We've seen thousands of churches and ministries reach their organizational goals through customized apps, here are a few important benefits, from increased giving to more connectedness with your community...
Best Practices Part 6: Media
Media concludes our best practices for reaching and engaging your audience. Whether they’re on a morning run or commute, you can easily connect your audience with your media anytime, anywhere. We really did save the best for last!
Media
So why media? As both mobile app use and media consumption continues to rise, delivering media through your app enables you to meet your audience directly where they’re at:
Mobile apps account for 52% of digital media consumption
Mobile video will represent 69% of all mobile traffic by 2018
App use makes up 88% of total time spent on mobile in the U.S.
With weekly recurring media content, utilizing the media tab provides an effective medium for expanding the reach of your content beyond the Sunday service. Not only can users instantly access your sermon collection, but they can download for offline listening wherever they are. Many churches have seen a strong increase in sermon downloads through their media tab alone!
The media tab is the most robust way to present your media on a mobile device. Built and designed for multiple devices and operating systems, the Subsplash Platform enables you to deliver a beautiful and intuitive cross-platform media experience. Easily customize the artwork and display of your media with multiple layout options, making the user experience more delightful and catered to your brand.
As our series comes to a close, these are a just a few ways we’ve seen churches use their apps to increase engagement and enhance their communication efforts. Your app should not only be a tool for presenting content, but also an effective way to directly remind, notify, and encourage users to engage. If you’d like to add any of these features, or would like to get started with your own Church App, we’d love to help!
Stories from the Church: Web Player
The Subsplash Web Player is the perfect compliment to your app to reach your audience in new ways! Whether your content is consumed on a mobile device or a desktop, we’ve got you covered. The content uploaded to your app is encoded and maximized for playback across every medium. This means there is no dual entry–upload in one place and your media is instantly delivered to your app, web player, and podcast feed. We’ve seen great adoption rates of the Web Player so far, but want to encourage everyone to check it out and see how it fits the need of your organization. Simply check out the ‘Web Player’ settings page in the Subsplash Dashboard to turn on this channel–it’s as easy as that, and it comes fully loaded with your content.
I had the opportunity to chat with a few of our lovely clients to hear how they’re liking the Web Player. Here are their stories:
ALL SAINTS CHURCH, SEATTLE WA
All Saints is a small church of 100 people in the heart of Seattle. By the grace of God, their app has had over 3,000 downloads! They cut their time uploading media to different sources in half by adding the Web Player as their media page on their website. Not only does the Web Player satisfy the functional requirements for them, but they are thrilled with the design of the page and how seamlessly it works with their current website. They love that it is 'easy to share and easy to update!'
ELEVATE LIFE CHURCH, ORANGE PARK FL
Elevate Life Church in Florida implemented the Web Player onto their website immediately after release. Elevate Life fully utilizes the Web Player, Apps, and Podcasting. They promote the App and Web Player to their congregation often, and consider it a key part of their communication strategy. Because they only have to upload their media in one place now, they have seen significant time savings from what used to be hours updating across multiple services. They ‘love the streamlining capabilities’ and even based the look and feel of their website redesign on the Web Player. Elevate Life just launched their second campus and is a congregation of roughly 1,900 with over 4,500 app downloads!
LIFEGATE CHURCH, ATLANTA GA
Lifegate Church in Atlanta is a 1,000 member church. They use their App and Web Player as the resource for their congregation. By streamlining their processes, they’ve noticed that the Web Player saves several days worth of work per week. The adoption by their congregation of a centralized location for video, audio, and podcasting has ‘been awesome’. All ages have responded well to the app and Web Player from teens to members in their eighties. “The amount of people listening is over and above what we could have ever thought”.
Want to hear more about how this tool can be customized to fit your needs? We'd love to chat with you!
Your Media is More Popular Than You Think
“The wifi’s down...”
Unless you have an unlimited data plan, this phrase often instills a slight internal panic. Whether it be a business trying to perform its daily activities, students studying in a cafe, watching Netflix at your house, or trying to pass time at the airport with Youtube videos, we live in a world that is heavily dependent on the internet and our devices.
While this attachment to our devices isn’t anything new, our time spent using them to consume digital media is definitely growing. So much so, that when an internet connection is lost, we suddenly feel a gap - not just in the use of our devices, but also in our daily media consumption habits we are used to.
According to Nielsen’s recent report, a continued growth in digital use is fueling an increase in media time spent. Among 18-34 yr. olds there has been a 53% growth in digital video viewing. However, this isn't just a trend for the millennial - digital media consumption has increased by 80% for ages 35-49, and by 60% for ages 50-64. In fact, digital media surpassed overall consumption on a TV screen in 2014.
So why do all of these numbers matter? Well, for today’s content providers, delivering your content through effective digital mediums has never been more important. With this scale of growth and interaction, people are naturally developing a standard and an expectation for how they engage with media, both on their devices and on the web. The design, interface, reliability, and overall delivery of the content has become vitally important when it comes to meeting your audience's expectations. Whether it be presenting lecture videos, a sermon archive, or promotional video material, these digital channels provide schools, churches, businesses, and many other organizations a unique opportunity to maximize their audience's engagement with their media.
A good first step is to know how and where your audience is engaging with media. Thanks to a recent study from comScore, we know that the majority of people consume media within mobile apps, accounting for 52% of all digital media use. To break it down further, mobile usage makes up 60% of total digital media time, and desktop-based media makes up the remaining 40%. Zooming in on just mobile video viewing, video streaming app downloads increased by 44% in 2014, and mobile video is predicted to represent 69% of all mobile traffic by 2018.
Key takeaway? Both mobile and desktop have the influence to help expand the reach of your media, while providing an opportunity to create deeper connections with your audience. No matter what your individual communication strategy needs are, developing an effective digital content strategy will be worth the time and investment.
Here at Subsplash, our heart is to help simplify your process, while giving you the tools to beautifully present your content. This was the foundation of developing Subsplash Cloud, an all-in-one solution for delivering your media. With one place to upload, encode, and manage your media, your content can be delivered through apps, the web, and your podcast feed - all with the click of a button. We want you to reach as many people as possible, and are passionate about helping you deliver a more delightful, enjoyable experience to your audience. We'd love to help get you started.
How does The Church App work?
Curious how easy it is to build and manage an app with The Church App? Watch this.
In this short one minute video, we'll highlight some of the key elements of The Church App Platform. From learning how to build and manage your app in real time using our App Builder, to seeing those changes live in your apps across multiple platforms, to then seeing how your audience can share and enjoy that content.