Hey [your dad's name]! Your son/daughter, [your name], wanted to give you a very special gift this Father’s Day…so they dontaed to Creative Missions in your name. We’re here in Alaska for the week of Creative Missions and your gift is really making an impact. Creative Missions is an effort to send creatives and communicators within the Church on yearly trips to impact a specific region. Ultimately, Creative Missions pairs teams of church communications gurus, creatives and techies with under-resourced churches and ministries to create sustainable solutions that better engage and communicate the gospel to their communities. Burdens and spirits are being lifted. It’s awesome to see the countenance of pastors and ministry leaders lift after only a week.

Thanks for supporting us and HAPPY FATHER’S DAY!

We are about $7,500 short of the amount we need to do the work God has called us to in Alaska, so your gift really will make a difference. If you want to help, go to http://mission.to/alaska and give there (your face will also be added to the wall!). Then shoot me an email or leave me a comment letting me know you gave and I’ll get with you to get the details for the video.

Need a last minute Mother’s Day Video for your services? I made you one! Preview it at Sermonspice.com.

Download it here for free until Monday (May 6).

What’s the catch? No catch. I hope you’ll tell others about it to spread the word and, ultimately, I hope you will buy one of my other videos…but even if you don’t…it’s my gift to you.

I was flipping through the channels last Saturday and ran across a show on the Fox News Channel called the “High Cost of Freedom.” It got me to thinking about how most communications directors have a longing for a bit of autonomy and freedom in their position. Namely, we desire:

• Freedom to make communications decisions on behalf of the church.
• Freedom from micromanagement.
• Freedom to manage the church communication budget in the way that we best see fit.
• Freedom to use our time in a way that makes sense to us, and…
• …Freedom from the expectation to complete people’s last minute requests.

I could probably name a dozen more.

The question is, what have we done to show ourselves trustworthy? What have we done to earn these freedoms? Have we paid the high cost of relational investment?

If not, why not get started doing the hard work today?

I recently saw a quote on Twitter from KISS rock star (and marketing genius) Gene Simmons:

You have to understand that nothing appeals to everybody.

This is a very true statement. The first thing I teach my students in the classes I teach at Lindenwood University is that they have to identify a target audience if the want to design well. After all,

If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time. -Zig Ziglar

The challenge for churches (and church communications folks) is how to balance this idea with the felt-need to “be all things to all people” (1 Cor 9:22).

It is a very real paradox and a tension we must embrace if we are to fulfill the specific call God has called our local church.

How does your church address this tension?

Image credit: marmit / stock.xchng

Bluehost Signup

podcast.xml template file (right-click to download)

[Click through from the home page to see a transcript of the video]

Transcript:

Hey everybody Chuck Scoggins here. I’ve been getting a lot of requests lately from churches to help them setup an audio podcast of their weekend message audio on iTunes. While I’m happy to let you pay me to help you get this setup, I thought it would just be easier, quicker and nicer to create a video tutorial. I will show you how I do this for churches. It is really simple and it’s a four step process for getting things setup.

First thing you need is some hosting space and I recommend Bluehost. There are many web hosted providers out there HostGator, Dreamhost, etc. but Bluehost is one that I recommend. Their price is good and you get unlimited space and just really great service from them. There should be a link right below the video to sign up for Bluehost and that is an affiliate link. I get a little commission from them if you click that link. However, I wouldn’t recommend them if I didn’t wholeheartedly back them and believe in them.

Second thing you need is an audio file. I hope you’re already capturing your audio somehow on the weekends, whether it’s on CD or DVD or some other method. It’s great if you have somebody who can clean up that audio for you – maybe a worship pastor or just a volunteer, or maybe you can do it yourself. You’ll ultimately need it in .mp3 format however you are capturing it. You need to have that file available and the smaller the size the better. You don’t want to sacrifice too much quality in the process.

The third thing you need is a xml file and that just basically a mark up language file.  That is going to let us tell iTunes when we have a new podcast, where our podcast file and audio file is located, the description, the details, the author, all those sorts of things we will work on in the xml file.  I am going to give you a template to use that will help you create that without being difficult.

The fourth thing you need is iTunes and it could be the Windows or Mac version but you have to have iTunes to submit your podcast to Apple. Those are the four things that you need.

So, lets go ahead and get started. The part that people often find most daunting is the FTP process that allows you to transfer from your computer to the web hosting computer. The second most daunting thing is the editing of the xml file. Lets just walk through those real quick.

I’m gonna open a free FTP program that you can download on Windows or Mac called Filezilla. This is what it looks like and you can see I am currently navigated to my desktop. There’s a folder called podcast there. You can even see the podcast .xml file that I’m going to give you in this blog post for setting up your podcast. 

