Weekend Quality Check (Part 5)
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In this series, we’ve talked about how to evaluate your in-person weekend experience. But there is another aspect to the weekend that we don’t want to overlook—the online service experience.
Evaluating your online service can be tricky; it’s both part of the weekend and not. How do we measure the quality of it?
In this episode, Sean and I close out our Weekend Quality Check series by discussing how to evaluate your online service experience. Aaron Bennett from Stonecreek Church in Milton, GA, also shares his insights in an interview with me.
ONLINE SERVICE: QUALITY CHECK
- Naming the WHY for your online services
- How to have high-quality online services
- Aaron Bennett from Stonecreek Church (GA) shares his real-world insights on evaluating online services
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Leader Conversation Guide
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More Episodes in This Series
- How Prepared is Your Church for Guests? – Episode 368
- Better Sermon Series Planning – Episode 369
- Teaching That Transforms – Episode 370
- Evaluating Effectiveness – Episode 371
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Transcript
Sean:
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church podcast. I’m Sean. I’m here with Amy Anderson. Amy, do you wanna hear something cool?
Amy:
Of course I do.
Sean:
Alright. I had a follow up call with a church this week to hear just how they’re doing in their first 90 days, kind of post planning. They’ve got their 90-day action plan. They’re working on that now. This church is called Harvester Christian Church. They’re actually in, I think it’s Harvester, Missouri, St. Charles, Missouri area. This church is growing significantly right now, and they’re planning to launch their third campus. It’s an exciting time at their church, and in their first 90 days, they set out a plan to identify a new campus pastor, develop a financial plan for this third campus, and then also identify a location. And they have a very promising location that they’re exploring for a launch in the fall of 2025.
I was just so excited. Pastor Nikomas there and the team, they’ve implemented every step of their plans so far in the first 90 days, and they’re already working on the next 90 days. They’ve got clarity around what the next steps are, and it’s just that consistent strategic obedience that they’re already operating in and they’re seeing results from it. And really, no matter the size of the church, if you develop and work a plan, it’s more than likely that your plan will work. So, just excited about what Harvester is doing and the results that they’re seeing already.
Amy:
I love that. You know, I worked with Nikomas and Pastor Nikomas and the team as well, and their staffing and structure, and I just love hearing stories like the one you just shared. Church, churches that plan and work though their plan. Those are my favorite churches. I’ve been a part of teams, you know, Sean, where we’re working hard, but we have no real plan. And then I’ve seen churches that plan, they even pay groups like us to help with that plan, then they don’t execute. And we all know a three ring binder with a great plan in it on the bookshelf doesn’t move us forward.
Sean:
Exactly.
Amy:
By the way, listeners, we don’t do three ring binders, so if you’re ever interested working with us, you won’t, you won’t get one of those.
Sean:
No. Three ring binder from us. That’s right.
Amy:
No.
Sean:
Yeah. Well, Amy, before we dive into the content today, I wanna remind our listeners about the show notes and the leader conversation guide. And especially if you’re brand new to the podcast, you don’t wanna miss the free resources that we’re creating each week to support that week’s episode. So if you’d like to get access to those, just go to theunstuckgroup.com/podcast and subscribe.
Alright. In this series, we have been sharing some practical ways that you can kind of up the quality of your weekend planning, preparation, and execution. And we’re closing it out with this episode about the online service experience.
Amy:
That’s right, Sean. And evaluating the quality of this one can be a bit tricky because it’s both part of the weekend and it’s not part of the weekend. And so how we measure the quality of it is really a hundred percent dependent on knowing why we’re even doing it.
Sean:
And that comment tees us up so well. I I don’t think a lot of churches really know why they’re offering an online service. And some pastors that I talk to would rather not actually be putting the service online.
Amy:
Interesting.
Sean:
So is that really where the tension around online service starts?
Amy:
Well, I think yes, because I think there’s often a sense that if we try to create a great online service experience, it’ll lead fewer people to actually coming to in-person church. But, you know, the numbers don’t bear that out. In our Unstuck Church data, on average growing churches had grown by 17% year over year and their online service views had increased by 32%. So I don’t think that online service views lead to declining attendance. At the very least, I think they correlate with actually increasing church attendance.
