EP095: Launching & Elevating Church Communication Teams

Episode 95 of the Church Digital Podcast, powered by Stadia Church Planting. Jeff here. 95. Even before I go any further, 95 episodes. Man, it's been a long run, a fun run. Thank you, audience out there for listening, for joining me on this journey while we're trying to figure out how to do church online, how to do digital church, how to do fidgetal church more effectively. It has been such a fun run. Man, I even feel guilty saying that in the midst of this COVID season, am I allowed to have fun doing podcasts, trying to help churches figure out how to see this as an opportunity to get better, to improve, to thrive, grow, and even multiply? Yeah, I think I can have fun doing that. So it's been a fun run.

Hey, Episode 95 here. We're going to shift a little bit, slightly, just a little bit, because part of this whole church online, this whole fidgetal church thing really comes down to, yes, we need to focus on creating community. Yes, we need to change some of the culture of how that works in context of church, but we also need to look at it not as the tool, the resource to create community, but we also need to look at it as the tool and the resource to communicate. And so I wanted to maybe pause from the whole church online, the online community, the disciple making, all of those conversations, digital only, and shift gears a little bit and have a conversation centered around how we as a church, what lessons do we need to learn through this COVID season towards communication, towards digital communication?

How can we do things more effectively, more efficiently? If we're starting, where do we start? How do we start? If we're growing, what's those next steps that we should be taking in and amongst this COVID season? And so what I did was I called the one guy I know who's incredible at church communications, Ben Stapley, weekend experience director over at Christ Fellowship Miami, no stranger here to the podcast, and said, hey, Ben, I want to do this show. Who should I bring in? Who should I talk to? You tell me what to do here. And Ben, as typically does, gives excellent advice and connected to me with two excellent communication directors. So we're bringing in Lauren Berkerich from Liquid Church, Ben's former stomping grounds up in the New Jersey, New York area, as well as Haley Vituris, who's actually a former Saddleback, but is currently at a church called Bayside out in California.

Both are phenomenal churches. Of course, Ben also jumped on the conversation from Christ Fellowship Miami. So we've got three mega giga level church conversations here, three people with experience with larger churches. But we're not just focusing on the big church. What I love about the conversation is we're able to drill down to the nitty gritty for that church planner, maybe even some of those guys who are just starting out trying to figure out what those next steps are. So when it comes to digital communications, this is a great conversation and a great place to start. So we're bringing in Ben Stapley, we're bringing in Laura Berkerich, we're bringing in Haley, the tourists from respective churches across the country, and myself, Jeff, with the Church of Digital and Stadia Church Planning in a conversation that I am calling Launching and Elevating Church Communication Teams.

Okay, everybody, here you go. Lauren, Haley, why don't you just take a minute, 60 seconds, introduce yourself, what's your ministry story, what do you do at the respective churches, just to give us some background, and then we'll get into the conversation here in a little bit. Lauren, would you mind going first? Sure. So I'm the communications director at Liquid Church. I've been there about five years, which means essentially, if anything's written, printed, video, graphics, social media, we're kind of overseeing that. So strategy to execution. Previously, though, I was not in ministry, I was in the marketplace. I got my start as a journalist, as a local television news reporter. So Ben and I have that in common, too.

That's kind of how we got our start. And then I transitioned to the agency public relations world when I wanted some normalcy in my life. And so I worked there with a variety of clients. Liquid was my church where I attended. And, you know, it's just one of those God things. You're having dinner with your pastor one night, and suddenly you're applying for a job the next day, and you're thinking, what is happening here? And so now I'm in the ministry world. And I got two little boys at home who are just the loves of my life. That's awesome. I didn't realize that the TV connection, Ben, was it the same station, or was it just within the same industry? No? Okay. No. And Ben, you were more like, you were more Canada when you were TV, right?

You weren't TV in Jersey, were you? Chicago and NBC, and then up in Toronto. Toronto. Okay. Yeah. Haley, tell us a little bit about your story. Yeah. So I've been at Bayside Church for two, almost two and a half years now. And I started out in church ministry at Saddleback Church for nine and a half years. And I was the first social media manager there at Saddleback and just grew those channels and really paved the way in, I would say, church social media. I was one of the early pioneers. Most of my peers and colleagues don't work at churches anymore. They work for themselves and hustle the churches, which is fine, but you're not, it's a lot harder to do ministry when you're in the trenches. So it's nice to be your own boss and to tell churches what to do, but it's a lot harder when you have pastors telling you what to do, even though you know the space a little bit better than they do.

But I just felt a call to ministry and I interned for a new station in San Diego, Fox 6 San Diego, which that affiliate isn't there anymore, but I could not do the reporter thing. I don't have the reporter voice. I am a little ADD. So talking on my feet was not a gift that I had, but I thought I was going to go that route to be a producer for the news. And God just pulled me into ministry, which is so funny because my two sisters went to private Christian schools for college and I went to San Diego State and was in a sorority. So not the kid you would think would work at a church, but here we are. That's awesome. I was a radio DJ. That's the closest I came to broadcast. So maybe, you know, you may not have the voice for it, but, or, you know, for that, I definitely don't have the base for it.

