How to Create an Engaging Online Easter Experience

[Tom Pounder] Today we're going to talk about preparing an online Easter event that's going to be special and unique for your online audience. Are you ready? Because it's time. [Announcer] You're listening to the Church Digital Sidekick Podcast, part of the TCD Podcast Network. [Tom Pounder] hey heroes my name is tom pounder and this is the church digital psychic podcast this is the podcast where i bring on ministry leaders and we talk about how to do ministry more effectively in this very digital and online world and today i've got tyler volkers on along with jake mcnamara and i've had tyler and jake on separately before but today the three of us got together for a twitter space and we talked about how you can create an Easter online experience specifically for your online attendees. What does that look like? What kind of preparation do you put on? And what do you do? That's what Tyler and Jake share. I'm really excited to hear them share with all of you because it's different than the way I do it. And I love talking to different people and how they're doing online ministry and what Tyler is doing, what Jake is doing. is really fantastic so with easter quickly approaching i think we're really gonna love this so without any further ado let's get into the conversation right now with tyler and jake all right so uh again thanks for uh coming and as people come and go we'll probably reset the room from time to time and just see how everyone is doing. This is a Twitter space. We're talking about creating an engaging online experience this Easter. It's a long phrase, but I have Jake McNamara and Tyler Volkers with me, and those guys are online pastors. And so I'm going to just have them really quick share about who they are and what they do and kind of like where they live. So Tyler, why don't we go with you first? [Tyler Volkers] Yeah, hey, thanks for having me be a part of this, Tom. Really excited to be here. Yeah, so I'm at the Ridge Community Church out in Greenfield, Wisconsin. I've been on staff here just now for over 12 years and currently serving as a couple of roles, serving as our online campus pastor, which just kind of leading and serving those who... join us digitally. And then also we call it the director of ministries, but just leading just our team of directors that provide some really core ministries here at the Ridge, like our kids and student directors, our groups director, and our, we call it compassion, but our admissions director for both local and global outreach. And yeah, been loving what we've been doing online for the last few years now. [Tom Pounder] That's great. That's great. Thanks. Jake, go ahead. [Jake McNamara] Yeah, I'll jump in. So my name is Jake McNamara. I'm at the Compass Church in the western suburbs of Chicago. I'm in Naperville, but we've got a couple of campuses just generally around the area. I've been attending the Compass Church since my wife and I have been married. So that's a little over 13 years. Ministry is my second career. So I started working at the church part-time probably about seven or eight years ago, went on full-time about four years ago, and then delved into the online space when this thing called COVID came about. I don't know if you guys have heard of that or not. [Tom Pounder] yeah that's awesome um yeah okay well that kind of leads us into my follow-up question for you guys and we'll go with you jake first since since you just uh talked about it but how did you get involved in the online space like how many years have you been involved with it uh and what what got you into it [Jake McNamara] yeah so when i um started full-time at our church i was our guest services uh pastor so everything from you know first-time guests running our greeters and ushers and all that assimilation kind of the you know behind closed doors word that we would use for all of that um and i had been pressing for us to become a little bit more active in the online space specifically around concepts of live stream and podcasting and it was something that just never really was able to take hold and then when covid came about um i did what i feel like any good um guest services pastor would do and that would going to where our guests were and just meant that our guests were online and i loved it so i was able to kind of be an entrepreneur in some ways it feels a lot like church planning in very strange ways. But it's been really good. So at the start of COVID, started doing all that and build out a little bit more of what we want to try and do to reach people where they are. And then our executive pastor and senior pastor asked me if I would stay there. So I said yes, and I have been doing our online campus work ever since. [Tyler Volkers] That's awesome. [Tom Pounder] Great. [Tyler Volkers] Tyler, go ahead. Yeah, you know, as I said, I joined staff about 12 years ago. Well, in 2020, I was actually in a role at that time that I thought was kind of just the perfect fit for me. I was actually our director of family ministries and just leading our kid and our student teams and staff across. At that point, we had two physical locations. We've had to temporarily close one of those, and we're hoping to relaunch that soon in the next future. I was also using part of my time to serve as executive pastor of that smaller and newer location then too. And then, like Jake said, hey, the thing that we sort of heard about, this thing called COVID happened. And we were trying to figure out how do we all do that. And then a few weeks into it, my