Category: Fruit Low Hanging

Transcription and sharing: A low-cost strategy for how a small church or a church plant can reach into a community.

6/7/2017

By Christopher Mann for ReSermon.com

In the age of online media, small churches and big churches alike face the same challenge -- producing excellent, engaging sermon content. If you are a small church or church plant and you're producing solid material hosted on a online platform, consider this low-cost strategy for engaging your community.

Sunday

Preach.
Just keep doing what you're doing. See, you're already off to a good start.

Monday

Transcribe the sermon.

Tuesday

Post both the audio file and the transcription to your blog.
Share through Facebook, Twitter, Linked IN, etc., the availability of this week's sermon and the transcript. Be sure to lead the post with an engaging, pithy excerpt and include a link to the blog post.
Intentionally and overtly encourage your membership to (a) like it (b) comment on it and (c) share it into their social media communities.

Wednesday through Sunday

Monitor the growth likes and shares and be ready to respond to comments for deeper discussions.
If your church does this weekly, then your searching ranking will go higher in Google and Bing search: algorithms ("algo" for short) reward your church with higher search rankings, because you're becoming a regular producer of original content. You're not just commenting, sharing and liking, but you're an original producer of content, and the algos recognize you as a regular producer, thereby graduating you into a higher priority queue.
You condition greater portions of both your non-church community and your church community into the habit of consuming and distributing your sermon content.

Questions to consider

What impact do you think might this have on your church’s personal attendance and financial growth in 2017?
Compared to other outreach strategies, how does the cost/benefit analysis compare?

For further reading

There are other benefits to transcription, and you can read about them by clicking on the “Transcription” tab on ReSermon blog, or just clicking here.

Comments

Empower seekers: Make sermons discoverable.

4/30/2016

Comments

by Christopher Mann
Founder, ReSermon.com

You have a great website, tricked out with all the latest stuff and your sermons are available as an audio or video file. A few weeks after posting, however, you see that this sermon only garnered a few dozen views, and you’re absolutely sure that you live in a city with much more than a few dozen people.

After the thousands of dollars invested in video equipment, editing software, soundboards and more, you’re scratching your head and wondering if this is worth it.

The problem may be that your sermon is not discoverable. Search engines like Google or Bing cannot search through your audio and video files and tell Sally Searcher what sermon contains material on her keywords like love, hope, resurrection and so on. (At least, they cannot yet; they’re working on this.)

Your sermon needs to become discoverable to search engines and that starts with transcription.

Turn your transcription into its own blog post.

After having your sermon transcribed, post it as a distinct blog post at your church website’s blog and announce the sermon’s availability through social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.).

Then, create a closed caption file.

Transcription is a critical step, but you might not be done. If you make your sermon available via video, then you need to close caption that video file.

“But wait, Google now produces automated captioning for videos posted to YouTube.”

Yes, but have you bothered to actually turn on the captioning for one of your sermons on YouTube? Machine transcription is improving, but still far from where it needs to be, and far from what you actually preached; brace for when Google thinks you cussed during your sermon.

Google’s captioning is better than nothing and plays a helpful role in making more content accessible to a lot of people dependent on captioning (more on that later), but the captioning is so poor that Google blushes too.

It gets a little wonky here, but this is important. Search algorithm only indexes manual captioning, not it's own machine captioning.

That means if you preach on the resurrection, for example, Sally Searcher who is looking for “resurrection” will not find your sermon if you let Google do its machine captioning. Sally will find your sermon, however, if you have uploaded a manual transcription, because Google's indexing formula intentionally values more highly the accuracy of manual transcription over the dubious accuracy of its own machine transcription.

Recap

Get your sermon library transcribed.
Post those transcripts as individual blog posts at your church’s blog.
Convert transcripts into closed caption files and upload to whatever platform you use (usually, Vimeo or YouTube).
Watch your views and missional impact increase.

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What are the advantages of closed captioning your sermon content?

9/9/2015

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You immediately expand your ministry reach to the deaf and hearing alike.

By Christopher Mann
for ReSermon.com

Captioning your video sermon is one of the easiest, low-hanging-fruit ways of immediately expanding your ministry reach. By captioning your videos, which demographics do you pick up?

In one sense, you pick up some specific profiles. In another sense, you pick up everybody.

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"A Beautiful Promise" Part 3. Based on Romans 8:28

8/24/2015

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“When you're walking through season of adversity, God is at work. No matter what the adversity, God will finish the work.”

A Beautiful Promise: Part 3
by Pastor Ron Williams
Pathway Community Church, Fort Wayne, Ind.
Transcribed and closed captioned by ReSermon

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Turn around time for closed captioning

7/7/2015

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ReSermon can meet any turn-around deadline. Whether you need it in a week from now or an hour from now, we're ready when you are.

Plus, you don’t have to delay posting your video content on account of ReSermon. If the video has to publish immediately, do it. Posting both the file and the closed caption file at the same time is ideal, but if something is that time sensitive, then you can upload the video, notify ReSermon, and we will immediately begin on the CC file. Then, we can log into your YouTube or Vimeo account and upload the file directly. All the while, the ability of your viewers to consume your content will be uninterrupted.

Whatever your tight turn-around needs, ReSermon won't disappoint.

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Spurgeon would have loved ReSermon

6/21/2015

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Charles Spurgeon's 63 volumes of sermons stand as the largest set of books by a single author in the history of Christianity.
— John Piper (@JohnPiper) June 13, 2015

If your sermon lasts 30 minutes, you're preaching about 5,000 words per Sunday. That's a great start, but Spurgeon would have appreciated help toward a wonderful finish--taking that sermon into his public square.

Comments

"That was really good. You should write that down."

8/6/2014

Comments

By Chris Mann

The case for leveraging your spoken content into greater, repurposed value in the public square.

If you have been teaching long enough, you've heard that line. And, they're probably right; you should write that down, but who has the time?

An average speaker will speaking at around 100-200 words per minute and at the end of an hour, he might utter around 6,000 words. The question becomes, how do you capture that value and leverage it? Should that value be contained to the walls of a worship center, classroom or lecture hall, or could it be repurposed into greater venues like blog entries (typically 300-500 words each), social media posts (15-100 words each), editorial articles (800-1500 words each) or full length books (150,000 words+)?

Comments

Transcription and sharing: A low-cost strategy for how a small church or a church plant can reach into a community.

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday through Sunday

Questions to consider

For further reading

Empower seekers: Make sermons discoverable.

Turn your transcription into its own blog post.

Then, create a closed caption file.

“But wait, Google now produces automated captioning for videos posted to YouTube.”

Recap

What are the advantages of closed captioning your sermon content?

You immediately expand your ministry reach to the deaf and hearing alike.

"A Beautiful Promise" Part 3. Based on Romans 8:28

Turn around time for closed captioning

Spurgeon would have loved ReSermon

"That was really good. You should write that down."

Archives

Categories

Transcription and sharing: A low-cost strategy for how a small church or a church plant can reach into a community.

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday through Sunday

Questions to consider

For further reading

​Empower seekers: Make sermons discoverable.

Turn your transcription into its own blog post.

Then, create a closed caption file.

“But wait, Google now produces automated captioning for videos posted to YouTube.”

Recap

What are the advantages of closed captioning your sermon content?

You immediately expand your ministry reach to the deaf and hearing alike.

"A Beautiful Promise" Part 3. Based on Romans 8:28

Turn around time for closed captioning

Spurgeon would have loved ReSermon

"That was really good. You should write that down."

Archives

Categories

Empower seekers: Make sermons discoverable.