Your Sermon Media Delivery Made Easy

Saving time, saving money, and using great software are just a few things you probably appreciate as a ministry leader. And if you do, then you will most definitely love using the Subsplash Platform for your church’s media experience. This week we made some exciting improvements to our media uploading, so we thought we’d take a minute to share some ways our platform can simplify sermon delivery workflow for your church:

A Complete Solution

Many services out there provide one element of media delivery, such as just hosting, just a video player, or just a web plugin. The Subsplash Platform offers a complete solution that covers everything you need. You can host, manage, and publish all your files for your app, website, and podcast from one central location.

Enhance Your Brand

The Subsplash Platform allows for complete customization, which allows you to showcase your ministry and brand more than ever before. We provide you with your own customized media player for both your app and website. This means that instead of uploading your audio and video files to a page on Vimeo, or other third-party website, that also contains millions of other videos (many of which may unwholesome), you get your own customized media player that contains the Gospel content you actually want your church to see.

Save Money

We provide cloud hosting and storage with each of our packages. And not only that, we just significantly raised the amount of hosting and storage we offer at no extra charge to you. With our solution, you no longer need to pay third-party vendors like Vimeo, YouTube or Amazon to host or present your content. We’ve got you covered. And we offer fully-integrated HD mobile-optimized video. With Subsplash you get the best encoding for iOS, Android, Windows, Android Kindle, and the web for streaming video and audio for engaging your audience. 

Save Time

Do you cringe at the idea of having to upload your media files multiple times while managing your app, website, and podcast separately? Yeah, we do too. And that’s exactly why we’ve built our platform to simplify that workflow process for you.

Managing your media files is now awesome!

• In the Subsplash Dashboard, you can publish your sermon audio/video to your app, website, and podcast with just one upload.
• If you have a video file, our encoder will extract the audio and create an mp3 file to give your users the option to watch or listen.
• Have a bunch of media files you need to upload at once? No sweat. You can upload those files in batches and continue to work on other things in the dashboard while the files are being processed.
• Have you ever been creating a Media item and thought "I wish I could upload my file right here?" Well, now you can! Jumping between Media and Files to link your audio and video is now a thing of the past.

While we strive to offer the best media tools available to churches, the Subsplash Platform can do so much more than just sermon media delivery. Our platform is built to help your church see deeper engagement within your community. In fact, most churches we partner with see three times more app downloads than Sunday attendance, an increase in giving, and both time and money saved by using the tools in our platform to simplify internal processes. If you are interested in learning more about using Subsplash for sermon delivery or increasing engagement in your church, we’d love to hear from you! Our team can be reached here.

3 Ideas for Customizing Your Home Page

Did you know that you can build your own custom home page with the Subsplash platform? Well, now you do! Building a home page (or "tab") is a great way to add even more customization to your app. Your home tab will be the first thing people see when they open the app, so it is the best place to put your most important information. Since the home tab is fully customizable, we thought we’d give you a few ideas for inspiration. Here are a few examples of what you can build with a home tab:

Sunday Tab

Build a “Sunday” custom home tab that houses everything your congregation needs for each Sunday service. This can include sermon notes, giving, prayer requests, each week’s Scripture reading, and church updates.

Connect Tab

Want to focus on getting people more connected to your church? Then building a “Connect” tab is a great option for you. With this option, the first thing your congregation sees when they open the app will be everything they need to get more plugged in at church. Some ideas for this would include a digital connect card, prayer requests, stories from your congregation, sign up forms, and small group info.

Multicampus tab

If your church has more than one location, then a “multicampus” or “locations” tab will be a great way to organize your content by each individual campus. Create a list of your campuses that includes events, volunteer sign up forms, and ministry opportunities for each location.

These examples are just a start. The Subsplash platform is so flexible that you could even implement ALL of these ideas in the same app if you really wanted to. If you’d like to see more about how you can create a custom tab for your app, click here to schedule a demo with our team. We love seeing your work as well! Once you create a custom home tab, make sure to share it with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram!

How to Get the Best Giving Rates for Your Church

If you are a pastor or church leader, chances are you’ve probably thought about ways to make giving easier for your congregation. And with online and mobile donations skyrocketing, who can blame you?! Choosing a solution to help increase generosity can be a challenge, though. With so many online giving providers out there, how do you know what constitutes a good deal? Is paying a monthly fee worth it? How do you negotiate the best processing rates so your church can keep as much money as possible? Here at Subsplash, we love providing resources for church leaders, so we thought we’d put together a little guide to help you answer that million dollar question. How do you negotiate the best giving rates for your church?

The answer is easy: your team shouldn’t have to negotiate anything.

Why not?

Well first of all, your church staff is a team of ministry leaders, not businesspeople. You probably didn’t take a course about negotiating giving rates when you were in Bible college or seminary. “Spend a few hours on the phone with companies X, Y, and Z, and try to find out if they have good giving rates” was probably not listed in your job description when you joined the church. Simply put, your job as a ministry leader is to love and serve the church and the people that God has entrusted to you.

Additionally, God has called each believer and church body to steward their money wisely (Luke 16:10-11, 1 Cor. 4:2). Why do you ask your congregation to be generous? So that the church can use those tithes and offerings to reach more people with the good news of Jesus. When your congregation gives generously, they are entrusting the church to use those funds for that exact purpose. By paying high monthly fees and high processing rates, your church is simply losing out on thousands of dollars that could be poured back into your ministry for the sake of the gospel.