lead pastor just called me out and said, hey, uh you know at that point we were broadcasting our services and and serving online that way um even before covid and we knew we wanted to do more with it we just weren't sure what um we actually committed to being a part of uh stadia's uh futurist cohort that was at that time being led by jeff reed and so i'm like hey this sounds like awesome like an awesome thing for our church to do but i never thought i was going to be a part of it and then i still remember um Mark, my lead pastor, sending me some of Jeff's podcasts and saying, hey, just see how you respond to this. Think how does this get your heart beating a little bit? And I was listening. I was like, yeah, this sounds really good. He's like, great. I ended up in a Zoom call in front of Jeff and was then told I was going to lead our online ministries. And that's what's been going on ever since. So it's been great. It's been really good. [Tom Pounder] yeah i i like to tell the story of um my executor pastor had me in a meeting and said hey tom you're really good at facebook and you're on twitter um and you know we're gonna do this online campus thing uh would you consider doing this and i'm like yeah let's pray about it yeah you know And then like two days later, three days later, I'm in a bigger meeting with a few five or six people. And then he announces to everybody that I'm prayerfully considering this. And I'm like, OK, I didn't think we were going to make this like a little bit more public. And then less than a week later, we were in a staff meeting with all of staff and said, Tom is going to do this. [Jake McNamara] So, you know. [Tom Pounder] it's that whole thing of okay that's quickly how that happened so uh that's great hey um okay so yeah well let's go back before we get into the whole easter idea and uh getting into creating this engaging experience uh let's go back and talk about the first easter that we all kind of had because again covet hit right around easter time um and everything shut down i i i still remember the the eerie feeling we had because we did our easter service live that year well we do it live every year but we did it live um and uh there was nobody in the building except for a few staffers and it just felt so weird it felt eerie like it just didn't feel like easter honestly um but i want to hear about your all's experiences about that very first easter you know how did you guys go from being fully in person well maybe then you might have had some online stuff but to really just only online like what did you guys do [Tyler Volkers] You know, Tom, I think at that point, I think it was a few weeks out and we had to just get in a room together and just kind of mourn the fact that we weren't all getting back together for Easter. And that was a big deal because I think we're at first really, hey, we'll be back anytime. We'll do that. And so what we knew as a leadership team and experience team was, hey, we had to do whatever we could to make this special. And I think some of the guard, you know, the guidelines that we came up with for how we do online services probably came out of learning from this experience, but we're like, hey, would it be cool to find a new location and prerecord our lead pastor as he's walking us through this special Easter message? And at that point, hey, let's get the band in there, but then also taking advantage of times of, at that point, we thought it was a great idea to just hit rebroadcast with someone pushing the live. feed button on the hour, every hour, which was me. So it was a long day just pushing that and just kind of waiting to see. And so that probably wasn't the wisest idea. We just didn't know any better, you know, as far as like on demand and different chat things go and leveraging analytics. But it was cool because we were trying to speak into the hey, we want to be as convenient for people as best as we can. And that was a principle that we learned out of that was, hey, how can we be convenient for those who are going to join us on their terms? That's great. [Jake McNamara] Yeah. I mean, from our end, I actually I had to go back and check because we did a lot of different iterations of what we do online towards the very beginning. So we started out, I think COVID hit probably three weeks before Easter. So we were in the same boat. We were prayerfully hoping that Easter was still going to happen in person. So I remember it being part of a lot of brainstorm meetings where we were figuring out option one and then online being option two at that point. um so we started by just kind of having everybody in an empty room luckily we had the equipment to be able to make a lot of that work but ultimately for easter that just didn't feel right either so we ended up recording every individual worship leader in their home for the worship service and stitched it all together we did the senior pastor i think walking through a bit of a prairie which was fun in our church for some reason we had pop-tarts make a cameo and like all of our online service for like eight weeks and people loved it it was like an easter egg hunt for him but ultimately like for some reason we used that as a prop or you know had a box in the background or whatever and it was just really fun stupid in some ways but really great touch point for people to be excited about and laugh about um so we ended up kind of going that route and then mixed in with all of it um we did the whole cell phone choir concept that i think is is pretty familiar for a lot of people right now. But we did