​New Worship Traditions

Nothing like a pandemic to change plans.
Since the beginnings of Sound Planning in the late 1970s, we have served a variety of houses of worship. From Christian, Jewish, Bahai and Jains, we have covered most of the religious bases. Something that we have become known for is what we coined the CLEMPS (Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian and Synagogues). I.E. We serve many traditional spaces with needs for sound, video and technology that have a minimal staff to operate and manage it.

A common occurrence in adding technologies into worship is taking on more than we can handle and then getting frustrated with the outcome. I am here to say that this can be avoided or at least minimized by accepting our limitations in staff and budget and building a system that will succeed with those limitations in mind.

Here are some key things to consider:

• Are you live broadcasting or recording and broadcasting later?
• Do you have a staff or key volunteers that will manage the technology?
• Do you have a social media manager for announcements and links?
• Is your website up to date?

The first two bullet points: Adding Cameras and Streaming
If you have not read our last blog post: https://www.soundplanning.com/blog/connection-not-perfection you may wish to. It covers adding cameras, streaming and technologies for video broadcast in a space where this is never been done before. It’s good to know what you are getting into before you are in too deep.

The last two bullet points may not be something that Sound Planning will handle, but I cannot stress enough how important they are to a successful transition to online worship. Having easy links and a clear path to getting your congregants to the video or page are crucial. Getting these links into a social media feed is now a part of life. My suggestion is picking a platform and mastering it before trying to cover the next ones. I.E. if you are posting to YouTube, master YouTube Studio before jumping over to Instagram, Facebook Live, and Vimeo... It is much easier to send links on a Facebook page to your well-managed YouTube page than to have both pages poorly managed.

​Do not get caught up in getting followers and likes! Concentrate on the message you have and content that you provide. As somebody that is active on Instagram, it is too easy to get caught in the trappings of this unhelpful behavior. Make it easy to find you and keep posting. Social Media is a stream, don’t be sporadic. By consistently posting even small and short messages, you will gain a following that enjoys adding your news and updates into their daily routine.  

Engage with your audience. Do not just post and ghost. It is a social platform, make the folks that responded feel that they are heard too.

​That's all for now! I hope that this was helpful.

By - Erik Saari