know how to log in. It was just really difficult to edit their website. So today is personal and close to ChurchSpring and the heart of what we do here. So we will talk about how an easy content management system can save you so much time and stress when you were managing your church website. So hello, I’m Isabellele. I I’m on the customer success team and joining me today is Rohn Gibson cofounder at ChurchSpring.

Rohn Gibson (00:01:10):

Hello, everyone. It looks like we’ve got some people chiming in here in the comments. This is great.

Isabelle Faletti (00:01:16):

That’s awesome. Hello! Hello! Yes. keep on commenting. If you have any questions we want to hear from you make sure to introduce yourself who, where you’re from your church name. You may have, you have to give stream yard permission so that we can display your name and your comment on our live stream here. So make sure to follow the steps. And we would love to hear from you for those of you who are new to ChurchSpring, we are a soccer provider committed to the great commission. So what that means is that we help church leaders by providing really practical tools to aid in growing the local church for the glory of Christ. So we are really excited to jump right in here. And just equip you with some, some practical tools.

Rohn Gibson (00:02:03):

Yeah. So let’s jump in before. I maybe share a few more announcements. I want to welcome Wayne. We are glad you’re here, Wayne, and looking to see how this helps a group of 30. That’s so awesome that meet at a restaurant. So with what we’re going to share today, super relevant to you, if you have any questions, Wayne is we’re, we’re talking through this, please do not hesitate to share them, but it’s going to be very applicable for you and your context. There have even 30 people meeting at a local restaurant. So that’s awesome. Welcome Cathy as well. Ginger road, Christian Church in canal, Winchester, Ohio. All right, that was, that’s close to where I was born and raised. So welcome Cathy. We are thrilled to have you here and for those who are others who are joining and we can see we’ve got a few others, please introduce yourself. If you have any questions along the way, please do not hesitate to put them in the comments. We look forward to to answering as many of those during our session today, as we can. Also if you have any prayer requests we are gonna wrap up with prayer. We count that as a real privilege and an honor to be able to lift those prayer requests up. So if you do have a pray quest during this, please don’t hesitate to put those in the comments as well.

Isabelle Faletti (00:03:26):

Mike from Rescue House Church, a church plant in Fargo, North Dakota. That is awesome. Oh, this is, this is a fun crowd today. I’m, I’m excited to talk with you guys here and it looks like we have couple more joining here as we’re diving in. So keep introducing yourself and we’ll give you a shout out.

Rohn Gibson (00:03:44):

Yes, absolutely. So if you could help us by liking this video but in addition to that, we are just trying to reach as many pastors and church leaders as we can with these resources to be as much help and service as we can possibly be. So if, if you could, if you’re on Facebook, which you probably are, that’s why you’re watching this, go ahead and click the share button and you can actually share this content out to your Facebook page. So if there’s other pastors church leaders that you may be friends with on Facebook, they would be able to see this and join us as well. So we would love it if you would do that. We are going to be posting this later. So if for whatever reason you have to jump off, we know that ministry happens and things come up at the last minute.

Rohn Gibson (00:04:30):

So if you do have to jump off, don’t worry. You can always come back and check it out, both on our Facebook page, under the videos tab, as well as we will be posting this on our website with show notes. So we’re actually gonna give the outline of what we’re going to talk about. That’ll be posted there as well as any links, resources, and even the transcript of this episode will be posted onto our face or onto our website at churchspring.com/CSL005 for church bring live. So churchspring.com/CSL005. Cause this is episode zero, zero five. Can you believe it’s been five episodes already? Wow. That’s so much fun. I can’t wait to the day it’s episode 300 episodes. It’s gonna be awesome. So anyway, we are thrilled to have all of you joining us today.

Rohn Gibson (00:05:18):

So Kathleen, yes. Columbus, Ohio go Buckeye. Sorry. I just had to throw that in. Whenever somebody says Columbus, Ohio, it’s kind of like just in my DNA, if you’re a fan of another college football team, leaving the comments, you know, you can feel free to talk a little smack, Lord willing – we’ll have college football season this year. We’ll see what God does there. But so quick question, and then we’re going to jump into the topic today of your church website, content management system and why it’s so, so important. But before we jump in, I have a question for you that I want you to engage with us. We don’t want this to be two talking heads on a screen to you. We want to engage with you. So please again, introduce yourself. But the question for today is what is the desired outcome you hope to achieve with your church website?

Rohn Gibson (00:06:11):

So leave your number one, not five different things. If you could only achieve one thing with your church website, what would you desire that to be? So I’m not going to give any examples this week. I did last week and I don’t want to plant anything, but what is the one outcome you would hope to achieve with your church website? Go ahead. Put that in the, Oh yes. Kathy’s got her Buckeye shirt on. Good. Gotta represent. Go ahead right now. We’ve got some people on watching. I’d love to, I’m just going to pause for a second. Oh, go ahead. What is that number one outcome you would hope to achieve with your church website? So here we go. We got one from Mike. Thank you, Mike, for commenting front door for newcomers. So you want people to find you online, see about your church and then come and actually walk through the front door of your local church. So we’ve got one from Stan outreach. Yes. It’s one of the very important, important pillars of the discipleship. Obviously reaching people. Those outreach efforts are so very important. We’ve got Cathy simple updating for others when I retire at the end of the year. Oh my goodness. Yes. Yes. So we’re going to talk a lot about that in our

Isabelle Faletti (00:07:32):

This is a great one, Cathy for you, a great triChurchSpring live for you to be attending. That’s exactly what Rohn and Mike heard all the time is that people don’t know how to edit, edit, and update retire. We don’t want your website to just collect cobwebs. We want people to be going to your website and interacting and engaging with your church. So I’m, I’m excited for you to kind of learn more about this.

Rohn Gibson (00:07:57):

Yes. All right. One last one before we jump in

Isabelle Faletti (00:08:01):

It looks like Rohn, he has experienced seeing some slow wifi today, so it’s like he froze there. So livestream, we got a lot of it. Lots of Grace’s extended. Looks like your back Rohn. Hello.

Rohn Gibson (00:08:14):

Awesome. Good. Can you hear me now?

Isabelle Faletti (00:08:17):

We can hear you now!

Rohn Gibson (00:08:18):

Awesome. Well, I’m just going to keep talking and anyway, I apologize if we don’t have any internet. So one question that has come in is how do I reach my target audience of church hurt people, man has so good that want to engage. So let’s make sure we bounce around or come back to that. Cause that’s going to be an actually, we’re going to talk a little bit about that even today, just with the topic. So let’s go ahead and jump in with questions.

Isabelle Faletti (00:08:46):

Yeah. All right. So Rohn, if you could give us a little background of what is a church website, content management. I’ve we like to define terms here in ChurchSpring Live so that we can all be on the same page so that we can understand the need and why this may be important. So what is a church website? Content management system.