that kind of as a special element and that to this day is still one of the highest trafficked pieces of YouTube content we've ever put out there. Super, super well done. I was incredibly impressed with how quickly all that came together, got edited together and just worked really well. [Tom Pounder] Okay, wait, I'm so baffled by this. I don't know anything about the cell phone choir stuff. What is this? Explain it to me. [Jake McNamara] Yeah, so what we did is we had every, we sent an email to everyone in our worship arts team across all of our campuses and more or less said, hey, if you would be willing, shoot a cell phone video of yourself singing Living Hope by Phil Wickham. So we sent a click track and, you know, parts to everybody and everybody just sang their part. So in one year they would have the click track and the other year they would have the music and then they would be holding their phone and recording it. So then we had somebody edit all of it together. So it looked like there were, you know, 20 different people on screen at a time singing into their cell phone, had it master mixed and all of that and turned out to be a really, really fun moment. [Tom Pounder] Okay, I'm going to need to see a video of this. So Jake, you have to send it to me a little bit later. That sounds awesome. It kind of sounds like, you know how Jimmy Fallon does those, he did the Brady Bunch thing one time or something with different people singing. Yeah, so that sounds awesome. I got to see that. That's really cool. [Jake McNamara] Yeah. [Tom Pounder] Okay, so let's move into Easter this year. We're now entering year three of Easter where you're having online services. Now, some people may have online services for longer than that, but for the sake of this context, we're entering into year three. What are you all doing this year? In particular, let's go to the starting point of are you doing a live service or is it pre-recorded? Yeah, I'll jump in first on that one. [Jake McNamara] We do pretty much everything online pre-recorded. So Easter and Good Friday for us are going to be no different. We are about a week and a half out from recording both of those services. So happy to get into the whys of all that, but ultimately for us, it'll be a pre-recorded Easter. [Tyler Volkers] Great. Yeah, Tom, same for us. And I would bet Jake and I are pretty similar as wise as to why we choose to do prerecorded. I think the one difference that Jake and I are going to have, we will live stream our Good Friday service just because of the uniqueness of that particular one. But we're prerecording Easter. [Tom Pounder] okay okay so let's get into this i i would love to know the wise because here's what we do for our church we do uh we've done um good friday has always been pre-recorded but um our easter has always been live and again our our live is specific of where we just live stream the main service from the main church uh we have a pre-recorded mix and then a pre-service mix and a post-service mix But basically, it's just everything that you see in church on Sunday morning in person, you're seeing online. So let's get into a little bit of the whys of pre-recorded over live. And Tyler, why don't you go first? [Tyler Volkers] yeah it and i don't think it's a wrong way to do it you know i think it's just hey what you know what where has god led your online ministry to to serve and ultimately that's going to lead to why what's the right decision for you and your church uh so for us what we've just decided is hey You know, we can create everything in the auditorium, like with your lights and your sound mix and the experience and your great guest services teams. And like that is designed for that experience, which is which is so good. But to just put that online isn't designed for the experience and. the room the the living room is what i say so um if we're going to serve those like if we want to serve them as well online we got to create an experience for them on their screen and so we what we've just determined is like if we're going to connect with people first online rather than in the building which um what we're seeing is still hearing is most people are still going to connect with us online first we want to have everything done with them in mind um so um we look at our target audience which is if we had the center of our bullseye of who we connect with it's going to be a young 30s male who values convenience who values you know speak right directly to them and just have it have access wherever wherever we are now would i prefer someone to be a part of a live stream or part of the service where they're engaging with community absolutely but I want to meet them on their first step that they're going to choose. And so that's why we choose to prerecord pretty much every weekend service. But for Easter, we take it up a level and make it extra special for them. So that's a great experience there. But that's largely our why is our audience. And then part of our digital strategy is to hope to meet them where they're at and then invite them to join a community, whether that's a digital community or an in-person community. [Tom Pounder] That's great. [Jake McNamara] Yeah, I mean, for us, it's not going to be too different. So Tyler, you were pretty right saying that we got similar strategies on it. For us, it started initially when we decided to call this a campus and that we were okay with people joining from anywhere to the point of even having membership. So we didn't want to try and assimilate people to just our main campus or those specific