When you sign up with Buehost, they will give you a domain name, a user name, and a password. Enter that information here: host name, user name, and password and press quick connect. When you do that it will pull up some files on your server on this side and again on this side is the local computer that you’re using in your office or at home or wherever you happen to be watching this at. 

I’m going to connect to one that I use from time to time when I teach classes and don’t laugh at the name but its professorchuck.com. Username and password and when I connect you’ll see there are many files here.  Basically the folders were interested in are “public_html” and “www” and this is where all your public files go anytime you create a website or anytime you’re putting files on a web server that you want people to be able to access.

The “www” folder is just a shortcut to the “public_html” folder. If you cant remember which one to use you can always just click on the “www.” Here you’ll see some folders and files with some of the classes I teach. What I’m going to do is right-click and go to “create directory.” I’m going to create a new directory and  call it “podcast.” When I click enter or hit enter on the keyboard you see it creates a folder called “podcast.” If I double click there it opens the empty directory or folder (“folder” and “directory” are the same thing in web terminology). All I have to do is drag from my podcast.xml file that is in my podcast folder on my desktop over to the web server and now podcst.xml is in the podcast folder on my web server.

So to get to that if I were to pull up a web server and go to “professorhcuck.com/podcast” you’ll see that the file is listed right there. I’ll go ahead and type that in – “podcast.xml.” You’ll see the template file that we are going to use and there are no styles or anything applied to it. You don’t see much but were going to go ahead and add some information. 

Eventually there will be a lot of information you can see and that iTunes can see for your podcast. For now i’m going to minimize this and open “podcast.xml” on my computer. I’m just going to use regular old Text Editor on my Mac, but on Windows, you might have notepad. You can edit this in any text editor that you want to or any website software like Dreamweaver or Coda or Notepad++. I just want to show you how it looks in regular old Text Editor and again you can do this in Notepad on Windows.

There are all kinds of code in here and don’t let that overwhelm you. Everything within the channel section all the way down to the last category tag is stuff that is not going to change with your podcast. This will be information all about your church. For example you put your podcast title here it might be something like “weekend messages from mychurch.com.” Then you would put your URL here:  “www.mychurch.com.” Then, where it says your name here – mychurch.com or whatever the name of your church is. Then you can put your church’s subtitle  here or you can put “Weeekend message audio from mychurch.com.” So you can see how you work through these and just fill them out. I left you clues and so this is the summary for your podcast. This podcast features messages from mychurch.com weekend services then inside the owner section you would put your church name here. Email address where people can email you if they have questions or for follow up. It’s really important for churches to have there in case  someone watches the message and has questions about god or life you want them to be able to get ahold of you.  That is all you have to put in that header section.

The part that your going to change every week is among these item tags. From the opening item tag all the way down to the closing item tag this will be information for your podcast each week. The message you would put there. The author you would probably want to put your pastors name or whomever spoke that week. Message subtitle you want to put something here. It’s not ok to leave this blank at the very least just repeat your message title. Down here or you could put a subtitle. If you want to put a short summary you can do that here or you can leave this one blank. It is really helpful for people to be able to see a little short one-sentence summary about what your message is about. Some people put message series as their title and in subtitle they put the name of their individual message.

So you might put “Jonah” up here and then “How Not To Run From God” as one of your messages or “What it’s like to be eaten by a whale.” Just use your imagination here. Down here is where we get a little more technical so the enclosure URL and the guid URL are going to both be the same. It’s going to be the location of the file on your server. 

So, in our case, when we were in Filezilla it would not be this. It would be a location on your server where the message audio is. What I recommend is on the page or on the site where you have your podcast.xml. You create another directory inside of podcast and call it whatever year you’re on: 2013. Now we have a 2013 folder. I don’t actually have an audio file handy. I should have done that. If I did I would drag that in here so lets just say I have an audio file titled January 15th. In fact you know what I’ll create a file – this will not be a functional .mp3 file, but ill create one real quick. Save this as 01-15-13 and save this to my computer. Lets just pretend it is an .mp3 file.

I would drag this .mp3…so you would already have this file somewhere on your desktop. Now I will go back to my browser and I can navigate to that. It would be /podcast/2013/01-15-13.mp3. This is going to be the address that we put in our xml file. If this were an actual .mp3 I could hit enter right here and it would start playing in the browser or give me the option to download it. Since it’s a fake file it’s not going to work.

Back to our xml file and my text editor so I’m just going to copy and paste that .mp3 file URL right there. Notice my URL doesn’t have the http at the beginning it does need to have that. So http://professorchuck.com/podcast/2012/01-15-13.mp3 and we need to put all that down here again and you’ll notice I accidentally left an “h” out and this actually should have a left angle bracket there. Those should be identical. The publication date you want to put the date that you actually want it to appear in iTunes so I will make this for Monday the 16th of January 2013. Next you save that. This is our updated xml file that we saved and just drag this over to the podcast file that I’m overwriting from the previous version. If you click and drag this over it will give you a confirmation message to overwrite.