Rohn Gibson (00:09:09):

Yeah. So a church website content management system is the actual system that you log into to update your church website. So it manages just like the word says it manages the content of your website. So it’s super important. It is not one of the most attractive topics to talk about when you start talking about church websites it’s kind of like a foundation of a house. When you go to look at the house, you don’t go around with man. This foundation is amazing. I absolutely love the color and the design and all those things. It’s just, it’s the foundation. It’s the guts. That’s so important because it’s going to really determine it’s a big factor in determining the ultimate success of your church website. So that’s why it’s so important, but is the system you log into to actually manage the content on your church website?

Isabelle Faletti (00:10:05):

Yep. That’s great. Okay. Awesome. So tell us them as a church website, content management system, really that important.

Rohn Gibson (00:10:15):

Yes, it absolutely is. So when we surveyed all those pastors and church leaders, the number one thing they said is that their church website was just this massive source of pain or frustration. And as we dug into that more it was because it was very hard to manage. I mean, it was a beast to manage whether it was volunteers related, whether it was the person who had to manage it actually had to be a programmer and know how to write code and make changes to the code. Like it was just, it was this, this beast of a system and it’s so, so important. So yes, it’s critically important. And I would ask you this question in return is effective communication important for your church and the answer to that is yes. And yes, there is no, no to that. It’s absolutely critical, effective communication is very, very important.

Rohn Gibson (00:11:07):

So your church website content management system is critical and we’re going to share some things that you need to consider to make sure that you choose a good one. I literally talked to a pastor and he shared that his church website was an embarrassment, like literally embarrassed to send people when he would meet people out in his community. He was embarrassed to say, yeah, go check out our website at dududu.com. And learn. You can learn about our service times. You can learn about our people. You can learn about our statement of faith, all those things. Like he was literally embarrassed. That was his exact words. I am embarrassed to send people to my church website because it just doesn’t represent us well, that all ties back to the content management system that manages your church. So it’s critically important. And we’re going to talk about some of the things that you need to consider when I’m choosing that and implementing a new content management system at your church.

Isabelle Faletti (00:12:03):

Wow. Wow. That is, Oh, that just breaks my heart to hear that story Rohn. I mean, just last week we were talking about what people form an impression when they are on your website in 0.5 seconds is that

Rohn Gibson (00:12:17):

Point Zero five seconds.

Isabelle Faletti (00:12:19):

Point zero five seconds. Oh. And so if you have outdated content, if your leadership isn’t even updated, then visitors are getting an inaccurate impression of your church. So this is why this topic is so important. So when, when people are looking into church websites what things should they consider when choosing a Trish management system for their church website?

Rohn Gibson (00:12:48):

Yeah. So what a lot of people are probably thinking we’re going to jump right into as the technology side of things and it actually starts with people, you know, that’s really what ministry is all about is people. So when it comes to this aspect of your ministry, the first thing you need to think about is what is the skill level of the person who’s going to be managing your church website. So is this person a highly technical person and not only the person who’s gonna maybe get it started, but actually the people who are going to be the people to actually manage, manage it and update it moving forward. So really understanding the skill set and the skill level, if those people feel comfortable and like Microsoft word, and maybe not even super comfortable, but they can create a word document and add to it, are they that level or are they more of the level where they can go in and they can write code and do those sorts of things that’s extremely important.

Rohn Gibson (00:13:47):

And ultimately the the more basic you can make your content management system the better, because that means, you know, you’re going to have people come and go. The Lord is going to move people along, or people will leave the church for various reasons. You want to have a content management system that you can plug somebody in and they can begin updating events, adding sermons, changing content. All of those sorts of things are so important. So you want to make sure that you’re very aware of the skill level, that you’re desiring for that person to be able to manage your church website. Then you want to start thinking about features. So what are the features you want to have as part of your church website? So common things that people, unfortunately they think about after the fact after they’ve chosen, chosen a church website provider or the content management system for the church website, they kind of put the cart before the horse and you don’t want to do that here.

Rohn Gibson (00:14:38):

So things specific features you want to consider are sermons. So being able to upload your sermons, whether that’s audio, whether that’s video, another thing to think about there as podcasting. So you don’t want to have to go and create a, you know, sign up for a totally different service to be able to offer podcasts where people can subscribe to it, whether it’s through Spotify or podcasts on their phone or their, or their smartphone, whatever it is they can even listen to them now in their cars through podcasts. So sermon audio, you want to make sure that it has that feature and I would also encourage you to make sure it’s got the podcasting component as well, live streaming. I don’t really need to talk too much about that with the pandemic and everything that we’ve gone through. Everyone is fully aware. Who’s listening and we’ll watch this later, how important live stream is for your ministry.

Rohn Gibson (00:15:29):

So making sure that you’ve got live stream integrations there a calendar with integrated event registration, we look at so many church websites that have these bolt on calendars that don’t, they’re not made for the church. They’re made for just general use. They’re not made for specifically for the church. So making sure that you have a calendar with integrated event registration, we’re going to talk more about that here. You have something to add there, Isabelle. Nope. Okay, awesome. And then another feature, and this is one that a lot of churches they’ll think about maybe a year or two down the road. But we want you to think about it right up front, because the worst thing you could do is not think about something then all this time and energy and building the site and training your your staff, or maybe it’s even you and updating it to find out, Oh, it doesn’t do this thing.

Rohn Gibson (00:16:20):

So now I have to start all over again. So a church directory is one of the features that we would highly encourage. You make sure that whatever provider you select, whether it’s ChurchSpring or otherwise, that it’s easy to integrate a church directory into your website. You know, ultimately we’re at, we’re a community, we’re a community of believers. So we want to make it easy for people to be able to connect and get information and reach out all those features are extremely important. So make sure you consider a church directory there as well. The last thing I’ll share is that you want to make sure that your content management system is up with the times. So what I mean by that is technology is constantly changing. You know, you look at even a year ago or two years ago at the amount of mobile visitors that come to your website.

Rohn Gibson (00:17:09):

We talked a lot about this last week in episode zero, zero four. But the amount of visitors who are visiting on a mobile device is going to continue to increase speeds of the internet on mobile devices. The mobile devices continue to get better. That’s only going to continue to increase and you want to make sure that you have a content management system that is updated with the times currently, but then also gives you the flexibility to be able to grow as technology changes. That’s one of the many benefits of ChurchSpring. You don’t have to go in and download and update something. And then that breaks a bunch of things on your church website, as far as your content management system, we do all of that for you. So you don’t have to go in and understand all the trends that’s going on with technology, all the changes that are going on with technology, right?