people or that specific room. So we tried to start talking through and figuring out what it would look like to have somebody feel like they are part of the Compass Church without potentially ever stepping foot inside of one of our buildings. So that's one of the, honestly, the main reasons that we started with prerecording. I mean, we did different iterations of all of it. But then beyond that, it fell into kind of two factors and neither of them are as major. But when we were looking at it, really just feel that YouTube culture is a direct to camera stream. Anytime you go and see anybody doing any sort of podcast or discussion or how to video even, you see somebody that's dedicated one off looking directly at you and having a conversation with just the one person it feels like. When we were broadcasting a room, we didn't really feel like we were getting that. So we intentionally didn't want to fight YouTube culture. We wanted to try and fit into what people were already experiencing and try and use that to our advantage as much as we could. And then the last thing is just a quality standpoint. uh it's much easier to qc things you've got a much better sound quality um tyler and i have very similar experiences with how we're going about doing all of that but you know even having a dedicated feed and mix for a live stream still doesn't address some of the issues specifically during a worship set that might come across and we wanted people to have you know as good of a product online as what they would have at home and by doing that we've actually had really good success just on social being able to repost and all those kind of things with a lot of our video elements for our services that's awesome this is a like really encouraging uh to hear this let me ask you this question it's just a follow-up uh how [Tom Pounder] Well, what kind of role do you have Sunday morning in the sense of do you participate in the in-house, in-person service at all and in what capacity? [Tyler Volkers] I'm part of our teaching team. So a number of times out of the year, probably about 12 to 15, I'm going to actually teach in the in-person service. So there's that. And then also with my other role with kids and students leading those teams that have active Sundays. So I'm very much a part of what's going on in the campus. uh from the week to week now easter is going to be a little bit different we like to we call them the live host elements which would be me um where i will speak directly to the camera as part of the we'll live stream at 9am it's kind of a different thing we'll we'll live stream the hosting moments but then um because of how we do music to get the quality that jake talks about um we'll have that on video from our we have a thursday night service that we capture that audio you know all of that from And then right now, we do some mix, and we've been doing a lot more capture the Thursday night message than show that. But there's also times where we'll just go out and prerecord that message too. So there's a hybrid of some live elements versus some prerecorded elements. But on Easter, we're going to be all prerecorded. [Jake McNamara] yeah from my end my family and I will attend in person on Saturday night Sunday morning for the most part I am hosting on YouTube and our you know church online platform so that takes up the bulk of that time but with that being said I also, you know, obviously we have a team here. So I do float in between campuses to help out with different things. So sometimes that's leading worship if we're down a worship leader, or it could be we're in a church merger prayerful consideration and process. So I get to go and be part of that congregation this weekend just to be a name and a face there. So those kinds of things do come up, but the bulk of my Sunday mornings are specifically for online. Yep. Great. [Tom Pounder] well again one of the things just kind of as we're talking about engaging online easter experiences here like i i think one of the things I'm hearing again with doing a prerecorded, you're able to speak directly to the online audience. And we're talking about online ministry here. Whereas when you're doing it live stream, like what we do at my church, you're speaking to the house, you're speaking to the crowd in the campus. And then you're also trying to speak to an online audience and it makes it challenging. I mean, And so doing a pre-recorded thing, it's a lot of work on the front end, but I think you'll see better results. And it's encouraging to hear what Tyler and Jake just said about how they're able to engage the audience, the people, the online viewers a lot better with this pre-recorded stuff. So that's really cool. um all right so let's get into some of the nitty-gritty of easter in particular so um what what are you all thinking through right now what are you all working on and how you're creating an online service for easter that's engaging what what are you all doing is there anything different than you would what you would do during a normal sunday sunday service uh jake why don't you answer first [Jake McNamara] yeah i mean we're trying to take things up a notch slightly in terms of what we do for our weekend experience for online so typically we will just use the the imeg gear that's at our broadcast site campus and we batch record worship every other wednesday but we're going to kind of film and shoot and capture audio in a little bit of a different way just to give easter a different feel than what a typical weekend would Nothing over the top, but enough to where