Digital Parish: Short-form video in digital ministry

Ryan Dunn [00:00:00]:
This is pastoring in the digital parish, your resource and point of connection for building your digital ministry toolkit and bringing your congregation into the digital age. My name is Ryan Dunn. I have often spoken about repurposing content on this sheer podcast. In ministry. We're constantly creating content Dunn it only makes sense to get as much mileage out of that content as we possibly can In this session of pastoring in the digital parish, I'm not only going to talk again about repurposing content, but this episode is itself repurposed content. For the past couple years, I've done training sessions on revitalizing your church's social media through short form video. This episode is a bit of that training. Of course, it skips several of the video examples and the interactive pieces, but you're gonna get some useful ideas that I've gleaned from stalking and researching churches who are making their communities easily known through short form videos.

Ryan Dunn [00:01:06]:
I'm gonna share some of those learnings in this episode. Dunn we're gonna talk quite a bit about having a hook for your content. So here is the hook for this session. We're gonna explore maximizing your churches or ministry social media engagement and reach with the minimal amount of effort. Sound good? And we're gonna do this through a 7 step process related to short form video. My son, who is now 16, has been a real eye opener when it comes to life in the digital world. He is a digital native. He's of the age right now when you would assume that he's getting excited about getting his driver's license, but in reality, he's not that excited.

Ryan Dunn [00:01:50]:
Most of us would probably recount getting our license as close to our 16th birthdays as we possibly could. And that's because we grew up in an age when relationships demanded some kind of physical proximity. Right? In other words, if I wanted to hang out with my friend, Matt, when I was 16 years old, I could call him on the phone, but that was actually kind of boring Dunn my sister would complain that she needed the phone and all that. So it meant that I had to figure out some way to get into the same space as Matt and a driver's license, of course, made that easier. My son is not challenged in that way. He spends hours with his friends every day. He and they are in the same spaces together, and some days, they occupy the same physical space. But many days, the space they choose to occupy is a digital space.

Ryan Dunn [00:02:41]:
They're gaming. They're on Discord. They're chatting. They're watching each other on Twitch. The reality today is that most of us use digital platforms to augment, maintain, or nurture our relationships and connections. And if the church fails to be present in those digital spaces, then we're missing opportunities to represent Christ in spaces where people are in active relationship formation. You're listening to this podcast. You probably agree with what I just said.

Ryan Dunn [00:03:12]:
The more pressing question at hand isn't so much if we should be on the digital space. It's probably more related to how we engage on those digital spaces. How do we effectively occupy that same space as other people? Well, we're gonna borrow from the marketing world quite a bit for this. Now I wanna settle some unease about utilizing marketing principles. In our case, marketing is a means for beginning relationship. It's about invitation. For us, it isn't about making money or building customers. Instead, it's about finding people and making ourselves easily knowable.

Ryan Dunn [00:03:51]:
There's been a shift on many of our digital social media platforms recently. I think it's a disruption that's been caused by TikTok, which has had this huge rise to relevancy even though it may be blocked here in the US sometime soon. But it started as a platform in 2016, and as of the end of 2023, it's posted over 1,000,000,000 active users. Everybody else who was in the social media realm wanted to catch a little bit of that growth magic. So Instagram introduced reels, which then expanded to Facebook. YouTube introduced shorts, Twitter slash x changed their video limitations and settings. So for the first time, all these major digital connection platforms started to prioritize the same kind of content. And when we talk about maximizing our digital engagement with the minimal effort, that is huge.

Ryan Dunn [00:04:45]:
Because really, for the first time, we can take Dunn piece of content and find that it can have impact on all of these platforms. We don't have to strategize individual Facebook posts and then separate Instagram posts and be scared of TikTok altogether. As many of us, of my distinguished age are, video is definitely a more demanding medium than other kinds of content, but our good news here is that its reach and impact is really increasing, making it well worth the effort. I think one of the reasons why we see so much resistance to church today is that in this age, when it's really easy to get information, the churches can be slow in delivering that information, or we can even be negligent. We're hard to know for those who are outside of the church, and there are all kinds of reasons for that. The long past privileged position of people knowing what churches were all about and what denominations stood for. Our goal today is to make ourselves easy to know and easily discoverable, and that's possibly, it's possible that short form video is actually the easiest way to do so. Now there are myriad reasons why many of us have invoiced avoided short form video.

