We've seen thousands of churches and ministries reach their organizational goals through customized apps, here are a few important benefits, from increased giving to more connectedness with your community...
Best Practices Part 6: Media
Media concludes our best practices for reaching and engaging your audience. Whether they’re on a morning run or commute, you can easily connect your audience with your media anytime, anywhere. We really did save the best for last!
Media
So why media? As both mobile app use and media consumption continues to rise, delivering media through your app enables you to meet your audience directly where they’re at:
Mobile apps account for 52% of digital media consumption
Mobile video will represent 69% of all mobile traffic by 2018
App use makes up 88% of total time spent on mobile in the U.S.
With weekly recurring media content, utilizing the media tab provides an effective medium for expanding the reach of your content beyond the Sunday service. Not only can users instantly access your sermon collection, but they can download for offline listening wherever they are. Many churches have seen a strong increase in sermon downloads through their media tab alone!
The media tab is the most robust way to present your media on a mobile device. Built and designed for multiple devices and operating systems, the Subsplash Platform enables you to deliver a beautiful and intuitive cross-platform media experience. Easily customize the artwork and display of your media with multiple layout options, making the user experience more delightful and catered to your brand.
As our series comes to a close, these are a just a few ways we’ve seen churches use their apps to increase engagement and enhance their communication efforts. Your app should not only be a tool for presenting content, but also an effective way to directly remind, notify, and encourage users to engage. If you’d like to add any of these features, or would like to get started with your own Church App, we’d love to help!
Best Practices Part 4: Social Sharing
Social Sharing has a well-earned spot in our best practices for outreach and engagement by enabling your community to share content quickly and effectively.
Social Sharing
We’ve heard incredible stories of users sharing sermons with friends and resulting in new relationships with Christ. With the ability to share sermons, blogs, and content directly through your app, users can easily share the right resources with the right people. I know when I’m listening to a sermon or reading a blog, sometimes I’ll think “wow, this person would really enjoy this.” Rather than opening a browser, copying links, and then sharing on Facebook (or forgetting altogether), I can share directly through the app to any of my social channels, email, and text.
These sharing capabilities enable your church network to reach their individual networks with the tap of a screen. A few ways you can encourage your users to share include adding a reminder in the Sunday service announcements, at the end of your sermon audio and video, or sending a push notification reminder. Happy sharing and stay tuned for part 5!
Best Practices Part 1: Sunday Tab
Best Practices: Outreach and Engagement
Engage: to occupy, attract, or involve someone's interest or attention.
That’s the hope right? Reaching people through technology is truly effective when outreach turns into response. Whether it’s inspiring deeper relationships with Christ through a sermon series, increasing attendance from event reminder push notifications, or getting newcomers connected through a connection card tab, creating a healthy and connected church community is the ultimate goal. That is why we’ve put together a collection of best practices for maximizing outreach and engagement. We want to shed light on how some of our clients are using their apps to deepen engagement, foster community, and get people connected within the body of Christ. Here are a few examples of ways our clients have used their apps to better engage their audience.
Sunday Tab
We love the way Ecclesia Hollywood put together their Sunday tab! Being the first tab users see when opening the app, their Sunday tab creates a great space for users to easily engage with their content and take action during Sunday services. Within this tab are resources and opportunities geared toward newcomers, regulars, and people who want to get more involved. By putting their weekly scripture, connect card, and bulletin resources directly within the tab, Ecclesia not only saves money on printing costs, but are also making it easier for attendees to engage directly from their devices. A Sunday tab can also provide immediate access to giving links, announcements, small group sign ups, and much more. Get Ecclesia’s app here to see it in action and stay tuned for part 2!
"We point people to the Sunday tab to follow along with the morning's scripture and announcements, and also direct newcomers to the tab for information specifically for them." - Michele McCreary, Director of Information and events, Ecclesia Hollywood
Stories from the Church: Web Player
The Subsplash Web Player is the perfect compliment to your app to reach your audience in new ways! Whether your content is consumed on a mobile device or a desktop, we’ve got you covered. The content uploaded to your app is encoded and maximized for playback across every medium. This means there is no dual entry–upload in one place and your media is instantly delivered to your app, web player, and podcast feed. We’ve seen great adoption rates of the Web Player so far, but want to encourage everyone to check it out and see how it fits the need of your organization. Simply check out the ‘Web Player’ settings page in the Subsplash Dashboard to turn on this channel–it’s as easy as that, and it comes fully loaded with your content.
I had the opportunity to chat with a few of our lovely clients to hear how they’re liking the Web Player. Here are their stories:
ALL SAINTS CHURCH, SEATTLE WA
All Saints is a small church of 100 people in the heart of Seattle. By the grace of God, their app has had over 3,000 downloads! They cut their time uploading media to different sources in half by adding the Web Player as their media page on their website. Not only does the Web Player satisfy the functional requirements for them, but they are thrilled with the design of the page and how seamlessly it works with their current website. They love that it is 'easy to share and easy to update!'
ELEVATE LIFE CHURCH, ORANGE PARK FL
Elevate Life Church in Florida implemented the Web Player onto their website immediately after release. Elevate Life fully utilizes the Web Player, Apps, and Podcasting. They promote the App and Web Player to their congregation often, and consider it a key part of their communication strategy. Because they only have to upload their media in one place now, they have seen significant time savings from what used to be hours updating across multiple services. They ‘love the streamlining capabilities’ and even based the look and feel of their website redesign on the Web Player. Elevate Life just launched their second campus and is a congregation of roughly 1,900 with over 4,500 app downloads!
LIFEGATE CHURCH, ATLANTA GA
Lifegate Church in Atlanta is a 1,000 member church. They use their App and Web Player as the resource for their congregation. By streamlining their processes, they’ve noticed that the Web Player saves several days worth of work per week. The adoption by their congregation of a centralized location for video, audio, and podcasting has ‘been awesome’. All ages have responded well to the app and Web Player from teens to members in their eighties. “The amount of people listening is over and above what we could have ever thought”.
Want to hear more about how this tool can be customized to fit your needs? We'd love to chat with you!