So that's why they kind of stuck me behind the radio. So awesome. Modern rock in the nineties. It was good, good time. Good times. Good times. The thing that I really wanted to get in here a little bit is, is this challenge of how do we build our communication teams in this COVID season without having the building, there's having been a lot of stock on social media, on email communications as churches don't have the physical ability. And now they're starting to reach out and really utilize some of these digital tools. And so like, I would love to even just from, from both of you guys, Lauren, Haley, Ben as, as well from, from the outside, like just from the get go, what lessons are you learning?

What observations, where have you seen like communication change as a result of COVID? Maybe some things that you were doing pre-COVID weren't working. What are you now seeing work and change for you in mid COVID, post COVID, wherever we are now, uh, call it, you know, October, September, 2020. What are you learning? Yeah. The, for me, I think there's a couple of quick things, the importance of a lower third to communicate fluid information. We did it twice where we said, we are reopening on this date. And then we had to change the whole video and re-record. So we just, we, we learned to say, we're reopening at the time below because we stopped, um, realized that we realized that what we thought was concrete was actually wet cement.

So that was one of the lessons learned for us, um, humorously, uh, two kind of big lessons we learned was one was that the communications director, manager, whatever you call that staff or volunteer, that that is really one of the most influential. And I actually say the second most influential position in the church. So you got lead pastor. And I think that's almost the second most influential position in the church. Um, in the past, I think people would say pre COVID, Hey, get an intern, uh, get a college student, get somebody, you know, get someone's nephew to run communications at the church. And we've realized that we can't get away with that. Um, information's changing so fast. Um, it's for some of us, it's a matter of life and death.

And because of that, we cannot entrust such important information to somebody so far down the ladder of leadership in the organization. So it's a much higher position. And then the last thing that I learned during the season is we need to do a better job of empowering volunteers during the week. So we do a great job as churches to do that on the weekend. Um, not so good during the week. And so we are, we're backfilling some of that for communications. How do we empower volunteers to go and take photos of community engagement that's happening during the week? How do they write copy during the week? Uh, how do we figure out to give them work that they could do in the evenings when they're off, but still meet our deadlines?

Those are the three big things that we figured out. I love that idea of the lower third and Oh, I'm going to have to rerecord that. And Lauren Haley, have either of you been bit by something like that in the season? Like the, the changing content literally day to day and having to redo some of that? Um, this morning, actually. So at our first, completely relevant. Yes, completely relevant. Um, we had our first week of, uh, live outdoor worship services this past weekend, which went wonderfully. We had some noise complaints, however, from the neighbors because they didn't like our tech rehearsals early in the morning, valid point. So we decided to push back our service times, but of course, everything we'd produced, uh, videos, websites, social media, et cetera, had the old service times and these are moving forward.

So this morning I spent a lot of time, um, rejiggering that content, asking our video team, can you cut out that line where, um, our talent says services are at nine and 11 and can we change that up? So, yeah, so we just went through that, which, uh, you know, it was one of those moments. Yeah. A lower third would have been nice. Is that the technical term rejiggering? Is that, is that? Yes, that is. That is. Yes. On my resume, it says professional rejiggerer. Well done. Haley, maybe, maybe for you, like what, what are you learning, uh, in this, in this season? Well, um, a really great trait that I learned from Saddleback Church was to be fast, fluid, and flexible. And this is absolutely the season for that.

Working in social media, you can't work in social media without being fast, fluid, and flexible because it's changing every day. I think there's new layouts, even on Facebook for managers rolling out. So like relearning the new layout that you have to operate every single day can get really annoying, but nine and a half years of it, I don't even know what's the normal layout anymore. It's just always new. Um, so we've had the fires here and so we've been able to do outdoor services, socially distanced, but with fires, you can't really be outdoors when the smoking is not just at a hazardous level, the smoke is at a toxic level. So making those calls to like last minute, move people indoors for safety purposes and just hoping that no one's in there going and telling the governor that cause we're in Sacramento.

So we're right where governor Gavin Newsom is. So there's a lot at stake there, but there's still like neighboring churches that are like, we don't care. We're meeting anyway without any of your rules. And we are much larger church. So we're trying to have a both and like, yes, you can impinge on our, um, our first amendment rights, but also like we can't be outside because the air is literally toxic for you. So last minute communication, like we don't, we learn not to put lower thirds down on there for the weekend messages, even though we filmed those like midweek. And we just, you really utilize our communication platforms to get the word out, um, through text, through email, through social, um, you name it, we try to hit it up.

Um, so people know when they can view onsite and online. And I think something else that is really notable saying is that a lot of small, smaller churches, when they knew they could go back to onsite, completely abandoned their online, but there's a lot of people still not comfortable going in person. So you don't want to move all of your resources to serve maybe a third of your church or less. We've seen it be like one fifth in person, um, when still four fifths are watching online. So keep those people hosting those Facebook lives, keep your hosts on your online platforms, keep pushing people to watch online. Because again, like I've always been pushing the online platform, um, with my friend Jay Cranda at Saddleback, because you can reach so much farther than the four walls of your church online.

Really it's limitless. You can reach all around the world. So I'd like to see more churches, um, not abandoning their online technique as they start to transition back to onsite. I think there can be room for a both end strategy. Yeah, there, there's definitely room for that continuing on learning lessons in this COVID season that are going to help the churches move forward. And, uh, you just, even with, with the fires, you just brought up how difficult 2020 is, right? Uh, you, so like COVID's a thing, um, racial reconciliation is a thing. Um, you know, we've, we've seen just here in Miami, uh, trop, we were hit by a tropical depression just came out of nowhere over the weekend. I wasn't horrible, but a lot, a lot of rain as a result of that.