Sean:
Yeah. And before you can even start evaluating the quality of what you’re doing now, you really have to be clear about what the destination is. Is putting your service online a strategy to move people towards in-person community? Or are you actually trying to build an online community? We’ve seen some churches actually move towards developing an online campus and community solely to reach people online. But for most churches, we actually don’t recommend that. For most churches, focusing on and developing an online community could actually distract them from reaching and serving the community that God has already placed them in.
Amy:
Yeah. I totally agree with you, Sean. You know, if people are exclusively online and say they live five states away, it’s gonna be really hard for any church to be the church for those folks. And I’ve seen churches trying to build out being the church for those online far away attenders, and they’ve actually drawn resources away from their primary mission field work. Again, we, when we talk about mission field, we always go back to where has God placed your church and how do you reach the people that God’s placed around your church? So while online services can reach the world, I think you need to bring clarity to truly who your mission field is. Far away people will benefit from watching your services; they’ll learn more about Jesus. But really to be the church for them is, it’s, I can’t say it’s impossible, but it’s really challenging and I really haven’t seen a church crack that nut yet.
And let me add one more thing to this, Sean. I think another key is to bring clarity, bring voice to determine who this experience is for. And I would guess similar to the in-person experience, it’s probably for both regular attenders and people who are new to faith and church. And I think it’s okay to be for both of those groups. You just have to be clear about it and make sure you actually are considering both audiences and how you offer your online experience.
Sean:
Yeah. Clarity about those two things is the first step. And don’t just assume that your team knows what you want the online service to be accomplishing. You actually need to spell it out for them. For the sake of our conversation, we’re just gonna assume that you’re putting your service online as a strategy, but that your goal is for it to always be pointing people towards in-person community. So with that framework, Amy, let’s talk about some of the best practices that we see.
Amy:
Yeah. I think it really starts with talking about the quality of that online experience. And this’ll be basic for some of our listeners, but for others, maybe there’s just a nugget in here. You know, first, and you know this, Sean, we have to have good audio especially, if you’re putting your music online, mixing for in room is very different than mixing for online. I know at Eagle Brook when I was there, we had to start dedicating technical spaces to have a separate team from the one that was doing the live service to mixing and creating the experience for those online.
Even things like quality camera shots, and again, preferably a separate feed for online versus in the room shots. Meaning if you’re in the room, we don’t need those wide shots. We actually need more close up shots so that we can see expressions and things like that. But when you’re watching online, you actually need a little bit of that grounding. I think. So you need to leverage camera shots in the room, leverage camera shots online to keep that engagement up for the people who are watching that service, that experience.
Another area you’ve gotta pay attention to when it comes to quality is lighting. You know, lighting. I always said the purpose of lighting was to bring focus where we want focus. Well, when you’re putting this thing online, it’s gonna live out there forever. We need to have good lighting in those experiences. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, Sean, but when it’s underlit hard to stay engaged, as you’re watching it.
I think also, you know, the art of the communicator, they have to have occasional eye contact with that camera, so it kind of says, yep, we know you’re out there. I’m not a fan of constant eye contact. I’m kind of like, quit looking at me. But you need to, you know, especially at the very beginning of the service, just the acknowledgement of the online audience, you know, at the top of the message. And little cues here and there to keep those people who are watching online engaged with it all. In fact, you mentioned Harvester. I went out and just watched a few services today to prepare for this podcast. And they did a great job of this. I watched the message from this past weekend and right away, you know, grabbed the bull by the horns, made great eye contact with all the people watching online. And then they went to various camera shots, you know, for the rest of the message. So yeah. Quality is a key part of an effective online service.
