We have been streaming our weekend services now for just about a year and it has been a huge success. Because of this we are looking into possibly rebroadcasting additional services throughout the week. I know some churches have rebroadcasts going all the time but I think we may start with one or two strategically placed and gauge interest while we build up our team.
So I guess my questions are:
Do you rebroadcast your services during the week?
Why or why not?
Have you found a particular time that is more popular (e.g. Monday night at 7 or Wed)?
How many people do you have staffing your rebroadcasts?
Are they staff or volunteers?
I really appreciate any feedback you can offer if you know something else that I didn’t ask that you think may be helpful I would appreciate that as well.
Hey @ecatanzaro,
We rebroadcast our services in addition to making the recording available onDemand.
We offer rebroadcasts of our services every 2 hrs after the live services thru Tuesday at 1 pm.
We are looking at the stats to evaluate if we will host chat and prayer ministry at any of those rebroadcasts.
I am very interested in your comment that this has been a huge success. Can you expound on this? What were your success metrics and objectives going in? What were your results? How many new people have you reached vs. people in your congregation PE watching from home or elsewhere?
It also sounds like you’ve been doing live streaming, but not posting your services for on demand. This is the reverse of the progression most churches I know have done. Do you know what drove that decision?
Thanks for your response. I completely left out that we were doing podcasts and on demand video before we launched live streaming so sorry for the confusion there. In terms of what we where going for or what we are basing our success on I would say it’s a few things:
Feedback/testimony from online viewers and people you see in church. It’s been overwhelmingly positive. My family who doesn’t go to church watched online, my relative was sick in the hospital and was able to watch, I moved out of the area and was able to watch (we still encourage people to get connected to a church where they are), I was on vacation, I was deployed, we were looking for a church checked out a service online and then came.
We also developed a follow up process that gets people connected with resources immediately after making a decision to follow Christ we use follow up video with a txt keyword (to make sure we get mobile and Facebook live viewers as well) and a very short mobile friendly form that only asks for first name last name email address to send them a digital version of the materials we give to people who commit their lives to Jesus at one of our services.
Prayer Requests: This one by itself is worth it. People really take advantage of this just like they would in a service and people seem to be very open and honest with you in a chat window. We have been able to connect and pray and follow up with quite a few people. We typically just pray online but we also try to point them to resources like small groups, addiction recovery ect. when appropriate. Also if the prayer request is about something really severe we try to get them connected into the care process we have at the church to follow up and do what we can on a case by case basis.
The number of unique sessions we have per weekend has been around 300 and our average weekly attendance just hit around 3,200 before the summer. We are very conservative in how we track this so it’s very likely the number is higher (e.g. this number is unique sessions only from our streaming provider who tends to be more conservative then the church online numbers by about 20-25% in my experience and we are not counting x number of people might have been watching). This number is about half of our on demand video but there is a unique benefit from what we have found which I describe next.
The average amount of time watched per session is about twice the average time watched on our on demand video’s. We ran a report on Vimeo and from our Live Streaming Provider (http://www.churchtv.online/) and compared the two.
To be honest with you going into launching live streaming I wasn’t sure what to expect but two of the assumptions I had where challenged in a big way:
Assumption: People will just watch online instead of coming to church. Reality: Our attendance grew online and in service way more then the year before. To be clear I’m not saying our attendance growth is because of this however it hasn’t had a negative affect. If anything it’s given people another opportunity to connect.
Assumption: People wont really connect online. Reality: While it is definitely different then being in person people definitely connect online you can see it in prayer requests and testimonies.
I apologize if I was a little long winded in my response but I wanted to give you a real reason other then a bunch of people now watch online that didn’t watch before.
Sounds like all involved in this thread will be happy to hear we are planning an Online Ministry track at the National Conference to talk about many of the topics in this thread…
At willow, we dont rebroadcast mainly because we put our full service on the home page. I know some focus just on the message, but since we focus more on the whole service I dont think it makes a ton of sense to rebroadcast. Even though, our online streaming is basically our largest regional now, its not actually considered a campus. Rather, its just an online extension. That may play a role as well.
Thank’s for the additional input Stephen! Good things to consider. I hadn’t thought about the message that we make available from the previous week. We don’t include worship but that’s a good point.
