EP137: Resi & Analytics of Online Church Services

I received a text the other day from a digital pastor. Jeff, I hear you. Butts and seats is a horrible, horrible stat, but I got to have something. There's got to be something better.

Hey, this is Jeff with the Church Digital Podcast. Once again, it's powered by Stadia Church Planting. Stadia, even in this post-COVID season, we are still pushing the importance of physical ministry and digital ministry working together. That's the goal of what we're trying to get from all of our churches, and that's the goal that we would encourage you. Every church on the planet at some level needs to have a fidel strategy. There needs to be a physical and a digital aspect for everyone. And it's in that heart Stadia is ramping up fall 2021, another set of digital learning communities. The purpose, the goal here is to get the church strategy to work together—physical and digital complementing each other, not being threatened, but complementing each other to help the overall church ministry thrive, grow, and even get to the place of multiplication in physical and in digital space. It's a beautiful thing. Check it out: stadiachurchplanting.org/digital.

And really, this is the heart of this conversation that we want to have. We want to keep pulling the fidget thread. Analytics are hugely important in context of our church. It helps us understand whether our strategy is being effective or not. And sometimes in digital spaces, it doesn't always line up with physical. It's very easy to get that button seat number digitally, but what does that mean? Excuse me, it's very easy to get that number physically, but how that aligns and matches up—is it true apples-to-apples comparison? In digital space, all of a sudden you're adding multipliers and length of view and platforms they're watching on, which may or may not have more people clued into it. And so all of a sudden, maybe it feels a little bit like you're just pulling numbers out of the air and making up the story as you're going. And is there any scientific fact in context of all these numbers and stories that we're alluding to in digital space? It's really the heart of the conversation we wanted to have here. And so we're bringing in the team—the nice people over at Rezzy, formerly Living as One. Colin Jones has been one of the earliest supporters of the Church Digital. I think Colin may have been one of the first people we actually told that we were doing the Church Digital. And so even from those early days, Colin has been a supporter, walking with us, encouraging us, and praying for us along the way. And so anytime we get to have a conversation with Colin, let's just call it gold. It's just an awesome time to be together with that.

And Rezzy is coming out with some new analytics 2.0 approach and how they're handling analytics and how they're providing reports and what they're digging into, what they're positioning around. Whether you're using Rezzy, Living as One, or even if you're in a different system, I think this is a gold conversation for you to start to understand what these analytics can mean. Yes, no, maybe it's an apples-to-apples comparison, but you're measuring a different thing towards a different goal. And that's where we get to tell a different story in digital space with these analytics than what we do at the butts-in-the-seats number in the physical space.

So what better way to dig in than to invite Colin Jones back to this podcast—long-time supporter—to dig in? Also, at the same time, we're inviting in Jennifer Miles. Jen's been on the podcast as well. Former previous involvement with Life Church doing some of their marketing, digital marketing towards that. Jen's been doing customer relations and building out some of this analytics 2.0 reports and how they're managing the stuff within. So as we're really getting a deep dive into what analytics looks like within Rezzy's new systems, let's bring both of them in, have a conversation, learn a thing or two.

So here's where we are. We're bringing into the conversation Colin Jones, CEO/President of Rezzy; Jen Miles, essentially customer relations in context of Rezzy; myself, Jeff, with the Church Digital; and of course, Stadia Church Planting, in a conversation that I'm calling "Analytics of Our Online Church Services."

Okay, everybody, here you go. So Colin, what's the weirdest, most out-of-the-box request that a church has asked for in this COVID season?

Yeah, Jen actually goes through all the requests, so that's probably a better question for her. But we've definitely gotten some very, very strange ones that we say, "Okay, that's a good idea. Have you thought about doing it this way?" And they're like, "Oh yeah, yeah, that's great."

Um, but Jen, if you want to go on that one, I'm sure you have specific examples.

I don't know if this comes across as a weird request like to me it's a weird request, but it probably makes a lot of sense to the customer who's asking for it. Um, one of the biggest requests we had when COVID started was the ability to make everybody be live with the event and require that everyone stay within like five seconds of live. And on the surface, that sounds like a really great idea to me. Um, but in reality, like the way that I look at church online, people might need to step away to deal with a kid. People might need to pause to talk to the person they might be sharing the service with. And so like, I love the concept of "I want everyone within the same five seconds," but from an engagement perspective, I also love the concept of leaving that up to the viewer to say, "Do I want to pause and have interaction with the people that are in the room sharing with me and then come back to the service and continue?" Like, it's kind of this fine paradigm of what is the culture of the church and what is that temperament you want to set as far as what does your engagement look like and how do you want to do that with? Is it small groups? Is it family? Is it individuals? And so that's always a weird request to me. And how I look at it, that's actually one that we did because we like eliminate the DVR window or whatever. So it's funny because that request that we actually did, but yeah, basically not giving people DVR.