So many hurricanes here within, in the Gulf, uh, affecting different areas and cities. Like this, this year is really is becoming a nightmare where it would seem like communication has to be so crucial in how it's handled in order for any organization, of course, churches to be effective in that season. Now the, and there's, there's lessons that need to be learned. There are things that, Hey, we need to do things differently here with, with the podcast. I don't know that the governor of California is listening. So I think the, the saddleback tip or the, yeah, that, that tip with Bay Hope, excuse me, Bayside church is safe. I don't think the governor will find out. Don't share this podcast with the governor, please.

Um, but what lessons, here's what I'd love to know. What lessons are we learning? Um, in the season, maybe what pain points, uh, of a church who's not learning somebody who's struggling with, Hey, I don't, I, I, we've got it. Okay. I just want to get back to the building. I don't need to improve communication. I, as a pastor are doing it fine or the team that we've got. Yeah. They seemed overworked. They seem stressed all the time, but every communication director is stressed all the time. I've never met one that isn't stressed. So I, the question would be this, what, what are the pain points that an organization would feel that is not effectively utilizing communication? What are the warning signs?

What are the red flags? What are the things that it's like, Hey, there's time maybe to make a change. There's time to grow the department a little bit. What, what would you guys say were some of the red flags that, that churches out there should be looking at? Um, I'll jump in. I'd say one would be, um, I think many churches realized they don't have a crisis communications plan and they realized that right back in March when we, everybody was scrambling, but they might now be resting on their laurels and thinking, okay, we finally figured this out and they still don't have a crisis communications plan. Um, so if that didn't spur them to action back in March, um, they really need to take some time to step back and evaluate what is their crisis management plan, who is on their crisis team and map that out for all different types of scenarios.

So if they haven't done that yet, that should be on their to-do list. I think that's one learning. I think, um, another big learning is that a lot of churches might've realized they don't have a communication strategy. What they do is they have a collection of tactics that they use. So if I had asked somebody, Hey, what's your communication strategy? I wouldn't be surprised for them to say to me, Oh, we advertise a lot on social media and that's our strategy. And I would say, no, no, no, that's a marketing tactic that you're using to execute whatever your strategy should be. And so I think a lot of people just need to take the time. It can be hard when we're rushing, right? We're so, um, uh, pressed against deadlines, but to step back and evaluate your status quo and take that time to figure out what is our strategy.

That way, every decision we're making can be filtered towards, does that get us a step closer to achieving our goals? You know, does that help us in our strategy? And then I would just say that some people, um, I think even my church included, uh, a liquid church, we love to execute with excellence. So we think excellence honors God and it engages people. And so we would try to perfect things. No, perfect is the wrong word. We're not going after perfection excellence, but we would try to get things really, really great and then release them. Right. But this is a totally new normal. And we have a new outlook. We're more open to experimentation than ever before. Um, we got to throw some spaghetti at the wall.

We got to see what works. We got to be willing to pull the plug on things. We got to be willing to say what worked before doesn't work now. We got to be okay. We're falling flat and failing and kind of just laughing at ourselves and saying that was a good try. Um, but I wonder if some other churches out there are still struggling with that. Um, and is it okay to experiment? Do they have the permission to try new things? Do they have the permission to pull the plug on some things? And so I wouldn't want that to hold people back because I think it's been really beneficial. And one of the things I would love for our organization to continue to do, um, post COVID that we are a church that experiments and tries new things.

Yeah. I love that idea of experimenting. We talk so much here and even trying to fine tune church online. There's no rule books on this. There's honestly, the majority of the strategies weren't, weren't even developed to the point that they are now. So in this COVID season, uh, there's been just so much experimenting within the church and continuing that idea on, you know, like, uh, we often tell the story of, um, like Apple iPhone releases their iPhone once a year, and that's got to be perfect. If there's an issue with the hardware iPhone, it's a 80 iPhone, 80 million iPhones will be recalled in a given year because that's how many they've sold very quickly. So you can't, you have to have that perfection, but software like Google, uh, Google, Gmail, like Gmail was in beta for five and a half years, had tens of millions of users.

And they were just experimenting and tinkering with all these users in the system. Facebook itself launches a new, uh, mobile app every two weeks. They just launch updates towards it. And so there's always this, this idea of tinkering and experimenting within the church, us learning from that to say, Hey, we don't have to have the, the final picture in place. Uh, but we have to be able to throw spaghetti on the wall. I'm going to borrow that one. That's awesome. Throw, throw the spaghetti, see, see if it sticks, uh, and then run with it. My, my daughter does that. She cooks and she throws spaghetti at the, at the, uh, free refrigerator. That's her thing. So awesome. Hey, uh, Haley, tell me what, what are some red flags on your side?

What, what should churches look for that, that maybe don't have a good communication plan? What are some things they're going to struggle with? Well, I think, um, I agree with everything that Lauren just mentioned, crisis strategy, crisis communication. That's been a big one. And as someone that's focused on, um, I'm a director of digital engagement. It's funny because overseeing digital somehow, like it's also accompanied the PR role because you can get a message out the fastest on social. And so some, for some reason, the social media person has assumed that PR position for the church. And so I can really only just speak on behalf of like what I know with my experience at Bayside, but in this season, it's just felt like, you know, with the, the BNLM movement and all of that going on at the same time as COVID is that we learned, we thought we were taking action as a church, but we learned we weren't being very clear on what we stood for.