people will notice a slightly higher quality is our hope and our prayer. But at a minimum, it'll just be kind of a slightly different look without having to break the bank and do something where we're sending everybody to a different state or whatever the case might be. So, I mean, I've seen some churches do that. I'm jealous of it, but this is going to work well for us and our people is our hope. And beyond that, we honed in really early on in the planning process. So I don't know about your guys' churches for Tyler, you or Tom or anyone else joining, but we try to get out ahead of holidays as soon as possible. So we started prepping and planning Easter the second week of January. um nice to be able to try and get far enough ahead so we knew pretty early on that kind of a movie theme was going to be heavily involved in what we wanted to do so we also started you know researching local movie theaters that you know had projector rooms and all these different kind of things to try and work in some different elements because again we can doing things like that for online whereas you don't necessarily get that bandwidth sometimes to do that sort of thing when you're just live streaming [Tom Pounder] okay tyler before you enter in real quick jake a quick follow-up are you um So you're filming in different locations. Is that correct? [Jake McNamara] That is correct. Yep. And honestly, we do that every week that our senior pastor is very big on props. But ultimately, what he does is he pre-records at a minimum of eight to 10 minutes at the beginning of his message on site as a way to tie a location into his message. And that gets shown at all of our physical campuses before it goes to the live aspect of it. So that's another reason we're kind of doing things the way we are. A little different model than a lot of other churches, but it's worked for us. [Tyler Volkers] That's great. [Tom Pounder] All right, Tyler, go ahead. [Tyler Volkers] That's great. Hey, let me give encouragement for those who haven't started in January. Because honestly, we're still figuring some things out right now. So I was just taking notes. I am. Our goal with holidays, I think, Jake, you mentioned, hey, we want to up it a little bit more and up the specialness. And that's true for us for holidays as well. And so our lead pastor, he's working on his message. And then we just kind of landed on, okay, what's the strategy and the theme, overall theme that we want to convey? to both in person and online as well, you know, in terms of, hey, what mood do we want to create? What do we want them to feel? What's going to draw them in? And we were just kind of landing in on the phrase, you know, thinking about our young 30s guy and just even noticing like the Super Bowl and just how everyone gravitated towards that, the halftime show. Like, wow, that was awesome. And, you know, guys our age were like. Hey, our generation felt seen and heard and just kind of the idea of why why are the millennials so nostalgic right now? Well, it's because they're trying to remember a time where things weren't so messed up, you know, and they weren't overstressed or didn't feel stuck. And so they enjoyed a moment of relief while reminiscing their old high school music. And so we leaned into that and we said, OK, well, what can we point towards in the future? to help bring that same type of hope rather than reminiscing in the past. Let's look forward and experience hope. And so the phrase, it's going to be okay, is just kind of reminiscing for us. Some ways that we're going to try to make this happen. Like Jake, we want to go off site somewhere to record. We'll probably put – and we do this typically for our holiday experiences. We land on a theme and then we – We'll have our live host, myself, maybe another host, host somewhere offsite, have our bands maybe somewhere there. They like to call it their little music video type shots. But they're going to lead the camera that way and then send the mix to Jake and I. He's a similar guy who mixes for us. He does a great job. And then our lead pastor will share the message. But he'll probably do that offsite somewhere as well. One of the places we're thinking of doing right now is I have a favorite running trail that I like. It's very woodsy, kind of nature-esque. So it's just something we're scouting out to see if that could actually work. Kind of similar things. Hey, we want to make this convenient for anyone who's engaging, really picturing a family gathering around or friends gathering around a couch. So they want to do it on their time, whenever that might be. So we try to get that up on YouTube at 8 a.m. We'll schedule our live streams through our church online platform for those who do have the online community. We have a couple services planned for that. Really just trying to get that out there where it can be as special an experience for them joining online, just like it would be if you were to come in the building and say, hey, I brought my neighbors and it's their first time here and everyone got dressed up and it was a special experience. We want to make that just as special for them to engage online. [Tom Pounder] Yeah. Now, that's awesome. I think we should all share stories sometimes of of on location sites where you've had you've been kicked out or anything like that. That would be a nice little podcast episode. [Tyler Volkers] Oh, we got kicked out of a baptism. We were getting ready to baptize people in a pool and a condo association and got kicked out right before. It was awesome. [Jake McNamara] We almost