Rohn Gibson (00:17:52):

You’re in ministry, you’re out there ministering to people doing hospital visits, meeting people in your community, walking alongside those who are hurting. Like you don’t have the time to be able to spend monitoring technology and staying up to date with them and then figuring out, okay, how does this relate to my church website? What do I need to change? And we do all that for you at ChurchSpring. You want to make sure that you have a content management system that is feature proof. That’s up to date now, but it’s also preparing you for the future of changes that are going to happen in the world of technology today. Yeah,

Isabelle Faletti (00:18:24):

That’s great. Thank you, Rohn. So Kathy, I know that you mentioned that you’ll be retiring at the end of the year here. So it’s really important for you that whoever will be stepping in for you to update the website, that they can easily update the website. So those items that Rohn just mentioned, his, his first point, know the skill level of the first managing your church website. The great thing about ChurchSpring and Kathy, I know I’ve, I’ve worked with you a couple of times in support tickets. So I know that your, your, your with ChurchSpring but what’s ChurchSpring. We have a really, really easy to use content management system so that when God brings in new people, people go out on, on new seasons. It won’t be this huge, stressful learning curve for a new person to learn how to manage the website.

Isabelle Faletti (00:19:14):

So if you have any questions, Kathy, about how you can transition your new website admin to help you manage your website, reach out there to you send in a support ticket and we can help you give you a few resources that we would recommend for, for that, that new person would be stepping in. So I’m, I’m excited to be working with you on that, but that’s, that’s why the church management content management system is so important so that when there’s natural transitions your, your new person who’s managing your website, doesn’t have to have a degree in web development or know coding. I don’t, I don’t know each TML that’s over my head and, and I can easily update our church website. So, okay, Rohn, I have fewer questions here. What features, so what specific features should we look for in a church website, content management system?

Rohn Gibson (00:20:09):

Yeah, so we talked about a few, so I’m just going to highlight those again, and then we’ll talk about several others. So again, this all starts with the skill set of the people that are actually gonna be managing your church website. So make sure that you understand the skill level of the person, what they can, and can’t do some content management systems out there. You have to add plugins. And then the content management system will update and the plugins don’t updates and it breaks things. I know we’ve got people I’m sure who have experienced that. I’ve experienced it more times than I want to admit. And that’s one of the benefits of ChurchSpring is that we don’t have any of these external plugins. It’s all one system. So you’re not gonna have to worry about breaking anything or doing anything as it relates to that.

Rohn Gibson (00:20:53):

So inline editing, inline editing is one of the most important features when it comes to managing your church website. So what I mean by inline editing is that literally you log into your website, you’re viewing the website, as your visitors would view it. You can click and edit content, click save, and it’s saved right there in the view, just like your website, visitors are going to see you don’t log into some backend content management system like you would do with nearly every other mainstream website platform out there. You would log in on the backend, you would update it and an interface that doesn’t look anything like your church website, and then you would have to open up a new tab or window refresh it. Okay. Did that change work? Does it look like I want it to look and is a massive time-waster and the harder something is to do the less likely you are to do it.

Rohn Gibson (00:21:40):

Okay. That’s like a basic, basic principle, right? We would all agree with that. The harder something is the less likely we are to do it. So when it comes to adding events or updating events on your church, on your church website, if it’s hard to do, you’re probably not going to do it. If it’s hard to add sermons to your church website, you’re probably not going to do it. So that’s why we’ve made it as easy as possible to update and manage your church website and inline editing as one of those powerful features that will make it easy to manage. Therefore, your church website will get updated, or I’ll say the odds are higher, that your website will get updated. You want an integrated calendar. I’ve already talked about this. You do not want to have to bolt on some third party calendar after the fact, then you’re going to have responsive.

Rohn Gibson (00:22:26):

What I mean by responsive issues is that it’s not going to show up correctly on a mobile device. It’s going to look really odd and people aren’t gonna use it. So just like on the management side, if something’s difficult to use, it’s not going to get updated the same. Thing’s true. On the user side, if I visit your website on a mobile device and it doesn’t come up super clean and I can find what I’m looking for really easy, guess what people aren’t gonna use your website. It’s not going to be an effective tool for communication and your ministry. They’re going to bounce and they’re going to leave. So super important integrated calendar. That’s also mobile friendly. We’ve already talked about sermon, audio and the importance of having that podcasting feature that’s directly integrated. So you don’t have to go and try to find a different third party service to be able to do that with ChurchSpring, we do that all for you live streaming again, critical for many different reasons.

Rohn Gibson (00:23:15):

Yes, we taught we’ve, you know, we’ve just come through are really in the process of coming through the, the pandemic while this is still super relevant. Even outside of that, there’s going to be people who are suffering with different health issues, whether it’s cancer or otherwise that are, it’s just not safe for them, or they’re not able to come to church. Well, you can bring the church to them. And some of these avenues like live streaming, so highly encourage you I’m live streaming super important church directory. Again, it’s about being a community, a community of believers, not just being consumers and showing up to church and then leaving, but actually being a community of believers that are walking together to reach your community. So church directory, critical component in that process, social scheduling so social scheduling, social media is a powerful tool.

Rohn Gibson (00:24:02):

You’re proving it right now, right now. You, you are on Facebook watching Facebook live. You’re listening to us communicate and add value to you. I hope add value to in educating you on how to have a more effective church website. So social scheduling is one of the tools that we use and we’ve built in the ChurchSpring, where you can literally, when you add your events, when you add your sermons, you can actually schedule out your social media content right within ChurchSpring. And we will automatically post it to those top social media channels that you should be using. So social scheduling, powerful tool, you should absolutely be using it. And then lastly, kind of a bonus feature you want, you want a website platform that makes it super easy for you to change the design. So many of these platforms, it’s like you’re locked into a design.

Rohn Gibson (00:24:51):

So maybe two years later, when it’s time to refresh and kind of give a new look and really update the freshness of your church website, it’s almost like you have to start from scratch. So you want to make sure that you have a tool that literally you can change the church website with literally a click and what church bring you can do that. You get access to all the designs. You can change the designs at any time. You’re not limited where all you can only use this one design and you have to use it for a year and then you can switch. You can literally switch it as many times as you want. And when you click on it, it’s automatically going to make the content and all the resources that you’ve already uploaded. And you’ve already put in available in that new design. So you’re not gonna have to go in and retrofit and do a bunch of changes, which trust me, I’ve been there many, many times. We’ve made it just, yeah. Oh man. Pulling out hair. I’ve I have lost many, a follicle on upgrades for our church website. So highly encourage you to really think through those features. And this is just a sample. So take a minute, maybe 15 or 30 and really sit down and think, what are the absolute must have features that you need for your church website, and then make sure that as you look at a content management system, that that content management system has the features that you’re looking.

Isabelle Faletti (00:26:08):

Yup. Yep. And if you get stuck because you’re so new to websites, so I know we just had someone join in here Saint James, and you said that you’re from Alabama. Hello. And you don’t have a website yet. You are coming into the ground level. That’s OK. First off. That’s why we exist here at ChurchSpring. But maybe, maybe some of you are new to websites. You don’t really know what features do I need. Well, Rohn, first off, he just mentioned really helpful features, but it can be also helpful for you to just to sit down with that pen paper and write down what are you frustrated with now? So what do you wish you could do, whether you’re spending too much time? That is what you mean with your church websites. So welcome Saint James you, yeah, you’re in the right place here with ChurchSpring Um I can’t wait to get you started on our new website. When you had a question, can I change the size of the logo? It sounds like that’s a specific ChurchSpring website, question, send us a ticket and we’re helping out with that. The answer is yes. We can go ahead and do that for you as though send that, take it in and our team will make sure to respond back to you real quick. So thanks for asking if anybody else has any questions about church website, content management systems. Drop a question right now on the comments. We want to make sure that we are answering them. We’ll transition here into our last kind of scheduled question. But if you have specific questions for whether you’re listening live, or if you’re listening at a later time again, put that comment in and we want to make sure to answer them. All right. So while I wait for people to drop in, in questions, Rohn, last question here for you. How can you tell if a website has an easy church content management system?

