In these months of social distancing, all City to City meetings are done over Slack, Google, or Zoom. And meeting online is an excellent opportunity to create a podcast, blog, or video.
Finally, meetings can be productive!
As a ministry leader, you’re already putting in a lot of work during this time. Below are two ways to take what you might already be doing and create sharable insights and stories.
GO LIVE
Going live is a new feature on many social apps. It lowers the entry barrier for creators to start streaming accessible content. Anyone can host a talk show with their phone, and their friends can watch or join in. It’s the new television!
Zoom makes it easy to go live. If you’re on a Zoom Pro account you can stream to YouTube or Facebook. If you have a Zoom Webinar account, you can use Restream.io to stream to many platforms at once.
Creating content live removes the need for editing and uploading. Once you’re done, you’re done. There’s no need for fancy transitions or professional lower thirds graphics. You’re in a Zoom meeting or using your phone to post on Instagram live, and that’s all you need. Just remember to save your live video, especially on Instagram.
Here’s a quick loom explaining the process below.
RECORD YOUR MEETINGS
Okay, so going live might not be your thing. But if you’re reading this, you have access to the internet—and that means you’ve probably been in a Zoom call or fifteen. So if you’re in a meeting and come upon a great idea, why not record it?
Google will send you a link. I love this. Zoom will either save it to your computer or the cloud.
TRANSCRIBE YOUR VIDEO
Services like Rev.com charge $1.25 per minute to transcribe your video. Simply give them the link, and you’ll have text in (usually) less than 24 hours. Don’t want to pay? Use a free service like Otter.ai. You’ll need to do some editing to get the transcript presentable, but do that after you do this next step.
Drop the video file and the transcript into Descript. If you make changes to the transcript, the app edits the video/audio file automagically! You’ll need to make some final touches to the audio or video file, but after using the app, it’s 90% there! We then upload the final files to Anchor.fm for the City to City Church in Outbreak podcast.
PUBLISH IT
Finally, create a blog post with the transcript and embed the podcast episode into the post. This makes your podcast more accessible and gives a good boost to your blog SEO.
For example, here’s a blog, podcast episode, and video taken from a YouTube Live talk by Tim Keller.
This blog post came about because I kept saying the same things in meetings, and people found it helpful so I made a loom and shared it on Facebook. That post got a bunch of comments and so I typed it out into this post.
Churches and ministries have to do more with less, so focus on where putting in a lot of time and effort, notice what could be useful to your leaders and community, and determine how and where you can share it.
