communications

4 Reasons Why Your Church Should Be Doing Video Announcements.

This month I’m giving churches a number of easy ways to “kick start” the new year . . . this week we’re talking about how to add video announcements to your weekend services.


In 2011 we made a solid commitment to video announcements being a regular part of our game at Liquid Church.  Two out of three Sundays this form of communication was a critical part of our services.  [Click here to see some of ours.]

I gotta be honest . . . I’m a bit of a convert to video announcements . . . I originally didn’t like these at all.  I thought the return on investment on this sort of thing was really low.  If you’ve had anything to do with video production you know that turning out a 2 minute video that looks great and is compelling takes a bunch of time . . . the thought of making a video that we would show just once didn’t make any sense to me.  But we kicked off last year saying that we would move it out of the “every once and while” to our default every week . . . we would only opt out of it for a good reason.

After having lived with video announcements for the last year . . . here are the benefits I can see for churches.

  1. Incredible Focus for MultiSite Churches – When I put on my communications hat . . . I know that one of the challenges that a multisite church like ours faces is consistency of messaging in all of our locations.  The video announcements allow us to centrally communicate a message to all of our services and locations.  If you are multisite church . . . you need to decide against doing video announcements in my mind . . . it’s been that effective in getting the data out.
  2. Allows Our Service Hosts to Focus on Relationship – I really don’t want our Campus Pastors’ communicating dates, times and locations of events.  Often announcements can degenerate to just the facts and figures.  Paring a video announcement that does the “detail work” of communicating allows our Campus Pastors to communicate the passion and purpose behind what we do.  The video host announces a new series . . . when it starts and such . . . the Campus Pastor gets to talk about their next door neighbor they are inviting.
  3. Showing is Better Than Telling – We live in an increasingly visual culture.  [Read this blog post on the church in a post-literate culture.] By adding videos announcements as a platform for communication we are able to regularly “show not just tell” what is happening at the church.  We use lots of “b-roll” and “cut aways” to make sure that people can see what we’re talking about.
  4. Extends Communication into the Week – We repost the video announcements through facebook, twitter and our weekly email blast.  This allows us to help catch up people who weren’t with us on the weekend to what is happening at the church.  Interesting factoid . . . when we post our video announcements and snippets of the messages on facebook . . . people click on the announcements more.  People want to know what is going on.

Does your church do some form of video announcements?  I’d love to see samples of what you do.  [Post a link to them in the comment section!]

Looking for more help with your announcements? This FREE 3-part video series is for you.

Are you looking to improve the hosting of your weekend services?

Have you already tried improving this area but aren’t sure what to do next?

Are you ready to take the next steps to increase engagement in your announcements and ultimately your church? I’m releasing a FREE three-part video series designed to help your church with better weekend hosting. The lessons in this series come from my practical experience of hosting hundreds of services in multiple contexts and coaching many other leaders in this area. The three videos are:

  • Video #1: 5 Reasons People Aren’t Listening to Your Hosting. Your first video will clearly define for you why people aren’t paying attention to the announcements in your services.
  • Video #2: The One Best Practice to Ensure Higher Engagement with Your Announcements. In this video, you will understand what the single most important practice thriving churches change about their announcements to improve engagement.
  • Video #3: 3 Church Hosting Myths Debunked. Finally, you will dive into three misunderstood myths about hosting announcements that move people to action.

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8 Comments

  1. Great post!!! I am the video person @calvarychurchcc and have done video announcements in various styles for quite a while. Some with talking head and graphics so with all graphics and a vo etc. This year we decided that we are going to go shoot in various location in our area the give them a little flavor. We are shooting 5 weeks at a time so that we can stay ahead of the game (which is easier said than done). We are a multi-site church and the decided to use the pastor at our multi-site to do the announcements for us this week so people at our main campus are familiar with who he is. Here is this past weeks announcement video.

  2. Great post Rich. This is an area where I’m pretty passionate too. We’ve been doing video announcements for about a year at our original campus while trying to figure out how it will work at our other campuses.

    I agree completely that it’s better to show than just tell; make it visual and people will remember! What has been challenging is getting that point across to all of our ministry leaders; some things just aren’t visual and our intent was never to just move the talking head from the stage to the screen.

    Here is one of ours from last summer:

    I don’t know if I’m completely happy with our version yet, but I’m thankful that my leadership has allowed me to ‘grow’ this aspect of things. We try to keep the whole time at or under 2:00 and feature no more that 3 items… I just don’t think that any church ever needs to give every event that kind of real estate.

  3. Nice work guys . . . I like what you’re doing there with those video announcements!

    I think still “focusing” this time is crazy important. . . outside of the message people can’t remember a whole bunch of things. I would just rather have people remember 1 or maybe 2 things . . .

    How do you guys decide what ends up being promoted?

    Rich

  4. You’ve seen videos from @TheMeetingHouse – there are a variety of types (series promos and teasers; special causes; humorous looks at our values, culture etc; random visual event highlights and summaries)

    You might ask @TimjHDay whether member surveys ever showed any strong preferences around the use of video.

    Your 411s with Lauren are very engaging and well done.Do you have any guidelines for the length of the clips (given possible attention differences between live viewer and online viewer)?

  5. Any opinion on churches that SHOULDN’T make the move to video announcements? Do you think there’s a congregation size/ministry style that would make video announcements not work or seem out-of-place?

    1. Hey Meghan!

      I would think any church with multiple services should consider doing video announcements. The consistency of messaging achieved helps!

      Make sense?

      Rich

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