Rohn Gibson (00:28:00):

Yes. And it’s so easy to tell because churches that you go to their website and they literally still have events on there from three years ago, that’s evidence right there that they don’t have an easy to use church website, content management system. And people can say, well, they may not just have somebody there in their church that can actually go in and manage it. Well, I’ll tell you if they have the right content management system, anybody in their church can go in and update content like that. As well as with the example that I just gave a good content management system will automatically remove all dates, right? So like we’re doing that work. Exactly. Exactly. So like a ChurchSpring, you don’t have to remember to go in and remove old dates off your church website. We automatically take outdated things, outdated content off your church website.

Rohn Gibson (00:28:49):

So you don’t have free members. So what is a, a how can you tell it’s an easy to use church website, content management system, the sites up to date? Another thing is that you have, and there may be a few chuckles out there for this, but your website, administrators have me. They’re not stressed out. When you say, Hey, can we add this content to our website? Or can we do this on our website? They’re not like, Oh man, I don’t know how to do that. It’s going to take me forever to figure that, that thing out. Yeah, we used to have people that would reach out to us and tell us actually, in our webinar that what we did in just a second, it took them like hours to try to figure out. And the current content management system they’re using, like updating the navigation on your site.

Rohn Gibson (00:29:30):

But with ChurchSpring, you literally click the little pencil icon. You edit it, you can drag it where you want it to be click save. And you’re done with some of these other ones. You have to find out where it even is on the backend. So anyway, one of those telltale signs, do you have an easy to use content management system is your website administrator is happy. Another thing is your congregation is happy because they’re actually utilizing the website to find out what’s going on at the church. So if in the pastor’s happy, cause they can actually tell people, Hey, go to our church website. You want to see what events, what things are coming up the times, if there’s any changes, any of that, Hey, go to our church website. It’s going to be up to date and, and you can know that as the pastor and as a church leader without I’d be like, Oh, well hold on a second.

Rohn Gibson (00:30:13):

Let me pull it up. Is it right? Okay. Now, now you can go. If it’s an easy to use content management system and you have somebody owning that there at the church with confidence, you can tell people, Hey, go check out our church website, all the information’s there, as far as who we are. So for those new people, if you have sermons, I’m actually on your site, which we highly encourage you. And for those new people, they can kind of, you know, experience, okay, what is, what is their services like even before they walk through the door? So you can remove that anxiety that somebody has, but ultimately your congregation is going to be happy because the website’s up to date and therefore people actually use it. And your pastor is going to be happy and not embarrassed. Remember back to what we were talking about earlier, literally pastors were embarrassed to tell people to go check out their church website. Cause it was so out of date events from years ago. Well, hopefully Lord willing. If you are a ChurchSpring user your pastor, if that’s you, or you know, if you’re, if you’re another church leader working with a pastor with confidence, you can tell people, go check out our church website because it’s gonna reflect truly your local church from events, from the content that’s posted there.

Isabelle Faletti (00:31:23):

Yeah, that’s great. Wow. Saint James, you just posted a question here, kind of asking me, what is the importance of having a website or actually have a website. Rohn Literally just answered that in his, you want your site admin to be happy because what site visitors can know what to expect like Glen said so that they won’t have any anxiety of entering into our church. Your current church members will know about events. They will know about the sermons, any livestreams changes. If you’re meeting in a restaurant like one of our listeners here, that’s where they’re meeting in a restaurant, what’s that address your, your church members, emailing you or texting you or trying to find your Facebook page, which you do not own. They can have one central location to always go to for their search information.

Rohn Gibson (00:32:18):

Yes. And it’s, it’s, it’s a critical, it’s a critical piece of your church communication. The first door of visitors going to walk through at your church is going to be the door. That’s open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And that’s your church website. The second one. And this may seem a little weird to say this, but are your people, are your people actively engaging in the community to reach out to their neighbors, to reach out to their community? That’s going to be, you know, kind of the second door. And then the third door is actually going to be the physical door at your, at your church location, whether it’s a restaurant or whether it’s a physical church building, that’s where the church meets. So that restaurant, that’s the church building. Cause the church meeting there, praise the Lord for that, but that’s going to be the third or even fourth door that they open to actually walk into your local gathering.

Rohn Gibson (00:33:12):

So your church website is absolutely critical. It’s a thing that’s there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, communicating the message of hope of the gospel. So highly encourage you to have that. So if there’s any other questions on that, I think that’s more commonly asked question than a lot of people don’t have the courage to ask. They think, well, social media can be my church website, right? No, you don’t own it. Facebook at any time can kick you out. They can sensor who sees it. And again, we love Facebook. This is Facebook’s tool, we’re playing their playgrounds. So you’ve got to play by their rules. However, having your own church website where you control the content you control, what’s there. That is your digital home base. So to speak so super important to have an effective church website. So thank you for asking that greatly. Appreciate it. Cause a lot of people wouldn’t have the courage to ask that question. So thanks for asking that.

Isabelle Faletti (00:34:06):

Great. Yep. Also Pastor Jackson, see that you’re just joining again. Welcome back. We’re always, we love having you on ChurchSpring, live here. I’m also thanks for your kind words that you said from hours to minutes for launching your church website and managing it. So awesome. Thanks. I’m just going to be our personal ambassador pastor. We love all right. Rohn’s our listeners. They understand what a church website content management system is. They understand the importance of it. What do they do now? So they have all this information, but what is an action step that listeners can take with this knowledge?

Rohn Gibson (00:34:46):

Yeah. So the first thing is sit down and build that list. What are the absolute must have features that you want on your church website? Now we can kind of give you the cheat code. You know, like when you’re playing video games, it it’s like these cheat codes to get you along. Well, we kind of have one of those and it’s called ChurchSpring. So we’ve done all of that for you. Like if you have no idea, what do I have a need in my church website, we’ve basically kind of given you the cheat code to go from where you are to boom, an effective church website in less than 90 seconds. So select your provider, find a good content management system. The beautiful thing about ChurchSpring is not only are we your hosting provider, but we’re also your content management system. We’re also, you know, the, the, the website designs that we offer also play the role as the designer.