Now lets look in our browser podcast/podcast.xml and it does give us the information. So now that this information is all here out on our server points to our .mp3, file it would have a series title here.

This would be the title of our podcast all that would be here. It will be looking good. The last step is to submit it to iTunes. You want to click on iTunes store. Click on podcast and on the right you want to click submit a podcast.

iTunes is going to ask you for your podcast URL. That is the URL that we just looked at. Go back in your browser http;//professorchuck.com/podcast/podcast.xml and click continue. Now I’m not going to do this because I don’t want this to go through…I don’t want to submit a podcast to Apple at this location.

The only thing we didn’t cover that you might need to do is create a thumbnail image for your podcast. If you don’t have a graphic designer to do that definitely shoot me an email with your logo and I can create a quick graphic for you. That’s no problem at all, or if you have someone on your staff that can do that for you that’s great too. Just follow the prompts and you should be able to get your podcast submitted. Sometimes it takes apple a little while to approve it. Just keep checking back in the iTunes store you should see it in there.

The last thing you need to know is how to modify or add an item for next week. All you have to do is go back into your podcast.xml file. Select the item tag all the way down to the closing item tag. Copy and paste that either above or below and then update the information for the week that your currently on. Lastly save that and re-upload it using Filezilla…just drag it over it will give you the confirmation asking you if you want to override. Apple should see that update. It may take a couple hours to see the update in iTunes but it should see it because it’s your xml file. That is how you update it each week. Copy and paste, change the relevant information, and make sure you upload your new mp3 file to it’s appropriate location.

That is pretty much all there is to it. If you get stuck shoot me an email I would be happy to help you.  Or if you would like for me to set this up for you for a small fee I would be happy to do that as well. Hopefully you can get that going and get your church’s message audio in the iTunes podcast directory with no problem. That is all for me see you next time.

Phil Bowdle – Easter 2013: A Communications Case Study

Steve Fogg - 12 Great Examples Of Church Website Design For Easter

Kelvin Co - When Art Gets Personal, Part 1 and Part 2

Church Marketing Sucks (Kelvin Co) - Easter Is Over, Now What?

Philip Nation – Debriefing Easter Sunday
(this one is meant for leaders, but I think it applies) 

Josh Burns (coming soon I hear)

• Analyzing Your Church Communications Stragegy on WFX Hub
  
• 3 Things the Church Can Learn from Feedly and Google Reader on MediaBLEEP
• Social Media as a Conversation on WFX Hub
• And, I’m routinely posting over at Church Marketing Sucks

Some quotes that have inspired me lately.

• If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door. 
• Yesterday’s home run doesn’t win today’s game

Random: I’m enjoying Usher and Shakeria a lot more on The Voice than I did Christina and CeLo.

Easter at The Crossing was awesome. I served as the Broadcast Director for 5 services. We live-streamed several of the services on the internet. It was an amazing time remembering what Jesus did for us on the cross. (By the way, we’re looking for a full time Broadcast Director)

I’m rapidly consuming everything that Pat Flynn is saying these days. Smart Passive Income for the win!

God is moving in Alaska. That’s why we’re going there to help give a creative boost some of the churches who get it. Would you consider sponsoring me on Creative Missions?

Do a lot of print design? Check out SpecThis.info.

This is an amazing post for wives on how to serve their husbands.

Having A Communications System Will Not Solve Your Problems

Want to take some surveys?

• Here is my quick one on Church Communications Resources
• Here is an even more important one by the CFCC.

After all these years, this post on environmental projection is still the most popular on this blog.

That’s all from me. What’s going on with you on this Tuesday?

A little more than 10 years ago, Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist, found that most people cannot maintain many more than 150 meaningful relationships. Obviously this was before the social networking revolution and Dunbar’s study began by following the habits of households sending Christmas Cards. The average English household sent about 150 cards every year. He and other like-minded anthropologists discovered this phenomenon throughout other areas of civilization as well:

• Military Companies
• Hunter-gatherer Societies
• Successful Business Divisions
• And many others (see links at the end of this article)

If true (and there are some who claim that it is bunk), this phenomenon has enormous implications for us as church communications folks.

What if there is a limit to the number of people with whom a communications director – or any church staff member for that matter – can reach through traditional communications methodologies such as the weekly printed program? Is the age of mass media dead as a means for connecting people to one another in spiritual community and helping them take the next step in their faith journey? Are we seeing a weakening in the effectiveness of announcement/promotional videos, newsletters, and bulletins? Do people trust those communications avenues?