So just an example for us, we did a march, a peace march in the city of Sacramento, the state Capitol, um, with Sacramento police department. It was together in unity with Sac PD. And we had some great photographers from our church come and take pictures. I got them. We posted them onto social, tried to be as selective as I could, but you can't filter out people from a crowd. So there are people with BLM signs in the background and all people saw, they did not see us linking arms with Sac PD. All they saw was us marching with people with BLM signs. So it became this very large political thing. And Bayside, we pride ourselves on being culturally diverse and having a very diverse pastoral staff.

We have at least one to two teaching pastors at each of our eight locations. So, um, we try to add a lot of diversity there as well. And it just felt like all that work we had been doing was kind of getting like destroyed just because people in the background were holding BLM signs. And we had like police, like wanting to leave the church and security guards who had been longtime volunteers wanting to leave. And we just learned like, we have to be very clear. Yes, Black lives do matter, but we do not support the organization, um, and their purposes behind it. We do support our brothers and sisters in Christ who are Black and we feel for them at this time while they're hurting, but we do not support that organization.

So had we been very clear up front with those statements, we probably could have solved a lot of pain points earlier on that we faced as a church. So just very vulnerably sharing, be very, very clear about doing any of those things up front and on your channels, have a statement ready. If you need one, have your pastor, just hop on a camera and make a statement, um, and post that to your digital channels because, um, we had to learn the hard way in this instance and you better believe we won't be doing that mistake again. So yeah, everything Lauren said. And then also just be very clear, even if you do feel like you're doing good things during the season with the community on what you do stand for as a church.

You know, and Ben, I know you and I, I feel like we've had this conversation maybe on, on earlier podcasts, but it comes to either pre-recording and being ready for situations like that, or just responding quickly in the moment. Like, I'm just curious how, what, how do you roll? Like what, what's the, the, the better plan or process? Be ready to jump on something or, or have it like pre-recorded and ready to go? How do you anticipate or deal with maybe some of those issues? In relationship to our, our regular weekend experience, we like to get that in a can. So we pre-record that. Um, but what we've done when that crisis does, um, happen after our recording, we figure out a way to inject that into the service experience or into just inject it into social.

So again, we're trying to, uh, we're trying to be, um, excellent as Lauren is talking about, but then also flexible as Haley is talking about. So how do we hold both those values in tension? That's, that's where we try to do it by pre-recording, then also being nimble enough to interject something, um, during the season. So, um, let me ask this, like, okay, let's pretend here. I'm an established church. Um, I've, I've been around a long time. I've, one campus church. Um, what, what's a new role in the church, uh, either staff or volunteer that's kind of come out of this COVID season? What, what are some things that we were doing, um, now mid COVID, post COVID that maybe we weren't doing pre COVID.

So like, what is something new that you would recommend? Oh, churches, you need to focus on this. I'll take that. And I'll, before I take that all, if I can jump into the other one as well, like what are some of the symptoms when you don't have, like Lauren was saying, a strong social media strategy. The two ones I've seen repeatedly is churches that add, add, add, add, and never subtract, right? They got the paper bulletin. Now they got the website and then they got the apps and they got the, they, they, they just keep on adding platforms. And at some point as a nonprofit, you have to cut something. So that's one of the things I've, I've seen. And for churches who are listening, who are looking for a, a life preserver is cut, cut something.

If you're adding a, another communication platform, and let's be honest, the proliferation of them is not going to stop. They're going to continue. Then you need to cut something or you're going to, you're going to wear everybody out. Um, that's the first thing. And then the second symptom I've seen is if you don't have a clear strategy, uh, then everybody fights for resources and that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. The, the old analogy I've used was my parents used to buy me and my, my two other brothers every Wednesday when we were kids, a large pizza and there are medium sized pizza, sorry. And there'd be six slices. And my parents never said, you got to, you got to, you got to. So what we do, we do is try to eat as quickly as we could in hopes of getting that third piece because my parents never allocated those resources.

And the same thing is we're adults, but let's be honest, we still fight for resources with each other. And so if you're not dictating as your leadership of your church, it's not indicating the priorities of the church, then all the ministries and all the departments are going to fight over the airtime from communications. And so I see that again and again, I hear from people in ministry saying, I'm not getting airtime. It's a, it's a wrestling match. That's because communication priority has not been established at the top. So those are the two symptoms I've seen. Um, and then to answer your next question in relationship to how, how we've pivot with staffing. I don't know if I've seen, uh, roles, but I've seen increased responsibilities with the crisis management.

Um, social media, um, are the biggest things. And then also positioning I've seen as a big change for churches where in the past, again, this is influence the past. This person in this communications director role is they would get information second or third hand. They would be a telephone game and they would, it oftentimes get mixed up as it got to them. Now I'm seeing that person being brought in with the executive team, the leadership team during important conversations to hear firsthand what is happening. And they're the first person outside of that executive team and leadership team to get that information to pass it on. I think that's the biggest change I've seen with staffing, just having that person in those conversations and elevating them to make sure they get it firsthand.