Rohn Gibson (00:35:30):

Like we do so much for you and make it super easy. So if you’re, if you’re on the call right now and you don’t have you don’t, you don’t know about ChurchSpring, maybe this is your first introduction to ChurchSpring you’re like, man, this sounds really good, but show me we’d love to show you. I’d love for you to join me as well as my cofounder and Mike and our support team in chat. And you can sign up and watch a demo of it. It’s about an hour long church, spring.com for slash demo. And we will literally walk you through how to go from no website to an effective church website and all the parts and pieces of it. So join us for churchspring.com/demo. Also, if you’re like, okay, I don’t want you to like walk, just let me see it. Like, let me get my hands on it.

Rohn Gibson (00:36:11):

I’m that kind of guy. It just, I don’t want to read the instructions, just all open the box and figure out how words go together. If that’s you, we have a solution for you too. And that’s the trial. So you can go to ChurchSpring.com/trial and sign up. Literally you get full access to ChurchSpring, and I would encourage you to sign up for the top plan. Cause then you literally get access to everything, social scheduling that your directory, every feature that we have available. So you can sign up in 90 seconds, have access to your new church website, get in there and kick the tires. If it’s a great fit for you. Awesome. Just stay with it. If it’s not, you can cancel at any time zero risk for you for seven days, go check it out. Church, spring.com forward slash trial. So let’s jump over into we’re working hard, Isabelle, and I, we get the fun job getting to be the face and like out here, communicating with you, all which we, we love and we enjoy, but there is a team who you don’t get to see their beautiful faces. Who’s working hard behind the scenes to roll out features and new resources to make it super easy for you. So we actually have some new features we want to tell you about today. And then maybe one that we’re going to kind of tease you with that. We’re going to talk more about next week. So let’s jump in as well.

Isabelle Faletti (00:37:22):

Yeah, well, like Rohn said, we have an amazing team here at ChurchSpring, constantly updating our platform, our service here. So we actually just released over 100 new images in the image library. So if you’re not yet a current ChurchSpring member, when you sign up with any plan, we offer three different plans with any plan. You mean like get access to the church, spring image library, and that kind of populated with hundreds. I don’t know how many photos we have a lot of folks in there with hundreds of really modern, updated, very clean high res images that you can use all on your, your church websites. You can also upload your own images, but this is a great base for you to, to gather some images so that you’re not spending the time trying to find a really good photo for your live streaming event they have coming up on, on Sunday.

Isabelle Faletti (00:38:19):

So we’re always adding the images. Oh, we have some really fun images. I love, I love photography. This, this is one of my favorite parts to just look through our image library and Jen she’s on her support team. She was the one who kind of gathered these images and they’re perfect summer events, summer camps youth events. We have a lot of multicultural photos for you to choose from. Just yeah, perfect for the, for the summer months here. So if you are a current member, logging your website, pull up a photo and just, just browse the beautiful new photos.

Rohn Gibson (00:38:54):

Well, and we weren’t talking about this new feature, but I’m going to go ahead and throw it out there anyway, because Kathy had this comment, I think the most difficult thing from somebody from a very complicated web resistance to your clean and simple platform, there are so many pieces of our site, YouTube Vimeo volunteers, blah, blah, blah. So one of the things we, we don’t promote, and actually we literally just within the last 14 days, maybe month have come up where we are going to offer migration service. So if it seems overwhelming for you to be able to go from where you’re at now, to everything we’ve been talking about, we actually have a service. It is an upgraded service, so there are fees associated with it, but we can literally for a relatively nominal fee take you from where you’re at currently and actually migrate you over to a new optimized church website.

Rohn Gibson (00:39:46):

So Kathy if that’s of interest to you or anyone else watching this now, or later on, reach out to us, you can reach out support@churchspring.com. We’d be happy to, there’s a questionnaire that will basically link to a survey that then you’ll fill it out with kind of specifics of what you’re needing. And then we’ll give you a customized solution to meet your specific needs, what you have. So Kathy, just based on what you’ve said, it sounds like that may be something of interest to you. Again, it’s not required. You can do all that on your own if you want to. But if time is short and resources are very thin that might be a resource that we can just add to your team for the short period of time to help you migrate to your new ChurchSpring powered website. So anyway, we were planning on saying that, but with that question, just wanna throw that out there to you.

Isabelle Faletti (00:40:32):

Yeah. And I know Kathy, you had another question here. If there are search capabilities for the photo library, not yet, that is, we are very aware of that. That’s on our roadmap. So stay tuned. We love hearing feedback from our current ChurchSpring members because we, we literally make our decisions of new features based on you. And so he’d sending in your nice to have, or just questions if you have it, because we may have it also that that may be something that you’re not yet aware of that. And you can add your, your giving provider or you can add videos. Kathy, we hear you and we’ll make sure to pass that onto the team. Thank you.

Rohn Gibson (00:41:16):

Yes. And literally we do keep track. We literally have a system where we go in and we keep track of the numbers of how many requests do we have for certain features. I and myself, as well as our cofounder and team, we go in and we look at all those, and then literally we’re making decisions. What’s going to add the most value to our customers based on your feedback. That’s, that’s a huge factor in the decision making process. Literally my week next week is going to be very much planning out the next 90 days of what are the things that we’re going to be rolling out and really focusing on for our ChurchSpring team and you as our users directly impact those decisions. We’re not just saying that we put a ton of effort and energy in and gathering your feedback, recording it so we can come back and then make decisions to move our product forward. So thank you for everyone who has given us feedback, you are the reason church brings. Great. Yeah, because it’s your feedback, it’s your feedback. That’s helped us build a tool that can help as many churches as possible just like you. So anyway, we’ll keep going here.

Isabelle Faletti (00:42:16):

Yeah. That’s great. Wayne, you just asked here is there background music available to be played while people are browsing the site?

Rohn Gibson (00:42:25):

Yeah, so we actually don’t recommend that. Let me just throw that out there. There’s and there’s multiple reasons for that. But one of the many is just speed. So to load a file in the background, as well as the Mo the more modern browsers, and you’ve probably seen this with video, they actually mute. So like, if you’re on it, if you there’s a video that autoplays, it actually mutes the video because the browsers, they want to provide the best viewing experience for the user. And they feel like if a person has an actually directly clicked play, then you’re like forcing something onto the users, as nice as it may be to think about, you know, somebody walks into your church building and you’ve got music playing well, I’m in an internet and a browser kind of website viewing experience. They’ve deemed that that’s not a great experience. And therefore they actually mute a lot of those videos or even audio files without the user explicitly actually selecting play. So we don’t offer that. And that’s the reason for it. And I would encourage you not to do that. You want to provide the best user experience. And that means the user selecting something to get what they’re looking for.

Isabelle Faletti (00:43:34):

That being said, Wayne, you can add background video to your church spraying website. So I’m not sure if you’re a current member right now with us, but we call it the blocks. So certain sections on your website, you can upload a background image or a background video. Again, it doesn’t have audio next to that, but it’s a really cool way to kind of bring your website to life. So that is an option there in case you’re not aware of that lane.

Rohn Gibson (00:44:03):

Okay.