Whether the Dunbar number speaks to the effectiveness of traditional methods of church communication or not, I think we can all agree on one thing: relationships today are driven more by social connections and less by mass tools than in days gone by. We need to consider new ways of connection if we are going to successfully help the church continue in her Matthew 28 commission. The job of the communications director is shifting from a disseminator of information to an equipper of social influence. Our goal should be to help our fellow staffers be as connected as possible to their sphere of 150.

We’ve entered (or better said, re-entered) the relationship age in church communications. It’s time to think differently about our role.

Here are some links for additional reading on the Dunbar number, if you’re interested:

From Bloomberg Business Week, an article written by Drake Bennett (touted as the Guru of Social Networks)on 1/10/2013

‘Dunbar’s Number’ may Change the Math of PR – from The PRNews Blog

Dunbar’s Number: How Group Size Impacts Productivity

A New York Times article that explores an interesting correlation in how Dunbar’s Number affects political candidates

Why Dunbar’s Number is Irrelevant (socialmediatoday.com)

Podcast with Greg Laden & Desiree Schell on Skeptically Speaking talking about Dunbar’s Number

I’ve been using Feedly for a while now, so I was thrilled when they announced that they will still be there when Google Reader is gone. Feedly offers a web-based reader as well as an iOS and Android app so it really is a great solution for anyone.

You might ask, “But Feedly is just a Google Reader shell, so how will it continue to work after Google is gone? After all, I do use my Google Reader login to access my feeds through Feedly.”

That is the key! Feedly has set up a server called Normandy that will sync your feeds from Google the next time you log in between now and July 1. Then when Google Reader shuts down you will use your same Google login to access all your feeds from Feedly. In Feedly’s own words,

When Google Reader is retired in July 1st, you will be able to continue to login with you Google Account, the only different is that the content you will see in your feedly will be aggregate by a feedly server call Normandy.

Could it be any simpler?

And, on top of all of that good news, Feedly is a beautiful feed reader. It’s the best of all scenarios!

Thanks Feedly for making life easier!

For those in church communications these days, there is a self-imposed expectation to have a communications system in place for receiving incoming communications requests. The problem with these systems is that they give us a false sense of resolution. They only help us receive incoming requests and do very little to help us successfully fulfill the requests. Once ministry leaders make their requests using our system, there is an expectation that they are going to get what they’ve requested. We need to do a lot of work before the request is even submitted in order to manage expectations if we ever hope to have a life of reduced communications stress.

Here are a few things I recommend:

1. Get Clear About The Church’s Vision

Help your church leaders become super clear about the church’s vision and then gently remind them on a regular basis of things that don’t push that vision forward and encourage them to relentlessly avoid pursuing them. This will go a long way toward reducing the demands on all-church communications because there will not be marginal ministries and events that need promoting.

This process takes a lot of finess and leading up…but if you have done the relational work to gain trust with your leadership, you should be able to speak in to this. If your leaders don’t let you speak into the church’s vision…well, that is a topic for another time.

2. Get Clear About The Communications Philosophy & Methodology

Decide early on (with buy in from your leaders) how and when and how often you will communicate various ministries and events. Decide which types of requests will get the full gamut of promotion and which ones will get none…and everything in between. Maybe create 4 tiers of support, for example:

3. Communicate Communications Priorities

Once we decide how and when you are going to communicate, we need to let those making requests know. Circulate the tiers mentioned above and have discussions with ministry leaders. Explain to people that their ministry is extremely valuable but might not fit within the promotional priorities of the entire church. Show them how their niche ministry benefits when the entire church is functioning in a healthy, focused way – even if that means their communication request never makes it into the weekly bulletin on in-service announcement video.

4. Communicate Communications Plans

As we’re developing our weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc. communications plan, we need to make sure everyone who has made a request gets feedback on what they can expect and where their request fits into the plan as a whole. Show them the big picture and where they fit in. Often, people will understand our decision to de-emphasize the publicity of their request when they see the big picture. For example, the senior adult ministry potluck dinner should receive proportionately appropriate promotion when being promoted alongside the church’s stewardship campaign.

5. Help People Find Alternative Promotional Avenues

The role of communications director should be spent mostly in helping smaller groups find alternative solutions for their communications needs. Help the children’s ministry find alternative ways to recruit volunteers (how about every existing volunteer invites a friend to serve alongside them). Help the women’s ministry find new and refreshing ways to promote their upcoming retreat (how about leveraging Facebook and Pinterest since most women are already in that space).

One last thought: communications request systems are an essential part of the equation. If you don’t have a process in place for receiving requests, your life will surely be full of chaos. However, we need to move past the thinking that having a request will solve all of our woes. We need to work toward a strategy that helps us manage expectations and appropriately fulfill the requests.

Check out this post from my friend, Phil Bowdle, on his 5 step process of working smarter, not harder to get project from problem to solution.