Awesome. Yeah. It's, it was, I think you mentioned earlier, we were having a conversation about maybe that communications director is like number two in importance, or at least in the ability to influence people next to that lead pastor, getting them that, that kind of fresh from the tree approach instead of the bad telephone game. Yeah. I mean, that, that, that's a big win. I've, I've seen that with, with organizations that I've worked with, with maybe from you guys, Lauren, uh, Haley, and what, what, what other, uh, what other things maybe should an established church, what, what are, how have things changed in COVID season that, that churches should be taken advantage of that maybe, maybe they haven't realized yet?

Um, so just thinking about like the resources and, and, um, staffing. So I'd agree a hundred percent with Ben that up to this point, a lot of churches have just been, um, trying to have their staff cover all the bases, right? Everybody's working more, working longer, taking on new responsibilities. But, um, at Liquid and other organizations that we've spoken to, um, there is the look though at re-evaluating what are those staff resources and what roles do we have to elevate or create? Um, two of those I would point to is the church online pastor. So at our organization and many, I think this was just one hat that a staff member wore. It wasn't the primary thing they focused on. It wasn't the secondary thing they focused on.

In the margins, they recorded some hosting. They tried to pop on social media. They tried to care for their flock in, I don't know, 10 hours a week if we're lucky. And now I think it's, Hey, we have to elevate that role or create that role and have somebody thinking 24 seven about this. Um, I would also say, um, we're looking at, you know, possibly, um, adding a position as a digital content director. So somebody under the communications fold, but specifically thinking about digital content 24 seven, because we have tried to create a lot of unique digital content in this season, but it's a beast. As we all know, social media, digital content, you can never feed the beast enough. There's always a desire for more.

And so to just add that say to, you know, my role, or, um, I I'm lucky enough to be a two man department. I have a communications coordinator who I couldn't live without. She's amazing. Um, but we're carrying so much and we're carrying all that digital content, um, kind of creation outside of church online right now, but to have somebody from the marketplace to maybe join our team and to think about that 24 seven, that would be a huge win. I think that'd be a win for any organization. Love that. Love, love the idea of the coordinator. When you say digital, like social media, immediate applications tying into that, are, are there other, other realms outside of social media that the phrase digital, that label covers?

How are you exploring the idea of digital at, uh, at liquid? So we've been trying to create a lot of, um, special online events. So I'll give you some examples for 15 weeks. We did Wednesday live prayer services. There was always a, a new theme, a new guests, new people praying, new pastors leading it, where we invited people to join us, um, on Facebook live for that every Wednesday. We did, um, daily devotionals for about 10 weeks, every single weekday at noon, you were hearing from one of our pastors. Um, I just got done producing a parent support series. This is through our liquid family ministry. So again, we were live every week, every week, a different theme. So it's surviving homeschooling this week, as we're leading into homeschooling, right?

We had educators on, we had professional homeschoolers, we had, um, occupational therapists. We had this robust conversation. How can we help our parents? Another week it's setting, uh, routines. How can we, so we're thinking about how do we help people? What are the felt needs in our community? And how do we create unique digital content that meets their needs? We're doing, um, you can sign up, um, text us, you know, uh, text liquid parents at 94090 and get your daily devotional. We've been doing that for months. Um, so every ministry has something different, right? Groups is doing unique content for their group leaders. Um, but it's all online. It's all digital. It's stuff we've never done before.

So we're figuring it all out and it's a lot. It's a big lift. I don't want to see it end. I just want to see it continue to grow. Um, and so, but we need some extra help and some fresh thinking too. I would love somebody to come on and give us some fresh thinking. Lauren, can I just jump in and say how much I appreciate the fact that your, your, your text word and your number are both easy to remember. I'm not going to out them, but I was at a church recently and the church had four words in their name and they text to, and the number they had didn't have any repeating numbers. And it was like, I just wanted to walk, who's your communications director? You can, we can do better than this. We can do better than this.

It'd be even simpler if the shortcodes weren't already taken. That's awesome. Hey, Haley, any, any thoughts on here, like, um, new roles or new directions, um, big church, small church kind of what, what are you seeing or learning over there at Bayside? Yeah. It's funny that Lauren mentioned all those things because we had been doing a lot of them prior to this season, but now they've just taken more of a precedence. So if you look on our Bayside church YouTube channel, we have a list of like our original shows that we have created. Um, one of them being one of the ones that I produce is the flip side. And we just filmed our hundredth episode. It's a weekly podcast about diving deeper into the weekend teaching.

So heavy on the theology for the, our attenders who are like, we didn't go deep enough in the message. Well, we only have like 30 to 45 minutes to teach. So you want more, go watch the flip side on Thursdays. Um, so that's there for them. We have city beats, which is a podcast with one of our pastors from our Midtown campus. So a suburban urban cultural, um, diversity show about racial reconciliation. That's one of our original shows on there. We had, um, a four week series parenting in a pandemic. So similar to what Lauren had, um, helping parents with psychologists and teachers and digital experts, how to keep your kids, um, safe digitally during the season as well, while they're just plugged onto devices.

Now they're being told to do it for school and then also after school hours. So what's the boundaries and balance for that. And then we've been doing a daily video devotion for five years called refuel every single day. That's a playlist on there as well. And then FaceTime phone calls, um, with some of our favorites, we did this like two years ago. Um, but that's still up there to watch where, um, you always want to be like a fly on the wall when your pastor calls Bob Goff and you're like, what on earth did they talk about? Well, this kind of allows you to be a fly on the wall in that situation. Uh, but the most recent show that we have just launched last week, actually it's called finding good.