This is exactly why we added GrowCurve to Subsplash Giving this past summer. We love the church, and were tired of hearing stories about church leaders getting locked into high monthly fees, high processing rates, and long-term contracts just to have a giving solution. We wanted to create a solution that not only helps churches increase giving, but also helps them steward their money wisely. With GrowCurve, we start you at industry-low processing rates for your online, mobile, and text giving, and those rates go down even lower as your giving goes up. To top it off, there is no monthly fee, no setup fee, and no contracts. Why? Because we would rather see your church keep more money and use it to reach more people with the good news of Jesus. No need to negotiate that.

If you’d like to find out more about how your church can increase giving and keep more of your donations, we’d love to help! You can contact our team of ministry consultants here.

The Church App Platform: Better Than Free

You’ve probably seen it before….a company offering a “free” app if you sign up for one of their other services. Sounds like a pretty good deal, right? After all, apps can be pretty expensive. Why not save some money and get one for free? This logic makes sense, but do you know what’s way better than not paying extra for an app? Getting an app that saves you thousands of dollars! Here at Subsplash, we can make that happen for you.

So how is this even possible? Let’s say your church is currently paying $99 per month for online, mobile, and text giving with a 2.5% processing rate (a pretty standard offer these days) and processes $50,000 per month. We’ll assume that you got a free app included with this deal as well. So how does this bundle stack up against Subsplash? Not very well. In this scenario, using the Subsplash platform would SAVE your church $2,640 each year.

Let’s also take a look at what you would get in addition to those savings. Each Subsplash package includes:

• The premier custom app platform trusted by over 50 of the top 100 churches in America and thousands more of all sizes

• A robust online, mobile, and text giving solution with Subsplash Giving and GrowCurve (rates automatically go down as giving goes up)

• The best sermon delivery software on the market….publish to your app, website, and podcast with just one upload

• Digital bulletins to help you save money on printing costs

• Cloud hosting and storage for all your media files

• A dedicated platform specialist and client success manager who will help your church see success with your solution

Are you excited about this yet? We certainly are! And we have been for years….from the beginning, the mission of Subsplash has been simple: provide churches and ministries with the best, most affordable engagement tools so that more people can hear the good news of Jesus. That is the heart behind everything we do, whether it be adding innovative new features to our platform, lowering our processing rates, or drawing up big plans for the future. If you’d like to learn more about how your church can save thousands and take advantage of the Ultimate Engagement Platform, you can contact one of our ministry consultants here.

Get the Most out of Your App

“Hey, can Subsplash do (insert awesome app feature here)?” We get this question a lot, and we love being able to respond with an emphatic “YES!”.

2016 has been our busiest year yet….so far, we have rolled out close to 70 new features and updates to our platform! We don’t build these features simply to check off a box that says we have them available, but to provide churches and ministries with the best tools for engaging with people on a deeper level than ever before.  

In addition to providing churches with the best engagement tools, our team is also passionate about helping churches use those tools to their fullest potential. If you are looking for some examples of what the Subsplash platform can do or some inspiration for updating your app, you are in the right place. We’ve compiled a list of some of our more popular features and capabilities alongside some examples of churches that do a great job utilizing them. Simply click the links to download each church’s app and see for yourself.

Home Tab - Oahu Church of Christ

Having a custom home tab (or an “Aloha” tab as our friends in Hawaii call it) is a great way to provide quick and easy access to key information within your app. Oahu Church of Christ does a great job with this and even has some great graphics to go along with it.

Media Delivery - Influence Culture Church

Does the idea of having to upload your media files to multiple different places make you sick? Yeah, us too. The Subsplash platform allows you to upload your media files just one time and publish them to your app, website, and podcast. Our system can even extract the audio from your video files and publish both, giving users the option to watch, listen, or download. This makes it easy to manage your media while simultaneously providing the best experience for your congregation.

Subsplash Giving - The Shoreline Church 

Want to increase generosity in your church? Why not make giving easy in the main place your congregation is going to access your content? Subsplash Giving is fast, secure, and takes place right inside your app. You can read more about our giving solution here.

Digital Bulletins - Church on the Queensway

Adding bulletins to your app is a great way to reduce printing costs and provide your congregation with an easier way to participate during Sunday services. With our digital bulletin feature, you can add fill in the blank sermon notes, free form notes, or entire Sunday bulletins into your app. Your users can simply download the notes when they are finished - no more searching for that elusive piece of paper from Sunday's service! We love how Church on the Queensway uses this feature for their weekly sermon notes.

Bible Reading Plans - Reach Church

When Subsplash’s very own Chris Sharpe was looking for a plan to help him read through the Bible in a year, he didn’t have to look any further than the phone he carries with him everywhere he goes. His local church here in the Seattle area has an amazing app with daily Bible reading plans available to help their congregation dive deeper into Scripture. Subsplash provides a native Bible feature, the ability to add custom reading plans, and even the option to integrate with other Bible apps such as YouVersion and Bible.is.

Form Integration - Rise City Church

Did you know that you can integrate custom forms into your Subsplash app? Whether you have sign up forms through your ChMS, a third party form provider, or Subsplash Connect (our own custom form builder), we’ve got you covered. Rise City does a great job of incorporating forms into their app.

Multi Campus Support - New Life Church

Does your church have more than one campus? Maybe even more than 10? With our custom tab builder, you can organize your content by each location. New Life Church does a fantastic job of using this feature to make navigating by your selected campus easy. You can even use our custom tab builder for anything, not just multiple locations!

Blog Reader/Daily Devotionals - Love God Greatly

Want to tie a blog, devotional, or other web content into the app? Our blog reader tool not only connects your content to the app, but automatically redesigns it to be the best mobile experience. Love God Greatly is an awesome app that uses our blog reader feature for daily devotionals.

We could continue to go on, but then you’d be reading this blog post for hours….there are hundreds more features available on the Subsplash platform and thousands more churches that use them well. If you have a question for us or want to share an awesome app, we’d love to hear from you. Click here to get in touch.