got kicked out of an abandoned water park that our senior pastor tried to climb a fence to go record at. Ultimately got permission. It just took a little bit. A little interesting. [Tom Pounder] That's awesome. We got kicked out of Manassas Battlefield. The first battle of the Civil War was right by me, and we got kicked out of that battlefield trying to... to film one location there so that was that was interesting um okay so this is this is great i i love it you're actually giving me some really good ideas for future years and and i'm like tyler we we were just meeting about easter and good friday yesterday so we are we are much further behind than as in jake is uh on things But as you look at your online audience, is there anything that you guys are doing right now to prep your chat hosts or to prep the hosts that are that are hosting the services that to intentionally engage your the people who are watching? Like, is there anything different that you're doing or is it much of the same? And if it's much of the same, what are you doing? [Tyler Volkers] I'll jump into that largely. Largely much of the same. And what we do from a weekly basis is provide just regular ongoing communication of, hey, here's what to expect during the service. Here's a script you can follow along if you're leading in the chat and utilizing Church Online platform. host notes for for that as well as i'll copy and paste into a google folder to share with those who are going to do on youtube or other social uh what we are doing differently though is um i'm actually bringing them in for an online just all team huddle we haven't had all team you know get all the chat hosts all my tech producers ever everyone together it's it's been about six months and so we're gonna do that in early april and just continue to equip about um who who we are picturing on the other side of the camera and so what language we want to use if someone's you know not being overly you know christiany on on youtube because that's just not who's going to be there the first time so just kind of getting them in the mindset of who might actually be here the first time and just prep them to be ready for that so that's uh that's the one thing we're going to do different heading into this this time [Jake McNamara] I love that idea. I had not thought about trying to get all of our chat hosts together in a room, or at least the ones that are local. So that's something that's going to get written down here by me. [Tom Pounder] In all honesty, we're not going to do a whole lot different. [Jake McNamara] um and largely because the vast majority of our viewership is still on demand through youtube as opposed to church online platforms so we will still have chat hosts we will still try to engage people as much as we can but in terms of the nuts and bolts of actual sunday morning on easter it really it won't look very different than what we would do on a weekend week out basis yeah [Tom Pounder] That's awesome. Okay. This led me to ask a quick little follow-up because Jake, you just mentioned this, but what are your all's platforms that you guys are streaming to? Jake just said Church Align and YouTube. Are you streaming anywhere else? And what's the breakdown percentage-wise of where you get your attendance from? [Jake McNamara] yeah so that's a fantastic question um so we do youtube church online we do vimeo for just kind of backup purposes we will put on facebook but in terms of metrics we don't actually count any of that just because it doesn't seem to fit what we want or need we just put it there for convenience And then we do audio-only streams of the message, and we build that to be a little bit more like a true podcast. So we'll put some intros and outros and almost like mid-sermon commercials, if you want to think of it that way. We'll toss all that out on Buzzsprout. [Tyler Volkers] That's great. tyler what about you uh yeah we uh stream through uh resi and uh we stream to church online platform but uh youtube and which is our which is our big one and then uh some tv apps that we connect our resi through to uh the subsplash tv app so you're on apple and roku um I think 80% probably connects with us YouTube either during the live premiere on YouTube throughout the following rest of the week. Probably the rest of it's broken probably half and half between Church Online platform and our TV apps. [Tom Pounder] That's fascinating to me. Um, our breakdown, we, we go church online is our big performer, partly because that was where we first started streaming and we were streaming before COVID. And so I think a lot of people were, were used to our church online thing. So I would say, uh, maybe 65, 70% is church online. 20% is YouTube. And then 10% is Facebook. Facebook has been just a complete disaster and disappointment. So I hate Facebook, but that's neither here nor there. [Jake McNamara] So just to give percentages, I mean, we would probably be about 70% on YouTube, 25% is Church Online platform, and that extra 5% would be mostly our audio-only streams. [Tom Pounder] That's cool. Tyler, I want to talk to you about TV apps one day. So I'll hit you up later for that. [Tyler Volkers] All right. This sounds good. [Tom Pounder] I think about it. I think about it often. [Tyler Volkers] But like you said, Tom, I mean, we were streaming to church online long before COVID happened. So we have a good community that's been established there. But what we find is most people who are new to checking us out online, the easiest way. I mean, everyone's on YouTube. I was looking at YouTube