Isabelle Faletti (00:44:03):

All right. So I am really excited to dive in and showcase spring’s own easy content management system, whether you are a current member or if you’re new to ChurchSpring this’ll be a super helpful section for you because I’ll be showing you how you can update your church calendar. So you may, again, if you remember, you may already know how to add any less but we have a lot of amazing fun time and stress saving features of the calendar as already integrated in your ChurchSpring website. So I’ll share my screen here and I’ll just dive right in. And then again, as I keep saying this entire time, if you have any questions as I go about the events and, and show you how to set up the calendar let us know, drop a comment. And as you can see, we will answer your question.

Isabelle Faletti (00:44:57):

So I’m, I’m like a broken record with that, but I will keep saying it. So anybody has questions we will know. Cause that’s, that’s what we’re doing this for. Okay. Let me pull up my screen here and we will dive right in. So as Rohn mentioned before, when you are editing your website, it is so important to be able to easily edit your website and specifically for your church calendar, you have to have your events on your website. They have to be updated with correct information with the date, with the time. If you’re registering for new registration, you need to have that on your websites. Because again, this is the base that people go to, to, to learn more, to know what’s coming up with your website. You don’t want to be spending the time to have to manually remove any events after the events have occurred.

Isabelle Faletti (00:45:54):

Cause I mean, you don’t have the time and you probably won’t remember. I have a ton of sticky notes around my desk here, and I’m not, I’m not remembering half of the things. So that’s why you need automated systems whenever possible when ChurchSpring takes care of that for you. So what’s your spring. Right now I’m on our top plan, the flourish plan. So I’ll be Deming on that. So if you are on the sprout or grow plan, you may not see the same layout. So just ask us a question if you’re a little confused about that. But what’s your experience. We, you literally launch your website and 90 seconds or under because we give you this really cool pages and templates that are uploaded prepopulated ready for you to go. One of those pages is your church calendar here. So we call it your events.

Isabelle Faletti (00:46:43):

You can always edit the name if you want it to be happenings or whatever you call it internally. So you can always update that. I just have it for events. So this is the back end of your, of your website. So I’m logged in as an admin and I have a couple of events here that I’ve already created, just so you can kind of see the layout that we have. So you can add images. You can add weekly recurring events, so I’ll just create it. I’ll add a new event here and we can walk down the exact process. So to add, add an event, you simply click add events and I’ll back up real quick. So again, if you’re, if you’re new to this for a ChurchSpring

Isabelle Faletti (00:47:31):

You do have to create a page with the event page design, and then when you do select that page, that is when you’ll receive this really cool option to add any events. So just wanted to let you know that you do have to choose the right page design so that you can have our system know what you’re trying to do. So we have the inline editor here that Rohn mentioned. It’ll save you a lot of time. So let’s say we are wanting to create a weekly event for a new Bible study for a summer Bible study. So I’ll just type in my title here, Bible study. I can upload an image, so I’ll just select the select image and I can choose to upload my own image if I have a certain graphic that I want to use, let’s say for VBS or something.

Isabelle Faletti (00:48:21):

I can also choose from the ChurchSpring library. I am live streaming, so hopefully the soul all populate quickly for you, but you can actually see here some of the new images that we just uploaded and they are just so beautiful and summary and a lot of different options. So I spent probably five solid minutes this morning, just looking through our images. So again, you can keep scrolling. I’m going to, let’s say just select this top image here. You click into your image and as soon as you click that image, then the event image will update with that. It will optimize for mobile, so for different devices and then you have the event location option. This is a really amazing feature. You guys. So if it is at, if this event is at your church address, and this is pulling from your church address, you’ve already set up, actually, when you sign up for us, you can also change that in your settings.

Isabelle Faletti (00:49:24):

So if this event is that your, your main church address, you can just click the check Mark and like that the address is automatically updated in your event location, if it’s not. So again, let’s say it’s at your meeting at a restaurant. You can just type in your address here. So then moving down, we have two options events, registration, and live stream event. These are two options that are available in our grow and flourish plan. So if you’re a grow and flourish member, then again, you have options for event registration. So if you need people to RSVP for this Bible study, especially with our times that we are in right now, that is something that I know my church is doing. You have to RSVP so that they can know how many people, how to plan the social distancing and all that.

Isabelle Faletti (00:50:16):

So you simply toggle that button to on, you’ll see it, turn green, say on, and then you can click this little wheel icon and that will open up the settings of the event registration. And here you can simply change the email address that will receive an email, an email alert when someone has RSVP. So if Rohn is RSVP to my summer Bible study here, then I want to receive an email notification that he’s RSVP. So I would just put my email address support@churchspring.com let’s say and then I can also change the default email subject. So if you have lots of events and your you have event registration for each of them, then you will want to update the subject line. It does automatically pull the event title and the email subject. So you may not need to update that if you don’t want to.

Isabelle Faletti (00:51:13):

And then that’s it. And then when people register for an event, you’ll receive an email alert and you’ll be, you’ll be all set if you do live stream. So if you want this event to be connected to your live stream event you do have to click the on toggle button. We will do another ChurchSpring live about live stream because that’s a whole nother, that’s a whole nother topic, but just so for all of you who are listening, if you live stream, you do have to click the on button for your event. And then this is the really fun part. You guys we have the option where you can have this event repeat weekly, monthly, or yearly. So this is another area where you can save so much time because if I want my summer Bible study to be occurring every Thursday, I do not want to be logging into the website every week to be adding that weekly Bible study because it’s the same information.

Isabelle Faletti (00:52:14):

And so I will just say my time, myself, time by clicking weekly you can select the event date. So let’s say June 25th, and then you can also choose an end date. So when this wants to, when you want it to expire I have a set here to December 17th. The last one of the last Thursdays of the year, I can also select the start time. So let’s say that is a long summer. I love that. I wish my summer was that long in Iowa. That’s my dream summer is year round. I second the motion.

Isabelle Faletti (00:52:53):

And then you can also set an in time. This is specifically if you have your live stream event on, so if you do not have the live streaming event, you don’t need to select an end time. And so that’s how you can, again, you can change monthly or yearly or never fish, a onetime event. You can just select never. And then you just have the event date and the start time. And then when you click down into this text area, this is where you can actually add details about your event. So you can say welcome to our church, and let’s say, Bible study, you can add whatever information you need to and you can also add any images that you want any video in bed. So to add an image, you’ll just click on the toolbar, that little tiny image, and then you’ll have that same.

Isabelle Faletti (00:53:41):

Pop-Up like up here once again, you can add your own images. You can even add a PDF document. So you can just select the image and then that will automatically go right into your new event that you’re creating. One really amazing feature of our events here. And this is for our top level are our flourish plan is our social scheduler. So social media is so important to your church communication, especially right now. With the times that we’re living in people, people are going to social media for updates. People are, are frequently on social media. So you can create any events. And then right within this event, right within your website, you can schedule a post to post to your Facebook page or your Twitter account that you have linked for your church website. So I won’t detail that right now.