So is it even possible to find good in this year of 2020 or in this culture that we live in? And so one of our pastors goes on a quest to find good. And the first trip he takes actually is down to San Diego and Bob Goff's ranch and has a conversation with him. And so that was this week's episode. And, um, we're kind of like modeling ourself almost as like a Netflix for our community of like positive, great content that again is meeting a felt need. I think that's the key to what all your marketing should be doing. Don't just be posting and promoting what you're doing and expect people to come tell them how it's going to meet something real that they're going through. Tell them how you can help people in debt, get out of debt and help their finances.

Tell people who are facing divorce, how you can help potentially get them out of that through a marriage class, focusing on your marriage. Tell people who are struggling as single parents things that they can do. And so these are basic felt needs. The church has always been the best at meeting felt needs, but more recently we've been the best at promoting ourselves and people are turned off by that. And social and, um, social channels that, you know, for sure do not reward those kinds of posts because people don't interact with those on your channels. So really find that felt need of how you are going to help someone as a church. And let me tell you some of our posts on social, the ones that do the best are our compassion pieces of us showing our church doing good, going out into our community and helping other people.

People want to see the church be the church. You're going to win so many more people over with your church and build trust. If you show your church actually being the church, then if you try to sell people something. By the way, I'm, I'm blown away the amount of content. I don't want to highlight content for content, but that was a lot of things you just routed off. A lot of these podcasts and episodic things. Like even, even going back to the whole flip side, which I think is the one that you were saying. It's a weekly podcast that goes deeper. Um, and like that's, uh, how, how many, uh, how much time do you guys spend on creating content outside of the week? Well, our global communications team, we're kind of going through little reorgs, you know, they're trying to repurpose people's positions that, um, might've just been in women's ministry.

Now they're like women's digital producers for this. Like everybody's roles are getting repurposed, has something more to do with digital content outside of the main communications team. And we have our campuses really focusing on creating content for their communities. And so that kind of helps free up our main communications team to help work on this kind of content. So our production team on the weekend was really, really great at producing, uh, in-person experience. They've had to relearn how to create a great digital experience for the user on a much smaller screen than those gigantic jumbo screens inside a room. Um, so that's been a fun transition as well, but our team has been a little more freed up to create content like this.

And we just want to show pastors like this has value because I think that's the hardest thing right now. How is this show going to get butts in the seats? Well, we have to rethink how we're measuring success. And I think this season has been the greatest test to measuring success because we only counted success as butts in the seat, not views on the screen, which is going to look different than a butt in the seat as well. So, uh, I don't even know if I answered your question, but, um, we try to spend a lot of our time creating that content outside, um, of weekend Sunday services and create added value besides the weekend service throughout the week. So it's engaging the one, six, seven people that have 167 hours in the week out of the one hour or more that you spend in church on Sundays.

And we want to make sure that we're engaging people and not pushing content at them, but giving them content that could help better their lives and help them grow closer to Jesus. Haley, I want to know what, when is Bayside jumping on Disney plus? That's when I went, when are you guys getting there? They're going to become the Christian Disney plus. They don't need Disney plus. They're going to create their own thing. That's awesome. Hey, so if I'm just curious, it's not the conversation I wanted to have, but this is really interesting to me. Sorry. Um, if, if, where, where, if I wanted to like check out, is there like a homepage, a YouTube channel, just a lot of the stuff that you're talking about, where am I going?

Um, you're going to bayside.com slash or youtube.com slash bayside videos. Um, Bayside church was taken before I got there. So that's what it is. Bayside videos. Um, but we also have it on our Bayside church app. Okay. Very, very cool. I'm going to, I'm going to dig into that. A lot of that. That's really fascinating. You can't compete with Mandalorian and we're not going to try. I totally missed that reference. I should probably have gotten that. I'm sorry. Mandalorian. You haven't seen that show. I've seen Mandalorian. What's that have to do with Bayside? Oh, and Disney plus. Oh, Disney plus. No, no, no. Listen, there's other things. Listen, I mean, I got like baby Yoda back here and then you can actually see it.

It's like there, but, uh, yeah, that's another, another thing. You can, you can be Disney plus at least for within your sector. All right. Hey, um, tell, tell me this. Cause we're now, of course now Haley, you've got all sorts of, of, of content. I, I sounds like it's a large church that's doing things. I'm really intrigued about this idea of, Hey, individual campuses create some of this compassion content in the individual communities. Like that's a thread I may want to pull for, for a later time, because now you, you've got stories that are being told within all the communities within, within your church. It's just awesome. No wonder that's so much good quality engaging content. Um, but I really wanted to want to get into this.

So like there's, there's church planners out there right now. We're with Stadia Church Planting. We planted a thousand churches around, around the world. We're going to plant 400 churches here in 2020, even as chaotic as, as this year has been, we're, we're going to have our record year with church planning. And so there, there's a lot of newbies that are listening to this. Yay. Yay. Newbies. We love you. Keep going. Do what you're doing. We need, we need new churches. Um, so I get this question a lot. How do I get started building a team? What does it look like? Just maybe real quickly here, let's dialogue through an org chart of, I'm starting from scratch. Who do I need? Now it's probably not going to be a paid staff person.

