Hi there,
I'm Rev. Janet Jones who is in ministry with the fine folks at High Country United Church in Mono, Ontario. We're a small-ish rural church with a big church attitude.
I've learned most of my church tech AVIT from COVID University (aka self-taught and guided by some fabulous folks on the Facebook Group). I finally have a young person who knows about streaming who is able to take some of the load off of me on Sunday mornings. I also stream some of our lunch & learns as well as Sunday night prayers from home (aka "Worship Studio" - sounds soooo cool). We're learning if you're not online, you're missing a lot of people. I'm determined to keep our system small and easy so anyone can step in. Sure, it would be great to have different camera angles and picture-in-picture stuff, but my volunteers might feel overwhelmed. We have a desktop that runs OBS and a laptop that runs our powerpoint. We have 1 PTZ camera. When responses or songs are on the screen, the camera zooms in on one of our screens. Voila. Nice and easy. We post to Facebook and YouTube and add links to our website's home page and video page. We also started a nicer digital newsletter we can add the video into.
I'm blessed to work with a forward-thinking congregation who put some memorial funds up for our tech upgrades to start streaming. I'm not looking forward to upgrading things in the next couple of years, so I'm creating a network of support so I don't lose my mind. We're due for a website overhaul but I'll need to set a few days aside for that... sounds like a good 'resurrection' timing project. And hopefully, I can learn some new tools and tricks to keep wowing my folks.
That being said, we've also started some tech classes and times for tech support in hopes to empower our folks. Highly recommended. Soon they'll have a surprise lesson at the AVIT station. Shhhh. It's our little secret.
Jan
I'm Rev. Janet Jones who is in ministry with the fine folks at High Country United Church in Mono, Ontario. We're a small-ish rural church with a big church attitude.
I've learned most of my church tech AVIT from COVID University (aka self-taught and guided by some fabulous folks on the Facebook Group). I finally have a young person who knows about streaming who is able to take some of the load off of me on Sunday mornings. I also stream some of our lunch & learns as well as Sunday night prayers from home (aka "Worship Studio" - sounds soooo cool). We're learning if you're not online, you're missing a lot of people. I'm determined to keep our system small and easy so anyone can step in. Sure, it would be great to have different camera angles and picture-in-picture stuff, but my volunteers might feel overwhelmed. We have a desktop that runs OBS and a laptop that runs our powerpoint. We have 1 PTZ camera. When responses or songs are on the screen, the camera zooms in on one of our screens. Voila. Nice and easy. We post to Facebook and YouTube and add links to our website's home page and video page. We also started a nicer digital newsletter we can add the video into.
I'm blessed to work with a forward-thinking congregation who put some memorial funds up for our tech upgrades to start streaming. I'm not looking forward to upgrading things in the next couple of years, so I'm creating a network of support so I don't lose my mind. We're due for a website overhaul but I'll need to set a few days aside for that... sounds like a good 'resurrection' timing project. And hopefully, I can learn some new tools and tricks to keep wowing my folks.
That being said, we've also started some tech classes and times for tech support in hopes to empower our folks. Highly recommended. Soon they'll have a surprise lesson at the AVIT station. Shhhh. It's our little secret.
Jan