Isabelle Faletti (00:54:39):

Again, that’ll be kind of another ChurchSpring Live, if you are interested in that, let us know, and we can bump that up to be sooner than later. Otherwise we can also send you information on that specifically, Rohn, I think you, you and Mike dental that in our demo webinar, right, we do lots of different ways. You can kind of see that in action. So then at this point I just click save events. And my summer Bible study that goes to December will be created right there. And then one last thing here before I wrap up is right now, I have this set to be a weekly event, but let’s say I’m on the 25th. We’re actually meeting at a different location. I don’t want to delete that event. I just made and create a whole new one. I could instead click edit that little pencil icon, go ahead.

Isabelle Faletti (00:55:32):

And I’ll just change my address to you know, one, two, three streets, right. Instead. so again, if you would have some update only for one week you’re right. I’ll do weekly here. Hold on. So I’ll go back there. When you do have any type of recurring or repeating events, you can update a specific event or all of the events that you’ve created. So I’ll make a quick edit. So our system will know that I’m editing this click save, and then you’ll receive a popup that says, Hey, just FYI, you are changing this repeating events. And I have the option to edit all of weekly occurrences or at only this event. So again, this is a great way that you can save time and not have to manually go through and, and make all those changes. So I’ll just say, edit this event only, and then it will immediately update. So I know that was a lot of information but I love our church calendar because it, it just really is a huge time saver. And it’s, it’s so beautifully laid out. Our, our team has just done a great job on this.

Rohn Gibson (00:56:51):

Yeah. So let’s, we’ve had a question, Kathy. She said, I don’t remember are all those fields required for recurring livestream events?

Isabelle Faletti (00:57:01):

So if you are a live streaming any event, yes, you do have to fill out all of the fields that are required specifically, so that the end date and the end time that is required because on your home page, on your website, when you live stream we have a slide, the automatically updates that lets your visitors know, Hey, we’re going live right now for whatever the event is for the young adults gathering. Our system needs to know when to pull that slide down. So when your live streaming event will stop, our system will also stop showing this event and the live stream notification to your visitors. So that’s why that’s so important and why it is required. So then your visitors can know when you are live streaming, like literally when you’re live streaming 30 minutes in and you still have 30 minutes left, we still want people to be joining in on that.

Rohn Gibson (00:57:59):

Absolutely cool. And we’ve got Kathy, thanks for the for the feedback. There is such an amazing time saving feature. Yeah. We recurring events and just having events right on your church website where you’re not having to go to some other third party thing and integrate it and all that stuff, and then remember to take it off. That’s awesome. And also Wayne, yes. We want to start using this social media scheduler. So that is excellent. Social media is such a powerful tool again, that’s available on the flourish plan. So that’s that our top currently our top plan. So I would highly encourage you to check that out. It’s an incredible tool. It makes your life so much easier cause literally you can go create the event and then you put in your post that you want to, you know, just think about like Sundays, I mean, inviting people to church or, you know, some event you can schedule it out to promote it a week or two ahead and then a week before, and then three days before, a day before and the day of, and literally you can set it and forget it.

Rohn Gibson (00:58:59):

And the social media scheduler takes care of all of that for you. Yeah. Let’s see here. Can I live stream, can alive stream on the site be a pre recorded event? So yes, it can. So basically the way that you would do that and actually probably, well, let me just say this real quickly and if there’s gaps, please reach out to us and we’re more than happy all ultimately your live stream links. So when people click on the view, live stream, where that goes, that is up to you, that you can change whenever you want. So if you had a prerecorded event, all you would do is you would create that event wherever you want it to be, whatever service you’re using for that, whether it’s Facebook or otherwise, then you would go in update that a link in the backend of church sprang specifically for your live stream URL.

Rohn Gibson (00:59:52):

And then when that event comes up, you’d click on it and it would automatically take you there to, to view that prerecorded event. So it is possible. That’s how you would do that. I know we have people doing that right now. So it is something that you can absolutely do. Another thing is you could just put that event right on your site. So you can just create a page for that event, put the video on it. And then that the popup would come up at the time of the live stream event. They would click on it and they could go literally and just watch the recording of that event right on your website versus going to a third party you know, type streaming service. So there’s a lot of options there depending on specifically what you’re looking for. So if that doesn’t, excuse me, answer your question. You have more questions on that. Please. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us. I’m more than happy to walk through that with you. Yeah.

Rohn Gibson (01:00:42):

All right. Well, we have been going for an hour. Can you believe it who’s been here from the very beginning time content out of this? Yes. When you get the, you get the participation trophy and Catholic, I think Kathy has been there with this as well. So this has been awesome. So we do want to have some prayer requests. We wrap up every single one of our ChurchSpring lives with prayer. We feel like that’s so important. So if you have a pray quest I don’t believe, I actually know. I think one did maybe come in yesterday or before we even started, I looked back through, she just, she requested that we keep her in prayer. Okay. And that was Audrey Audrey Spencer. Alright. So if there’s any other prey quests, please let us know. Let’s see, new Heights, church, ChurchSpring, the best on the planet.

Rohn Gibson (01:01:40):

We appreciate your kind words. And it, it absolutely is encouraging to us. Our team works very hard to serve you and to hear that it just makes us feel like yeah, we’re, we’re, we’re benefiting you and your ministry. So thank you for that, Kathy. Thank you. You guys, rock. I have to get back to the mobile site video. I missed it. Awesome. For sure. Yep. Go check that out. Cool. Well, let’s go ahead and wrap up with prayer. We have Audrey and we also have a few pray requests that have come in. So there’s emails that we send every single week to you. If you’re one of our customers I’m asking for specific prayer requests. So I’m actually

Rohn Gibson (01:02:20):

Going to pull that up over here. Well, Hey, I think we got an answer to our prayer. One of my prayer requests this morning was that my internet connection went hold up and God always good. Alright. Copeland, let’s see pray for myself and my husband, pastor LW Booker. We will absolutely pray for you.

Isabelle Faletti (01:02:45):

Yup. And for, for that one from Copeland that’s actually yeah.

Rohn Gibson (01:02:52):

Oh, st. James. Okay. Very good. And then let’s see Wayne, any qualified volunteers to help help in our ministry. So we will absolutely pray for that as well. Well, let’s do this. We’ve got quite a few that have come in here. Just these few. We’re going to go ahead and pray for those. And then we’ve got a couple of just last minute wrap up things. We’re gonna talk a little bit just about what we’re going to actually cover next week. So we want you to be there for that. So let’s go ahead and pray. And then we’ll talk about our last few things here. Let’s pray, dear God, we thank you for your love for us. Lord. We acknowledge that you are God, we’re not in Lord, that you are always good.