Ryan Dunn [00:06:10]:
Some of us, we just don't understand it. We don't know what's appealing. We don't know what gets reached, what draws a response, nor what's really involved in making a video. Here's what I've learned, both through some personal trial and error and anecdotally through others experience. No one is out there in the digital wasteland waiting for the church to jump on the latest viral trends. They're out there in the digital space waiting for the church to represent the church. So we are at our best and our most engaging in digital spaces now when we faithfully represent who we are and allow other people to get to know us. And this gives some definition to short form video.

Ryan Dunn [00:06:55]:
For us, it's a piece of video content most often presented in the vertical format, which communicates something to the user about our Christ centered community. And there aren't hard and fast rules about how long a short form video is, though I will get into the links that I believe connect best with people a little bit later. There aren't Dunn rules about exact content or a formula for it, whether it needs to be funny or whimsical or heart tugging and evocative. It just needs to portray our community offering value to the people who are watching the video. I said that we're gonna have 7 clarifying questions that will help us produce engaging videos, and we're finally getting to question number 1, and it's in regards to portraying value. The first question is this. What are you trying to say? The obvious first step is defining what your video is about. And this actually is another drop out point for would be video creators, especially those of us who have other responsibilities on our proverbial plates.

Ryan Dunn [00:07:59]:
There are already worship orders to put together Dunn worship slides to prep and newsletter articles to track down and Bible lessons to print off and visits to make. And now we're supposed to strategize a video series. Well, there's great news here for those of us who work in the churches. The content is often already there. The community's leaders are likely recording meaningful content every Sunday morning. Our goal is to take that 20 minute long Sunday morning sermon and dice it up into something that we present as a short form video. And here, there's more good news. It's pretty easy to get that content these days.

Ryan Dunn [00:08:39]:
So let me provide some suggestions on how to call short form videos from the weekly sermon. Step 1 would be to pay attention to the sermon on Sunday and make some notes regarding likely sound bites or video bites. That can be a bit of a challenge though. I'll admit, I imagine that a majority of the people who are listening to this have other responsibilities on Sunday mornings, which may come in conflict with your ability to provide the the sermon with your full undivided attention. And let's admit it. Sometimes you might hear something that sounds promising, and you think it's gonna lead to this great epiphany type moment of truth. And then the preacher just never really quite brings the plane in for the landing. Online, they present the issue, but they don't fully answer a resolution or offer a resolution.

Ryan Dunn [00:09:29]:
So does that mean that you have to devote another half hour relistening to the sermon and annotating the Sunday sermon notes? No, it does not. Thanks to AI. There are a few services out there now that actually specialize in turning sermon recordings into additional pieces of content, and they will provide AI informed recommendations for clipping portions into short form videos. Pulpitt AI, I believe, is Dunn. Pro Church Tools is releasing something I've heard. I use a podcasting tool that offers similar features. The tool I use is called Cast Magic. It provides suggestions for video or audio clips.

Ryan Dunn [00:10:10]:
It also gives suggestions for things like discussion questions and hashtags and keywords, all kinds of useful things, and you can tailor your prompts. And those are all paid services, But you can coax out some AI tools like this for free. If your preacher is a manuscript preacher, this is especially easy because you can use chat g p t. You'll prop chat g p t with something like, I need sound bite suggestions from the following sermon text. And then you paste in your text of the sermon. Chat GPT will provide many suggestions then. You're gonna jot down or your job is to use your human brain and then discern which clip or clips might offer the most value for your users and how much to expand the video around that sound bite. Even if your preacher is not a manuscript or they're one of those digested manuscript or extemporaneous preachers, you can still get a file if you're streaming your service on a platform like YouTube.

Ryan Dunn [00:11:13]:
YouTube creates captions, and you can download those caption files and then transfer or convert them into text files, which you can then copy and paste into chat gpt with your prompt for sound bites. The pro with the AI aided tools is that the AI is gonna timestamp the quotes for you, which makes editing go so much quicker. We'll get into the editing process a little bit later. The key piece of information that you want to get through this question though is simply an idea of what part of this sermon is gonna be most useful for the casual social media surfer. What piece of information is gonna invite them to stop their scroll and spend time with your content? And I'll tell you what is a big help in answering that question is also coming up with an answer to our Dunn clarifying question for video mastery. And that question is, who is this piece of content gonna serve? Specifically, who is the viewer that this piece of content will serve? I've noticed that a lot of us actually post content unintentionally moving in the opposite direction of the intent of this question, meaning that we post content that is actually meant to serve us, the poster or creator, more than it's meant to benefit the actual viewer. It's a pretty innocent intent, and sometimes it is unavoidable. For example, we want people to know that we have a Wednesday night Bible study.