Sean:
Yeah, absolutely. The other tension that I feel a lot of times with churches in producing this online service is what exactly what part of that service did they put online? And they have this tension between the full service with all of the music or just the message or some clips. And I really think that churches need to be more strategic about thinking through who this is for, based on what they’re putting online. So when churches actually get this right, I think they understand the difference between who is tuning in live and who’s watching on demand or just checking out clips. Regular attendees, they’re more likely to watch live. They know what time your services start. They want to tune in and feel like they’re a part of the experience that they are usually a part of when they’re in the room, in person people exploring your church, they’re more likely to watch on demand later at a different time or watch some of the clips. And so just think through who you are placing this service online for and what parts of the service you’re gonna share with them.
Another thing churches get right when they do this is they make it easy to find either of those options. Meaning it’s easy to find the full service and watch that with the music, or it’s easy to find the sermon video only or the clips. For example, when I’m on a church’s website and they have a page that links their full service video straight to Facebook or straight to YouTube, depending on what they’re using, and it’s all on one page, and it’s easy to find that information in one spot. They just made it a whole lot easier for me to find what I’m looking for. Some churches will post a sermon only video on their website, and then if I do some searching, eventually maybe I’ll find that they have a Facebook page somewhere where they’ve live streamed the service, and then I can watch the whole service. That’s a whole lot more challenging for me. Just put it all on one page where I can find it easily and I have options to engage. And really to simplify, I’d encourage churches just to choose one platform and stick with it. Either use YouTube or use Facebook for live streaming. And in the full video of the service, choose, choose one avenue, use that. And really if you want to go kind of down the technological rabbit hole, Amy, I know you love technology.
Amy:
Yes. I all about technology.
Sean:
Technology conversation. Yeah. Using YouTube specifically will actually help you with your search engine optimization online. So there’s a whole other, you know, that’s a whole other topic, but churches should do some research on that.
Amy:
And Sean, let me just jump in. You’ve been talking about, we’ve been talking about the online service for adults, but you know, what are your thoughts around online services for kids, teens, things like that?
Sean:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I’ve mentioned this before. I have five kids of my own. So, I have a bit of experience being at home, certainly through the pandemic we went through this and trying to engage an online service for my kids. And what I’ve found is that online doesn’t at all replicate the experience for kids of actually being in the church. And for my teenagers, it didn’t work at all. They didn’t wanna want sit and watch another video online. They wanted to be with their friends. And so you probably don’t need to think of an online service as a way to attract kids to your church. It’s more for the adults who are part of your church. But you probably do wanna think through ways to equip parents to disciple their kids on the weekends when they’re not able to be at the church, and certainly during the week at all. So we, I just encourage you to kind of think outside of the box when it comes to that.
Amy:
Yeah. And Sean, the last thing I would mention about leveraging your digital strategy is actually to think about what content you can create to put in the hands of your congregants to share on social media. These would be digital products that people can share that might engage what we like to call the spiritually curious in their mission field. So I think short clips are often fun to watch. Everyone’s watching reels. My husband this last weekend did a message, he was talking about generosity, and he did this great illustration. He had a full plate of cookies and he asked, you know, how many of you like chocolate chip cookies? And of course, everyone’s hand goes up. And then he calls out one guy and he says, okay, so what’s your name? We’ll call him Sean. You like chocolate chip cookies?
Sean:
Of course.
Amy:
And he’s like, yeah, but my husband’s holding this plate of cookie. And he is like, oh, it’s too bad you don’t have one. I wish you had one. Let me pray for you. And it was just this funny thing of illustrating how much we have and how important it’s to share. And I don’t, you know, if you’re a Jesus follower or not, you care about things like generosity. So fun clips like that that you can share that just expose people to your church. I think you can create digital resources that tie into the series. Again, we’re in a kind of a generosity series, so I could see our church creating some downloadable resource, like three proven steps to find financial freedom type of thing. So not a video clip, but an actual resource they could download and these tools, they would be tools that are helpful to the unchurched right now.
And they don’t need to be filled with Christianese. It’s really just more providing tools that help people’s life go better. And I’ll also say this, ideas like this, they need to be built into your creative process, but just think of what flywheel could get created if we regularly equipped our body, our church body with digital tools that they could share on social media and Facebook that just help non-believers lives go better.