So what volunteers, what types of skillsets, what, what am I looking for? And if I do pay somebody, like, what do I need to get from that person to get value from that? So, uh, who wants to go first to take a shot on it? Okay. So if I'm starting out, um, what I am doing is I am kind of, um, shaking the trees and finding somebody like-minded with marketplace experience, if at all possible. Um, I know, you know, there's some levels of Sunday volunteers, for example, you don't have to have any experience. Anybody can do this. You can just onboard. Anybody can be a greeter and wave hello and be a friendly face. Um, but for communications, I think you really do want somebody who has some skills. And so can you find somebody with marketplace experience?

Who do you know who works, um, at a PR agency? Who do you know who works, um, for in-house communications at a corporation? And so I think it's a lot of conversations talking to the people, you know, who do they know, and then reaching out to those people. Would they be willing to give of their unique gifts and talents and volunteer some time for the church? And what's interesting there is say they, you know, cause some of those people, professionals might not have a lot of time to give, but anything they have to give would be a value. Because if you had say a young, willing volunteer who has the time, but not the experience, but you pair them with somebody who has more experience, but limited time, you can actually have them working well together.

You have the experienced marketplace individual providing some training, maybe to somebody young who's still in college, or maybe just fresh out of college, giving them some best practices, some tips, some trainings, and together they could create a really amazing team for you. So, um, I wouldn't just assign things to whatever warm body you have. I think that happens a lot. It's like, oh, Hey, you're the, you're our new pastor or you're running our small groups, but can you also do social media? Uh, can you also leave the communications plan? I think people feel like, well, maybe anybody could do that or get away with it. And I just think that is not a recipe for a success or excellence. So I would try to find somebody with some of that experience and know-how.

Yeah. I echo what Lauren's saying there. To get someone with experience, I'd also probably add on top of that, um, make sure you find someone who's a leader, not just a doer, because at the end of the day, you're going to tap out what they can get done if they're just doing and creating the communication. But if they're a leader and can lead like Lauren suggesting people who can volunteer their time, you're going to get a lot more output out the door. Uh, that being said, if you're, if you want that, you need to be patient as a leader because it's going to take the time for them to assemble their team. So I guess at the end of the day, what do you want? Do you want quick results or do you want more results?

And if you want more, find a leader. Some other like quick principles that I give, um, for a leader who's wrestling this through, one of them is the, the, the growth or control aspects. So let's be honest. If you're talking, you know, Jeff, you're saying church planners, right? A lot of church planners, those guys and gals are kind of D personality types. They like to control things. Um, but at the end of the day, if you're going to want to have church growth, you're going to need to release this and release some of that control to get growth. So it might not be done the exact same way. And you might not understand the filter that they're using, but empower them and release them for greater growth.

And then the last thing I would encourage church planners, because there's just so much out there, um, is to identify your core audience and then let your platforms be dictated off that. I'm sure you've seen it before where you're like, you have a church planner and they're planning in a bedroom community and a lead pastor saying, maybe I should be on TikTok. Well, if you're in a retirement community, you shouldn't, you don't need to be on TikTok because your core audience isn't there. And so I encourage people, Hey, your, your platforms are dictated by your, your core audience. So figure that out first. And then you'll figure out where you need to focus your communications energies on. Yeah.

I love that. Communic, communications, digital, social media, these things amplify who you are. They don't change who you are. Uh, if you're a nerdy, geeky, bald guy with a goatee in real life, when you get on TikTok, it's not going to make you hip. Um, I, I just have, for some reason that, that just popped into my head. I have no idea why that illustration is so relevant to me today. Hey, uh, Haley, I'm, I'm just curious from you, what, what's your kind of perspective here? Uh, when it, when it comes to maybe starting and building a team? I have a lot of perspectives on this issue or on this because I am actually, Bayside is in Northern California, but I'm in SoCal right now because, um, we'll surprise my mom for her birthday, but also we had our first preview service because Bayside's launching a campus in Southern California, which people don't know that it's like seven hours away.

That's a long way. So if you're on the East coast, drive South seven hours, you're probably going through three different States at least. Um, but that's just down the coast in SoCal and we're launching a church in the middle of a pandemic, which is also the craziest thing. Also fires, also masks and people can't breathe. So all the things, um, working against you, but we had overflow for this preview service on Sunday and we heavily relied on some digital ads, um, not promoting the service, but promoting again, felt needs of what you will get as an individual when you come and decide to like stop being isolated and separated, but come and join a community of people that genuinely care for you and want God's best for you.

Um, so it's funny because it's like the leadership only anticipated, um, a fourth of what was there. And because of the ads that we had put out on social, um, really helped get the word out and generated momentum, but also like word of mouth from friends, from trusted resources. So if you're, you have people at, that, you know, that can post about your church being launched or planted, like word of mouth from a trusted friend on social, having those people post it because people know people, they don't really know unknown brands or churches. Um, that's always going to win. So advocacy, I always say is best for a church planner. I also say, go find a church that's close to you that has resources that can maybe help you along the way.

And I know every church is like strapped and overworked. Um, yes, but we also are here to like partner up together. And so if you are in a community, like find someone that can help maybe guide or teach a volunteer you do have that you want to do this position. Um, but here's where I'm going to challenge you pastors. We're always so tempted to pay the worship leader, but we want to make a communications person volunteer their time. Both are skilled in their positions. Why is one worth being paid for? And the other is not, um, a worship leader is great for Sundays, but who's going to like carry the one, six, seven. So I would say carve out some money in that budget to invest in the communications person.