Ryan Dunn [00:12:47]:
And we can say that it's useful to the user because they're gonna benefit from that Wednesday night Bible study. But really, it's about getting people to show up, if we're totally honest. And that kind of content is unavoidable. But when it comes to short form video, a piece of content that we're hoping someone will invest a minute or so of their time, we need to make sure that it's content that is valuable to them right then and there Dunn not so much to us. In order to do that, we need to have a clear picture of who we are trying to serve or provide value to with our content. And do yourself a favor. Don't try to answer this question with everybody. Content that is for quote unquote everybody ends up being for nobody.

Ryan Dunn [00:13:33]:
I think it actually helps to get so granular that you have a specific person in mind when you post a piece of content. A lot of the content that we end up posting for Rethink Church is in reaction to a specific question. So in a way, we're building a whole piece of content for 1 person, the Dunn person who asked that question. Hopefully, a whole bunch of people find that content valuable, but we found that the more specific we are in identifying a target audience, the more likely we are to make a connection with somebody. And I see this happening all across digital spaces. We're in such an age of personalization that people have little tolerance for things that they don't feel are immediately relevant to them. So, yeah, we need to be specific about the people that we're trying to provide value to. And it doesn't have to be the same target group or person with every piece of content.

Ryan Dunn [00:14:28]:
Sometimes we're gonna speak to busy parents. Sometimes we'll speak to anxious gamers. Sometimes we'll speak to the hardheaded ideal logs because they are in our church, too. And they also need love. Hey. I just said that people will move away pretty quickly if they don't feel content is immediately relevant to them. So once you've identified your audience, you'll need to address our 3rd clarifying question. What is the hook? In other words, what is the reason someone will want to view this video? What is the promised value? We need to answer this question for our viewer right away.

Ryan Dunn [00:15:08]:
They won't wait to know why this video is valuable despite our post text that says, wait for it, wait to the end. This doesn't mean that we have to deliver the goods right off the bat. It just means that we need to let the viewer know about the value that we think they'll receive in this piece of content. And most often, this value can be communicated in a question. Sometimes we get lucky Dunn our speaker in the video poses that question for us, the the editors and the viewers. More often though, we'll need to present the question as text on screen. And this is especially true in reference to repurposed sermon bites. Our pastor might be telling us why we need more peace in our lives, for example, but they never directly ask that question.

Ryan Dunn [00:15:56]:
So we'll ask the question as text on screen as pastor then provides the answer. This may be a good time to talk about editing. I'm not gonna get overly deep here. I'll offer that some kind of video editing software is needed, and that's likely gonna require a little bit of an investment. If we're talking about using sermon videos, those are most likely originally captured in a horizontal format. Right? So we need an editor that allows us to flip that to vertical, and that will, of course, require a video editor. In a video editor, it makes it easier to add text to a video as well. Although there are cool ways to do that with a native editing app, meaning that we can import our video into an app like TikTok Dunn then use TikTok's features to add text and captions.

Ryan Dunn [00:16:43]:
I've used Imovie to edit, and there are tricks to getting it to show up in a vertical format. So though it's free, it might not be ideal. In the end, I think editing is really gonna require some kind of investment. It may not be a lot, but some kind of capital will be needed. In whatever editor you're using, your AI evaluation that you did earlier will helpfully supply timestamps so you can jump right to the section that you want, excerpt it, format it, then send it to your social media platform. TikTok and Instagram now offer the ability to load video content from a desktop, but these platforms don't have the same features that are offered on mobile. The mobile version is far more robust in these cases. So it might pay to use Dropbox or Google Drive to import the video.