Rohn Gibson (01:03:30):

So Lord, we just thank you for who you are or we thank you for your goodness to us or your steadfast. Love your mercy, Lord, your faithfulness, or through all the generations. God, we just thank you for who you are and for your goodness. So God, I pray that you would be with the churches who were on this call and those who will watch afterwards, God, I pray that you will be with them as they continue to navigate Lord willing during the tail end of this pandemic, God, I pray that you would give them strength and endurance and mercy. And God, I pray that you would give them wisdom. Lord, I pray that you would be with the, the members of their church guide, that you would just give an abundance of grace And Lord that you would lead them. And they would be in tune with your leading and got, ultimately, we ask that you would help them to live Lord on mission or an understanding that it’s not a building that we go to, but it’s who we are. Lord, as your, as your church and what I pray that you would help them to take on that responsibility Lord, that you would or break our hearts.

Rohn Gibson (01:04:41):

Lord, for those who don’t know you and that Lord through loving you and loving others, Lord, that that love would be active and that we would be reaching those Lord and having a burden for those who don’t know you. So God help us to be in tune with your spirit.

Rohn Gibson (01:05:00):

Lord, help us to reach in those us to reach those in our community in this world. God that don’t know you and don’t have hope. Lord help us to be able to share with them the hope that lies within us, which is you. So go to war God, work in us, work through us. Lord. I pray that you would be with Audrey Lord. I don’t know all the different circumstances. There are God, but you do in Lord. We know that or that you love her and that you are good to her. So God, I pray that she would sense your presence. Lord, then you’d work in her life, whatever it is that’s going on, Lord, I pray that you would work in her and through her Lord to accomplish your will. So Lord, I, I pray that you would be with Wayne. God, I just pray that you would bless him, bless his ministry. What I pray that you would bring qualified volunteers and Lord, we just, we thank you for equipping those who you have called.

Rohn Gibson (01:05:59):

And God, I pray that you would move in people’s hearts. Lord, Lord, there. Even in his ministry Lord, that they would feel that that nudge to not just sit in a Pew and consume, but Lord to be led by you and through you to be actively involved Lord, in the work of ministry. So God, I pray that you would continue to be with Wayne or that you would continue to give him strength and endurance, that he can only describe as coming from you and Lord, I pray that you would rise up leaders and volunteers in his ministry and all those ministries, Lord who are doing your work

Rohn Gibson (01:06:43):

Or that they would sense you’re leading in your calling. And it would be in a way that they can’t not, but act Lord. So I pray that you would even a surprise Wayne, this week, Lord have maybe someone or maybe multiple people got to reaching out to him saying, how can I help? How can I be involved? What I pray that you would lead and you would work in those lives or do you’re so good. So I pray that you would lead them and help them to respond to your leading Lord. I also ask that you would be there with st. James Lord Lauren and her husband, and God, I pray that you would be with them, Lord God, that you would strengthen them Lord, that you would help them to walk in your footsteps and the context Lord that you’ve called them there and their local community and got us so encouraging to hear these requests, to see those who are faithful or that you’ve allowed us to engage with, or we know there’s many others, but Lord, we thank you for those who have been able to join us here today,

Rohn Gibson (01:07:54):

Lord, who are responding to your calling on their life. Lord, we know that many times that calling is difficult, but you are good.

Rohn Gibson (01:08:08):

And Lord, I pray that you would continue to bless them, strengthen them, equip them. And Lord, I pray you would call people Lord to be in a relationship with you, God and I pray that you would help us to be faithful in casting in that. And what I pray that you would help those who you have called to respond and to follow you. So God, I pray that you would be with yeah. Other requests, Lord, maybe that I’ve missed that have been mentioned, Lord, we pray that you would be with each and every one of them. And God we ask that you would or help us to be who you want us to be or having a correct view of you and a correct view of ourselves. And therefore that leads us to do and to respond in a way that is right and honoring and glorifying to you. So Lord, we pray that even with ChurchSpring,

Rohn Gibson (01:09:05):

That it’s not about us being high and lifted up, but it’s,

Rohn Gibson (01:09:10):

It’s about you and it’s about your work and it’s about or souls coming into a saving knowledge of who you are and growing in that knowledge and being obedient to do what you’ve told them to do. So God, I pray that you would be honoring glorified through everything. We do everything we say or that it would truly bring honor and glory to you. So in your name, we pray. Amen.

Rohn Gibson (01:09:34):

All right, last couple of quick items. Join us next Thursday. So we know we shook things up a little bit this week because of some schedules. So next Thursday, July 2nd at 10:00 AM. Central time, same place. We’ll be here on Facebook streaming live. We’ll send out an email, but next week we are going to talk about the absolute must have pieces of content you have to have in your church website. So that’s our little taser. Like these are nonnegotiable. You absolutely have to have these pieces of content on your church website to accomplish. What many of you have said you want as your number one outcome. You want to bring people in. You want to have people come and visit your local gathering and then be part of that local gathering. So we’re going to talk about some of the absolute must have features and pieces of content that you have to have on your church website.

Rohn Gibson (01:10:28):

So don’t miss it next Thursday, July 2nd at 10:00 AM. Central time. If you have questions as always submit your questions, you can submit them here. We get those. Even after the fact for those who are watching it after leave your comment or you can visit [inaudible] dot com for slash contact and submit your question. We look forward to answering those in a future episode and let’s see, is there anything else? Thank you, Wayne. Appreciate your brother. All right, well, we’re going to jump off so God bless you. All. We look forward to seeing you next week, July 2nd, what time we’re gonna do our Sunday school lesson here again? What time?

Rohn Gibson (01:11:06):

10:00 AM. Central time. We look forward to seeing you then where we talk about the absolute must have features and content. I keep saying the absolute must have content on your church website too, until then God bless. And we look forward to seeing you next week. Bye.

• Welcome to ChurchSpring Live, Episode 005 – What to expect (00:00)
• What is the #1 pain and frustration that pastors experience with their church website? 
• What is a content management system? (09:09)
• What things should I consider when choosing a content management system for my church website? (11:07)
  • Skill level of the person managing the church website
  • Specific features you want to have
  • CMS that is current with the times and technology and making updates as tech changes
• What things should I consider when choosing a content management system for my church website? (12:48)
  • Depending on your skill level choose a CMS that does not require you to know how to code or require you to add tons of plugins
  • Inline editing
  • Integrated Calendar/mobile friendly
  • Sermon audio/podcasting integration
  • Live streaming
  • Church directory
  • Social scheduling/sharing
  • Bonus features: easily change designs/unlimited
• How can you tell if a website has an easy church content management system? (28:00)
  • The site is up to date
  • Your website administrator is happy
  • Your congregation is happy because the site is up to date and therefore people actually use it.
  • Your pastor isn’t embarrassed to send people there
• Action Step: Select a website provider who offers an easy CMS (35:30)
  • Sign up for a free demo webinar at churchspring.com/demo
  • Try us out for free at churchspring.com/pricing
• New ChurchSpring Features: 100 *NEW* Images in the ChurchSpring Image Library (37:22)
• ChurchSpring How To: Create your church calendar and new events (44:03)
  • Text Editor: Upload image, add text, hyperlink, add a video.
  • Recurring events
  • Event Registration
  • Past events
  • Social Scheduling – save time! Promote & share
• Closing Prayer and Wrap Up (01:00:42)