And what I like about this too is that you can track how often your content is shared. You can track how many views it had. And if you tie it to like a downloadable resource, you can also collect emails and then create like a digital follow-up strategy for those people who downloaded it. In other words, you can measure next steps to see what content is actually helpful and you know, which ones didn’t work. And I like that too. We need to do more research and development in our ministry world, especially digitally. And so I think it’s just easier to fail forward and keep digging at what is actually helpful and what would draw people outside of faith in church to take maybe a little step towards church.
Sean:
Well, before we move on, I wanna take a moment and thank this week’s podcast sponsor. With Plain Joe, A Storyland Studio. You can unleash the power of your church’s story. Their creative, fun loving team of designers, architects, and specialists come alongside your church to help you excel in your storytelling and to reach the people who need you the most. Plain Joe has expertise in strategic, spatial and digital storytelling, from brand development to architecture, website design and beyond, you can learn more about their services and their team at plainjoe.net.
Well, in each episode of this series, we’ve invited a pastor we know who leads at a church that’s excelling in a particular area of the weekend to share some of their insights. And in this episode, we invited Aaron Bennett from Stonecreek Church in Milton, Georgia.
Amy:
Yeah. When I sat down with Aaron, we discussed some of the ways of what they’re doing to help people take next steps from their weekend service, as well as how they’re using digital as an extension of their weekend service. So here’s my brief conversation with Aaron Bennett.
So Aaron, could you share a little bit about what you guys are doing over at Stonecreek Church?
Aaron:
Yeah, you got it. I have a background as not just ministry, but owning a marketing agency and working in local business marketing. One of the things that I would really notice is that a guy running a roofing business knew so much more about his people than I knew about my people. For instance, he would not just know like how many leads he had. He would begin to know this really powerful idea I’ve really adopted and we’ve adopted here called the conversion step. And so just with my friends and pastors, oftentimes I’ll say, yeah, just for instance, like, how many first time guests did you have last year? And a lot of times pastors may or may not know that number, but then I’ll ask the follow up question, what percentage of them took your next step? And most of my friends just from anecdotal evidence, say, I really don’t know that. And we really didn’t have access to a ministry tool that would easily give us that information. So we sort of coupled together and developed our own ministry tool. And it has given us this powerful insight. You know, in the Bible as pastors were called to be shepherds and shepherds need to know their sheep.
And so for instance, just some real numbers. At Stonecreek, we saw about 45 to 50% year-over-year growth. And a lot of folks would say, where did you find all these new people? And when we dug into the numbers, what was so interesting is we found that our first time guest number was actually flat. It’s that instead of it’s an embarrassing moment. Once we started tracking it, we found that only 4% of people were taking that next step. Once we knew that, we spent the whole year strategizing to say, how are we like really keeping this promise that people walk into our environments expecting. We changed some things strategically, that number only went up to 35%. So we still have work to do. And that alone, just by helping to close the back door, by having access to better information, building better strategies for the people in front of us, that was just like a powerful insight. And so now, and it’s a really common idea that digital marketers will think through. They’ll call it a funnel, you know, we call it a pathway. And not just to know that it exists, but to watch in real time. The progress through through that experience has been really powerful.
Amy:
How do you see digital as an extension of your weekend service?
Aaron:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think when I just talk to people that I know, when I think about my own life, I don’t think about the difference between my digital life and my impersonal life. I think at this day and age, it’s a pretty integrated experience. And so that has been the big shift that I personally made in ministry, is to think about how are these two platforms, the in-person, and the digital telling the same story in meaningful ways? And we use promise language a lot. In marketing, I learned this concept of you gotta make a great offer. That feels really impersonal to me. But when I see in the scripture, the scripture is filled with promises, and I really begin to understand the key to growth really is to make and keep a compelling promise. And so that’s how we use digital.