Professionals are great, but you want to make sure someone is theologically sound because they're going to be the mouthpiece of your church. And they're setting the tone and culture of your new church out there for all to see. So it's really important that they have a good sound theology, um, and that they represent like what you stand for at the core because one wrong sentence can completely change what you believe in. Yes, we are totally affirming and accepting church. While some people can take that very differently and then it takes your church in a completely different direction than maybe you intended. So just consider like who you're investing in. And I would challenge you really invest in that, um, communications person because they're going to carry their weight in gold for you, not just as the start, but moving forward.

And in my time at Saddleback, I got to be part of the team that launched four international locations, no presence in those countries, in the Philippines, in Argentina, in Germany, and Hong Kong, very different countries. Um, but the first presence there was our social media presence. So don't underestimate the value of growing those social platforms even before you have in-person, um, an in-person community, because that can really help move you forward and carry you and create and generate momentum for your church to launch. That's awesome. Well said, you know, care about that, that 167, value that 167. Honestly, in this COVID season, the 167, uh, may be more valued than, than the worship leader who's at this point only doing one gig that that's recording.

And that may be a separate conversation and you can I do want to say they're very valuable. They can probably do a midweek service, but who is feeding the voice of your church in that 167? My takeaway is Haley saying fire the worship pastors. That's what I, that's what I heard. That's what I heard. We're going to make that the title of the podcast, episode 96, fire the worship pastor. I like to be a little controversial and Haley, you just did it right there. Well said. Hey, awesome. Thank you so much for this time in this conversation. I, I, we could go on and we could talk about this for a while, but there's, there's so much then when it comes to communicating and in this season, as things are always changing and there's more and more issues, I just come back to this idea.

And Haley, I think you said it to kick off where we talked about this idea of having strategy versus just executing tactics. We can have tactics on how to do things, but without the overarching strategy. Oh, Lauren said it. I'm sorry. Lauren, we'll give you credit. Shoot. As Lauren said, we kind of even just kick off this idea of, of strategy versus tactics where it's, it's, we're not just being responsive, but we're able to strategize and plan ahead towards that. And so thank you all of you very much for the time here. Even just as we're landing the plane, wrapping up the show, any, any closing thoughts? Lauren, do you have anything just closing up for you as we're landing the plane? I guess I would just say it's really overwhelming.

There's so much you could be doing. For instance, I can sit here and listen to Haley and everything that they're doing at Bayside and saying, yes, let's do all of that. Oh my goodness. It's hard to set those priorities. So I just say, take the time to step back and to reflect on what are the things you need to do to meet your goals to that match your strategy. Otherwise you're going in 50 different directions and none of it is really serving you or your congregation well. So make sure you carve out some time to reflect and really think about what you're doing. Awesome. Thank you very much for that. Take that time to reflect towards it. Haley, do you have anything as we're landing the plane? I want to say like, don't let the only time you communicate with your communications team be when you need something or it's like something is wrong.

I think this is definitely the most thankless job in the church. I've seen it. Communications people never get time off. Like I have to put Sabbath on my team's away message so that people respect my day off and they don't message me or call me because if something's really important, it can wait one day. The world will continue. Things will go on if it waits one day. So respect their Sabbath and then like show appreciation for your team, whether it's a little bonus or a raise because they've been working really hard for the season. If you can, that's great. If not, take them to lunch every day for the rest of the year. Like that would be great. Just kidding. But no, appreciation goes a long way and it'll create loyalists for your organization.

And you want people that are loyal to your organization. You don't want people that are bitter and burnt out. Yeah. At least I'll speak for me. Like I've had those tattoos of bitter and burned out. And so that's well said there. I was actually known in my communication days, I was known as the no guy because people would tell me all the time, you know, this is what we want. And I was just, no, no, no, no, we're not going to do that. No, that's probably not the good attitude either. But that came honestly from the bitter and burned out part of my life. So, hey, Ben, as we're landing the plane on your side, any thoughts for you? Yeah, two quick things. I know a lot of church planners are listening to this, Jeff.

The one is, hey, when do I make that switch from moving from part-time, from volunteer to part-time staff or contract? The encouragement I would give for those people is if you have excellence in your core values, then probably now is the time to do it. If it's not, then it's probably not. So if you're trying to do things with excellence, again, realize that the communications director is showcasing who you are and more importantly, who God's presence is in your community. And if you value that, then fund that. Not that you have to. A lot of churches have other great priorities on their list. But if excellence is there, stand behind it with some dollars. And the last thing is, I think both the ladies have already said it, be gracious to yourself because this is a very trying time.

Yeah, learn lessons from this. It's interesting. Even the three, you know, mega giga churches that we've got on here, Christ Fellowship Miami, Liquid, Bayside, they have different strategies. They have different plans. They have different methods and how each of these three churches, again, they may be similar in that they're multi-site, but their communication strategies, you know, even with all the content that Haley's doing in California versus, you know, some of the others, there's just different approaches to that. And so, you know, it's developing the strategy. It's getting the resources and moving forward towards that, experimenting along the way, even this COVID season. So, ladies, gentlemen, I very much, thank you for jumping on the podcast.

For Ben, for Haley, for Lauren, this is Jeff with The Church Digital. Thanks for being here once again. We'll see you next time here at the pod. Y'all have a good day.