for, you know, different running shoes and then how to fix a pipe, you know, earlier this week. It's just how we. how we get there. And then, and so why can't we do the same thing for helping people there? So most people will find us first through YouTube. [Tom Pounder] Yes, it was really interesting is that we first launched YouTube for us last Easter. Easter was our first year of doing YouTube and YouTube was low. And then within a few weeks, it surpassed what we were doing on Facebook. And we continue to get new people watching from YouTube rather than Facebook. Facebook's always a struggle now for us. And we just do it simply because... [Tyler Volkers] you're quote unquote supposed to do it i mean like it's just there's not a lot of fruit that comes from facebook right now from us for us right we yeah we we pulled the plug on facebook well over a year ago and here here two reasons why one we were struggling with the analytics and experiences just like you guys were facebook's not designed to watch a you know 45 minute to hour service or whatever you might have but our communications team struggled uh because they felt like they could leverage uh facebook um more with hey pointing them towards the service on youtube to pointing to the experiences in the building they're like we could do all of this but our our feed is clogged because we have a service going here all the time and so we said hey let's pull it let's leverage facebook for what it's designed to do push it there equip our people our facebook groups invite to the service online or in person um tom we we saw no change in our analytics and we've grown since then when we pulled facebook so um yeah i i and some churches are connecting really well with their community on facebook so if you're doing well keep it you know do what you're what's working for you but that's why we pulled it and we're we're fine that's great okay last question for you guys and then we can open up for some questions too if anybody has any [Tom Pounder] How would you encourage some online ministers, some digital pastors right now as Easter is approaching or something, or what would you share to people that maybe I didn't ask you that you think would be helpful for this Easter? And Jake, you can go first on this one. [Jake McNamara] yeah so i know we're pre-record and that changes some things for a lot of other churches that might be joining in on this but i would encourage people if at all possible to at least pre-record something that something could be a digital invite tool that you send out to your email lists or that you post on different social channels Don't neglect that. You really want something that's really going to catch people's attention and be shareable. And usually when you prerecord, you've got a better chance of having that available as opposed to just hoping after the fact. But also just the encouragement for after the fact, right? We will have spent all of this time prepping and planning and praying for Easter services. But the good news as Jesus followers that we all are is the grave will be as empty on Wednesday as it is on Sunday. um so just celebrate it like whatever happens at your in-person and online services take time afterwards to celebrate it take time to build things out to you know make an instagram reel or some youtube shorts um you know short digestible things that are just going to go out after the fact but are going to ultimately try to be used to steer people towards an intentional next step for your church and your local community It's all good things to be trying to do to reach as many people as possible with the hope that only Jesus brings. [Tom Pounder] That's awesome. [Tyler Volkers] Yeah, I would add two things to that. One is, as much as we are planning that pre-service, I wholeheartedly echo what Jake is saying. Look at your discipleship pathway and plan just as much as the before and after of that Sunday. And so, for example, hey, if your pastor is going to lead them through a good decision time and people make the decision to follow Jesus, what is your plan to help engage people to take the first steps to follow Jesus after that decision in the first few days? And and how can they act on it? And so right now we have a text in church response that we just use where they text literally text the word Jesus to that and they get some text bounce back to them with some different readings and videos encouraging them. And then we follow up with them through that. But then. Also, if they're willing to be curious, but maybe not willing to make that decision yet, we're trying to launch some alphas after that Easter experience. So that way they can go into alpha and continue to check out. So just think about where they're at and what their next step might be. and have that prepared to be ready. So that's first. But the second thing is just, I think what I always encourage us to do is our community doesn't need us to be the dynamic, perfect leader. Our community needs us to be healthy followers of Jesus. And so let's just make sure that we're continuing to take ourselves, that we're staying connected to... You know, Jake said it great, the greatest hope we have is in Jesus. And if we aren't experiencing that hope each day, how can we share that hope with others? So take care of yourself. Make sure you're living with Jesus and walking with Jesus and be connected with him. My lead pastor says, hey, we don't serve for Jesus, we serve with him. And just by saying, let's stay connected and do that. So that's my encouragement. That's awesome. [Tom