I think we begin to first really understand what is the unique experience about meeting and interacting with Jesus at Stonecreek. There is just like meeting a person is unique, meeting an organization or a group of people, or an ecclesia or a church that’s unique. And so when we could find the language to tell that story, it became really fluid to tell that story across different channels, both in person, and online in digital. And to also begin to see really cool opportunities about how digital ministry can supplement what we don’t have the time or resources or attention capacities to deliver on a Sunday morning experience. But the more they’re integrated, we have just seen that we win. I have a tendency to wanna do things that are clever or some people will say gimmicky. And the more we move away from gimmicky things, which sound cool, and just really begin to know the people in front of us, and to utilize these resources to meet their needs and further their spiritual growth, it, it just, everything rises.
Amy:
Say more about this that the in-person and the digital are integrated. Just in real layman’s terms, what what was the big learning there or, or what did you adjust because of how you’re thinking about that?
Aaron:
One of the first things that we did is that we stopped having a discipleship team and a creative or media team. And we began to integrate those teams together. And so, like the person who writes our small group content is also our main copy editor for our videos. And that begins to flow over. We just start to see these like natural connections. Whether we’re offering a teaching in person or we’re writing a social media content. One of the things that we really learned is the deep appreciation that people had for bible study. And so it drove some of our social media content to just be devotion oriented content, which we never thought of before, but it resonated with our people and began to extend their experience of what they’re receiving on a Sunday. Another integration, it’s so simple, is we move from an in-person physical first time gift to a digital first time gift.
So you’re interacting with it in person, you’re sending a text in person, but the gift is coming to you digitally. The main thing is, is it just begins to increase like our awareness and information in real time, of like who’s there gives us tons of opportunity for follow up. And so tons of meaningful connections are already happening, you know, two hours after the service. And so that’s where in-person and digital, we’re really just like living together. A person’s not thinking of it as two different experiences, but one integrated experience.
Sean:
Well, Amy, that was a great conversation with Aaron. When we’re looking back at this now, what stood out to you?
Amy:
Well, I liked not tracking online service views. I like that they weren’t doing that, but they’re actually tracking a funnel or a pathway and encouraging next steps and how they’re working to blend both digital and in person, which most of us do in the rest of our lives.
Sean:
Sure. Yeah.
Amy:
So why wouldn’t we do that at church? And the truth is, many people are already doing this. They watch online when they can’t make it to church. They come in person when they can. And again, the data says online drives in person attendance.
Sean:
Right. That’s right. Well, this has been a great conversation, great series, Amy. I really enjoyed this. Any final thoughts before we wrap up today’s conversation and the series as a whole?
Amy:
A couple takeaways from our conversation that I would just double down on. Sean, you, you mentioned it, when we talk about accessing online services, we really need to make them easily findable and easily shareable and shareable, not just for the whole service because again, I would say a lot of people outside the church aren’t interested in 25 minutes of music, but wanna share maybe a great message or a great teaching.
Sean:
Right.
Amy:
Second, even if your goal is to lead people towards coming to church in person, you’re creating a ton of video content every week. And so I just encourage you think like a marketer, what are the little segments and the little pieces of all this that we just worked so hard to create? How could we break that apart to make it and take it even further than just the weekend? And I guess what I’m saying is, how can you have your team repackage and reuse that content in shareable segments? How can you encourage your people watching online to share those things? And again, I would move away from long, long clips and maybe just try to get, you know, that that 15 to 30-second clip that can be shared by people.
Sean:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks again for tuning into this week’s episode, and we hope this weekend quality check series has been helpful for you, that it starts a good conversation on your team about where you need to be putting some attention so that you’re prepared for guests and continue to maximize the weekend for reaching and connecting with new people.
Remember that if you need help assessing your ministry’s health, including the quality of your weekend, that’s part of what we offer through the Unstuck Process. You can learn more about that at theunstuckgroup.com.
We’re back next week with our quarter four edition of the Unstuck Church Report. Amy, I’m excited to go through the data with you next week. And we’re gonna sit and share some of the latest benchmarks and trends in multisite church health based on the survey data that our churches have submitted between October 1st and 31st. So, make sure you’re subscribed to the Unstuck Church Report to get your own copy, and you can subscribe at theunstuckgroup.com/trends. Until we’re back for next week’s conversation, have a great week.