Ryan Dunn [00:17:36]:
Or if you're an Apple person, you can just air drop that stuff. Let's hope that's my only money moment for Apple. Videos on social media tend to move pretty quickly. So I encourage removing long pauses and extraneous parentheticals and such. I'll also play around with the playback speed a little bit. I'll try to get the video to go as fast as possible while it still looks natural. So if it gets to the point where it seems that the pastor is all hopped up on goofballs, you might have gone too far. But up until that point, I say push that speed up.

Ryan Dunn [00:18:11]:
And I'll do this because I think videos around 60 seconds are really the sweet spot. It doesn't have to be exact. But I do know that as you stretch much farther than that, then video completion rates really start to drop. And I also believe that you can go too short. I don't have much proof behind that yet, but I work with the philosophy that all social media platforms want their users to spend as much time on their apps as possible. So their algorithms aren't placing a whole lot of emphasis on a video that only extends watch time for a few seconds. I think there's some kind of minimum threshold at play. I do not, however, recommend playing with playback speed to make a video longer.

Ryan Dunn [00:18:54]:
It just it it comes out weird. We talked in the beginning of this about setting the hook. Now let's talk about the end. The next question we can answer to maximize our video is this. So what if this video takes off and thousands of people see it and Dunn share it, what's gonna happen? I often know or I know we can offer an altruistic answer to this. We can say something that while lives have been impacted and people are inspired and uplifted, people know Jesus, but we can also ask people to do something in reaction to the video. It might be something as simple as saying click to follow our channel, or it can be a bit more robust and say visit our site to join a community based on this topic. It's a good idea to have some kind of call to action in our videos.

Ryan Dunn [00:19:54]:
You can vary these calls to action from video to video as well. Our call is to make disciples of Jesus. In in the United Methodist Church, we believe that the primary arena for making disciples is the local church. So it's a great call to action to invite people to draw a little bit closer to your church community by following your channel or consuming another piece of content or offering you some information. So a quick review. You're gonna identify something of value to communicate. You're gonna discern who you're gonna offer it to. You're going to entice them to actually watch that valuable content, and then you're gonna offer them a way to respond.

Ryan Dunn [00:20:36]:
Those are the basics. The rest of the stuff I'm gonna cover is basically window dressing. It's all stuff that helps make your valuable message a little bit more palatable. So our next clarifying question then is, is this visually engaging? Or to proactively phrase that, what can I do to make this more visually engaging? Here are a few ideas of how to add some visual variants. Use jump cuts. Social media users are totally forgiving of rough edits. There's no need for, like, a smooth fade. It's okay in this realm to just jump from Dunn scene to the next.

Ryan Dunn [00:21:13]:
And one way to add a little more visual emphasis in your video is to jump cut to zoomed in perspective and zoomed out perspective. So I've worked out this little formula that I use that fits with our sermon clip theme. Often I'll zoom in on the speaker when they present the hook, then I'll zoom out as they provide the context and then zoom back in as they make the final point or bring the video in for a landing. If they get to that point, hopefully they do Another good way to visually engage is to utilize on screen text. Instagram's reels have some really nice features with closed captioning. You can also manually add text that underscores a point or poses a thoughtful question along the way. And I believe that captions are always a good idea, especially for Instagram and Facebook. A large portion of the people who see your video on those two platforms likely have the sound off as they're viewing your video.

Ryan Dunn [00:22:10]:
So captions are key because they'll still stick with your video even if they can't hear your video. I don't think many people view TikTok or YouTube with the sound off, but you never know. Captions keep things visually engaging and will help to bring out your content whether someone has sound on or not. If you're not doing sermon videos, you can play around with green screens and such. My green screen is a sheet of green fabric Dunn put that on a production stand. The whole setup cost me about $30. Green screening can be a little bit tricky in editing. I found that this is why I lean into Imovie.

Ryan Dunn [00:22:43]:
It works great, but Imovie can be tricky with editing vertical video. So I've also played around with cap Dunn and Adobe Express. They offer background cutting features, which could work. They sometimes work. Sometimes they're a little bit quirky too and give you a strange green aura in your in your thing. If you're looking at the video, you can kinda tell, that I did this one with capcut. I've got a, well, a wonderful kind of radioactive glow about me, really glowing. Alright.