Pounder] You guys just gave me it. See, the secret part here was that I actually brought you guys on. So we're at ground zero for nothing at our church and need a bunch of ideas. And so there you just gave me a bunch of ideas. I got to go, guys. I got to go. I got to take I got to go take this. Now, this was awesome. This was very encouraging for me. It really challenges me on the pre-recorded stuff. I always look at it as extra work. And what I'm hearing is it meets the online audience so much more clearer when you're focused on them and you've got something directly for them. And that's been encouraging. the follow up that you're talking about, about texting the word Jesus. I think that's a great way to utilize text in church. I'm going to totally steal that idea. And I love just the different location settings that you guys are using. That's just it makes it fresh. It makes it new. And again, it makes people feel like, wow, you intentionally thought this through and they're really thinking about me. And so I think those are just some great ideas on that. So, well, as we kind of wrap up here, if anybody's got a question, I know Tammy's listening. I know Gerald's listening. And I also have my sidekick's Twitter handle listening, too. But if anybody's got a question or thought, let us know, and then we can kind of answer any questions. Or if you want to just share something, that's fine, too. Or Tyler, Jake, and I can just talk about football. So let me ask you guys this question real quick. So again, anybody wants to ask a question, just raise your hand and I'll let you in. But Tyler, Jake, like here, Easter Sunday is always the end of spring break here for our high schools and middle schools. Is that how it is for you all as well? [Tyler Volkers] Depends on the year for us. Because Easter's later this year, our spring break is actually mid-March. So some schools will kind of get maybe an extended weekend, depending on how that plays out. Actually, I don't even know if my kids are off yet or not. But spring break's at the end of March for us, so we're aware of that. [Jake McNamara] yeah and similar here uh schools in our area have moved away from having spring break be attached to easter at least you know most of the time anymore it seems like so uh very rarely is spring break attached to either the beginning or end of an easter weekend for us that's cool we're still very much tied to that um but i is it weird having easter or i'm sorry spring break in mid-march when it's cold up there guys [Tom Pounder] without question yeah for sure spring break is different when you're excited for 50 degree weather but that's what we get yeah that's true uh good well guys i'm all out of questions you guys have been awesome so um Any final thoughts before we wrap up? [Jake McNamara] Yeah, do anything you can to capture people's information this Easter. You can do anything to reach as many people as possible, but without a name to go with it, a lot of times you feel like you're pastoring a number on a screen, and that's just not what any of us have been called to do. We're called the shepherd people. So I like to say internally, and I'll say it to all you, by hook or by crook, I want to capture people's information. you know so whether that's a standard connection card or if you want to do you know we're talking about do we want to ask people to sign up online so we can mail them a bag of popcorn since we're kind of doing like a little bit of a movie theme um just whatever we can think of to get somebody's contact information um we're trying to do so easter is a grand grand time to be taking that into consideration as well that that's so true [Tom Pounder] All right, well, let's just wrap it up then. Thanks, guys, everyone, for coming out. Again, I'm recording this. I'm going to download it. I'll probably be able to share this on a podcast coming up. So we have about six weeks to Easter. So, yeah, we've got 44 days, I think it is, to Easter. All right. Yeah, there we go. All right, everyone, thanks for being with me today. I hope you guys have a great rest of your day and a great weekend. [Jake McNamara] All right, appreciate it. [Tyler Volkers] Thanks, guys. Thank you, guys. Thanks for having us on. [Tom Pounder] All right, so what did you think? What stood out to you? What is it that Tyler or Jake are doing that really challenged you, encouraged you, or even caused you to have some more questions? I would encourage you to definitely, if you're watching this on the YouTube or on Digital Bootcamp, definitely put it in the comment section below. But if you're listening to this on a podcast, Go on Twitter at TAPounder and let's continue this conversation online. Tyler and Jake would be happy to step in as well and share their thoughts and insights on Twitter. So go and hit us up. We would love to have this conversation continue more online because Easter is coming and you can still create a great Easter online experience for the people who are attending online. So I would encourage you to share your thoughts, share your questions and share your insights. We'd love to hear them. All right, heroes. Well, thanks so much for joining me today. As always, if you enjoyed the Church Digital Psychic podcast, subscribe to it. You can go to YouTube. You can go to the Digital Boot Camp. You can go to iTunes and Spotify. We would just love for you to subscribe to it so you can get these podcasts every single week. All right, heroes. Well, I hope you have a great rest of your day, a great rest of the week. And until next time, have a great one.