How do you do your sermon podcast?
public
group: Churches
flickerfly - Fri, 2008-08-22 19:42
I haven't done this myself yet so I shant comment. In trying to figure out what sort of questions a church new to using drupal might ask, I happened on this one. "How do you do a sermon podcast?"
Perhaps those actually doing this could share their version of drupal, the modules they depend on and any other tip that might be appropriate in helping others complete this task. This will help us build up resources for others to get started. It might even be a good start towards the case studies we'd like to build up or be something we could start formatting into a wiki page.
Try our service SermonCast.com
SermonCast comes with an entire media management platform- something you could not build with drupal without a lot of money and/or time for custom modules, etc. And why build something custom when SermonCast already does it?
The SermonCast media player integrates with any church website including drupal sites.
Very powerful and easy to use, and the best value of any sermon podcasting service. Free to start and very low cost after. Over 7,000 churches and ministries use the service.
www.SermonCast.com
Also if you've got a podcast consider joining our directory of Christian podcasts - Godcast1000.com. Over 1100 Christian podcasts. We will be launching Christian podcasting resources on the next version of Christian.com as well.
God bless,
Lee
Obi-Wan (Lee Raney)
Dallas Drupal Group
www.DrupalJedi.com
Christian.com Media Group, Inc.
www.Christian.com
www.SermonCast.com
My Blog: www.LinkedInJesus.com
SermonCast looks like an
SermonCast looks like an interesting tool. How can it be integrated with a Drupal based site? Is there an API or a module or something?
Is there any good research
Is there any good research to determine if podcasting sermons is even worth the hassle?
What are the demographics of congregants most likely to use them?
Since we post our sermons to GodTube and link them from our Web site I wonder who might choose to listen only to the audio. Perhaps that is more of a urban commuter thing?
http://firstbaptistchurchsh.com
Pastor David
My experience with having
My experience with having sermons online and the feedback I received indicated that we had listeners to archived sermons that were primarily people interested in finding out more about the church, of members of sister churches around the world who were looking to hear sermons.
Where we had the bulk of our activity was our live stream - we piped the live service out to the web via an MP3 stream. This was primarily used by families home with sick kids (several on any given service), though we had occasional listeners from other parts of the world.
This of course is one experience in a very small church setting, not a demographic study, but hopefully it's helpful.
Purpose and demographic
I think podcasting really depends on what you are putting out there, how you are sharing it, and your demographics.
My church puts out their sermons and bible classes as podcasts. People who miss a service or are shut ins tend to use this to listen. There is less distribution cost than CDs. I'm aware of people in their 70's using this all the way down to as young as people want to listen to what they missed.
The bible class online is setup for people who miss a week or want to take the class but can't make the time. There are over 15 people who signed up for homework based bible study who listen to the lecture online. Many others just listen to the lecture.
This is a different demographic than if you did a podcast meant for the web. My church has one of those. We have listeners from those in their 20's up through those in their 60's and 70's. It's a matter of letting them know they are there and making them easy to use.
The congregation I attend is in the burbs and some have said it borders on rural.
Matt Farina
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.geeksandgod.com
www.superaveragepodcast.com
www.mattfarina.com
We use audio module
We recently re-did our web site, and wanted to include the sermons. Since we already record the services on CD, it was easy to upload the sermons as audio podcasts. I used the Audio module to do this, which works well. It allows me to FTP the sermon recordings to the web site and then import them. You can see it at http://www.fumcsantarosa.org/sermons.
The primary audience are those who are not afraid of the web (leaves out many of our older members) and either heard a sermon and want to hear it again, or missed it, or want to hear the sermon at our other location. (We have 2 locations and a different sermon/pastor at each location.) Our pastors tell me that they often tell people about the sermons on the web site. We don't get a lot of listens, an average of about 10 per sermon. I consider that 10 people who might not otherwise hear them, a good thing.
We also have a CD ministry where we duplicate CDs right after our largest service and make them available during the fellowship time, about 15 minutes after the end of the service. We also distribute the CDs to those who cannot attend a service, especially shut-ins. We give out about 6-12 CDs per week. Some people want to hear the service, or parts of it, again, also a good thing.
I considered using other modules, such as the Assets module, which also promised video, but there was a bug in that module, which has now been fixed. I would look at it again if I were to start over.
We plan to move to videocasting some time soon, and I will look at the modules that support video. I have found that it is straightforward to encode a video to Flash (using Quick Media Converter) and then play that video using JW FLV Media Player and hardcoding the link as shown on the http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=jw_flv_player site. I did this for another web site, and it got a video up without needing any module other than the external JW FLV Media Player. This approach is not suitable for nonprogrammers but it is straightforward.
audio - stats - S3?
We also use the audio module for our messages ( http://www.gracecommunity.ws/messagelist ) which we then re-use on a central message page (gets an average of 50-75 visits per month), an iTunes feed, and special message collection pages which gather all messages and other resources on a topic together.
According to the stats (provided from the audio module) - each message over time has an average of about 100 downloads, and 10-15 plays. With some messages getting downloaded 1000+ times. The podcast is much smaller.
The volume of downloads is increasing and pushing our bandwidth limit, so I am looking into the media mover module to help us store the files on Amazon S3 storage. But that module does not integrate with audio - but I may be able to get the same results using CCK+mediafield+media_mover+views+itunes_view to get the same result.
So it seems to be very successful from our experience. We've gotten emails from the other side of the country when there are issues with the podcast - so it is surprising how wide the reach can be.
I've been posting my sermons
I've been posting my sermons as an audio podcast for a couple years now; can't remember when I started. We get 1000-1500 downloads/month (measured by podtrac), which, considering we have ~60-70 people in church on any given Sunday, means way more people are listening online than live. We've gotten some comments from listeners: someone in Japan who lives too far from a Lutheran church to attend, a widow of a former pastor here, a commercial pilot who listens to sermons while flying across the country, the pastor at the church on top of Mt. Carmel in Israel, and a few others. Only 68% of our downloads are from the USA. 2.5% are from China, which really excites me, since the Gospel is hard to get there. China actually blocked it for a few months, but it opened up again beginning of this year.
My goal is simply to throw digital seeds out there for the most part, but also to give people who want to know more about the church a chance to do so.
And yes, our church website is horrible, but that's due to a lack of geeks in the rural Iowa congregation, of which I'm the only one, and I've been too busy with local ministry to do much more. That's more of a self-indictment than an excuse, though, because I know we could be doing so much more.
Pastor Dale
http://crossfeednews.com/podcast
Taxonomy
Is anyone categorizing sermons by books of the Bible, topic, passage or anything like that? Is there any evidence that people are more likely to use archived sermons if they are more easily discoverable than most sites provide for?
If you haven't seen Mustard
If you haven't seen Mustard Seed Media's podcast on this subject and the new module that Rob commissioned, check it out.
http://mustardseedmedia.com/podcast/episode14
It is the way I've been working on, but missing the podcast element. Well, the podcast part is now solved thanks to a new module. I'll be putting this to work real soon.