Ryan Dunn [00:23:15]:
While we're editing, let's address the next clarifying question. That is, can this video be shorter? I noted that a lot of creators speed up the playback speed. And I definitely encourage you to take out pauses and any extraneous info. And then when you're done with that, cut it again. Again, 60 seconds seems to be a pretty sweet time. To get your video on YouTube shorts, 60 seconds is actually a necessity. So what can you do is what you can do is use your short form video as a teaser for a longer video. Facebook and YouTube, I believe, offer features that actually allow you to link back to a longer host kind of video.

Ryan Dunn [00:23:58]:
So your short form becomes a teaser for that longer thing. So you use that full video to communicate all the things. You use the short form to communicate the most valuable thing perhaps. Alright. Once we've edited up and we're ready to post, we're gonna address the final question. Number 7, how will this be discovered? A large part of this comes down to hashtagging. Hashtags are still important for discoverability. And this is one of the cases that I really lean into the AI bots Since what's being fed to people is often at the discretion of a computer algorithm, I trust the bots a bit more to reveal to me what it what it is that the computer mindset is looking for when it's suggesting content for users.

Ryan Dunn [00:24:44]:
So I'll ask whatever a ai system I'm using to suggest relevant hashtags, and then I'll use several of them. Now we don't wanna go overboard with hashtags. I'm pretty certain that there are limitations in the algorithms limiting people who over tag. So I normally shoot for, like, 3 to 5, maybe even 6 hashtags to describe my video. And often a couple of those hashtags are standard to every video I make. For example, when I'm posting for the denomination, everything I post is hashtag with hashtag UMC and hashtag United Methodist. When I'm posting for Wreathing Church, everything gets hashtag rethink church. When I'm posting for my local church, everything gets hashtag Glencliff UMC, and I've been adding in hashtag Nashville church.

Ryan Dunn [00:25:33]:
And then I'll add in a couple content specific hashtags. One might be a general one like hashtag compassion, but another will be really specific, like hashtag compassion in practice. Again, I'll let the bot help me decide some of that really specific stuff. Now that I've provided these Dunn clarifying questions, I'm gonna add a few warnings. 1st, response builds slowly. So don't expect to go viral with the first thing that you post. That rarely happens. Most creators I've spoken with say that they've been posting videos for a year or more before they gain much traction.

Ryan Dunn [00:26:12]:
A huge part of building that following revolves around follow-up. So the content piece itself is not the full thing. The follow-up interaction is key. You'll need to comment back at people after they've commented on your stuff. You need you can also thank people for sharing. Now for sure, at some point, you'll have someone comment with something spiteful on your content. If it is an opportunity for grace, then I say respond. If it's not an opportunity for grace, then delete or hide the comment.

Ryan Dunn [00:26:44]:
If you don't feel up to offering grace in that moment, then delete or hide the comment. That's okay too. Some grace full post backs include phrases like, we are a community trying our best to represent grace to all the people in our neighborhoods in area. So we're basing our statements here in that. Or maybe something like, it sounds like you've been hurt by the church. Our community is trying to be a safe harbor for nurturing people on their faith journeys. Or maybe you want to say we believe that grace is grounded Dunn respect and prefer to proceed with an assumption that all people are worthy of respect and dignity. Or you want to say something online, we've been ordaining women since the 19 fifties, so get off my feet.

Ryan Dunn [00:27:28]:
Just kidding. That's some that's probably in response to the kind of comment that you wanna delete. In the end, I think a lot of commenters forget that there's a human being on the other side of the post. They just see the institution. So humanizing your comments goes a long way towards establishing some kind of civility. And for positive commenters, they're gonna love the fact that they are able to possibly connect with other like minded people. It's really the the biggest of any social media platform. If our goal is to use social media as a point of invitation and to make our communities easily knowable, then responding to comments goes a long, long way.

Ryan Dunn [00:28:08]:
Alright. Those are 7 clarifying questions for short form video revitalization. I'll link to some sample videos in the show notes for this episode. And if you wanna interact with the full training session, keep an eye on resourceumc c.org, which by the way is your one stop stop spot. Oh my gosh. Which by the way is your one stop spot for leadership resources across the United Methodist connection. I think the episode from earlier this season with Caleb Wines would be a good follow-up to this particular episode. That episode is called how social media transformed a fading congregation.

Ryan Dunn [00:28:51]:
That's relevant for a few of us. I'll be back with more stories to share about digital ministry next week. I look forward to chatting more then. Peace.