Yeah, another one for me that's always been really interesting that we get a lot and that we've accommodated for is after an event is live, I don't want it to be available on demand anymore. Um, and so again, it's like, again, what's your culture of your church? For me, I want people to engage throughout the week with content. And I know that not everyone attends live. Um, like according to Barna stats, what, half of people actually attend a service in the last four weeks? And so if I want people to come back and engage with my content, I want it to be available on demand so they watch at the appropriate times. We especially saw with COVID what started with people attending live transitioned to more and more people watching on demand. And so I look at things as how do we get people to engage? But every culture has, every church has a little bit of a different culture, a little bit of a different way to engage people. So what I think is weird might be absolutely normal in the context of that church's ministry. But those are the two that I always felt were kind of weird.

That one's funny because that second one's normal to me. That's what I recommend to churches because then you get more attendance coming at the same time rather than people saying, "Oh, I'll watch later," and then later never happens. Um, so then a lot of churches that like just have their sermons up all the time, you know, are like, "Watch on demand later on, you know, um, the whole service, you know." Um, then it's like, "Then why do I come at 10?" So I'll just come later, and then I don't ever come.

Yeah, later never comes.

Yeah, but isn't that funny? Like, even within the group, yeah, even within this group, it's like, "Oh, we're on opposite ends of the paradigm," is how does how do we approach it so that just shows how different churches are from what is their engagement model and what is the audience that they're working with?

The hang-up with the on-demand, and this is not where I want to go to the conversation, but I find it interesting and it's funny. Like, I've even seen Jay Kranda tweet about this, and I seem to hear this conversation a lot where, you know, Christ Fellowship Miami, a church that I'm close with here in Miami, they've got four or five English services on a weekend. They're broadcasting all four or five out actually through Rezzy. And so like on YouTube, they've got four or five live streams that have analytics, they've traffic on it. And so they're wrestling right now as an organization: do we delete three of the four streams and keep the one up that was the most trafficked? But then you're throwing away like analytics and comments and things like that because you don't want the multiple streams. Or are you better off having the multiple streams? Like, how do you how do you recommend, or do you guys have any thoughts on how to handle that type of situation?

So um, it honestly depends on the organization that we're working with. One of the things for us, like originally we would tell customers, "Don't delete events. Like, leave them there." Um, because you want those analytics long-term and you want to be able to get access to those. Now that we have analytics version 2.0, my answer is kind of changed a little bit because you can get rid of the three services that aren't really the primary one. Like, a lot of churches will go through and say, "We have a 6 p.m. and 9 a.m. and 11 a.m., but the one we like the best is the 9 a.m." So that's the one we want to keep historically. So now it's, yeah, you could get rid of the six and the 11 and just put the one out you really like, but you have access to all of the analytics for every service you ran that weekend. You're not going to lose them just by getting rid of the event itself.

So I get—use the one that you like. So your source of truth on the analytics piece, now that you've expanded, we're going to get into what, but the analytics 2.0, out of Rezzy, the source of truth isn't the traffic on YouTube. The source of truth is some of the numbers that you're able to pull off of Rezzy and how that's hitting the YouTubes and the Facebooks and everywhere else. So that's interesting. And I know that that probably greatly simplifies a lot of spreadsheets that churches are running trying to tabulate all the traffic of all the different areas that are happening in any one Sunday.

So and I know within Rezzy you guys have spent the past season—I mean, obviously you accelerated very quickly, like a lot of tech companies did at the beginning of COVID. And so you've seen a lot of growth within the organization. You've been working on some advancements, developments specifically within analytics and other areas in this season. Like, when you're looking at churches and they're asking questions like, I'm just curious, like what are they wanting to measure? What particular stats are you getting? Like, uh, unique stats that maybe you weren't expecting? You know, I know one of the questions that I was always asking is where are these people viewing from? Like, what's the geographic area where I'm getting this traffic? So maybe what are some of the front runners, the things that churches are really looking for coming out of their analytics of church online?

Yeah, I think what's interesting is when we were talking to customers um to determine what we were going to include in analytics 2.0, one of the things that I really liked is that we consistently heard the same things. And so I think that COVID...

Has really brought kind of a focus on what is valuable versus what we call a vanity metric. What are the things that are actionable? What are the things that equate to more like engagement on a physical campus? So things like how many viewers do I have? Are they watching live? Are they watching on demand? Being able to track what kind of engagement you're getting with people, where are they watching from? Right, so that's one that you just mentioned that's a really big one: what are my top ten locations? Because churches might then say, you know, we could have a pop-up in a location that we're seeing a lot of activity but doesn't actually have a physical campus within driving distance, or that the physical campus isn't meeting. And so those are two big ones that came up: the viewers and the locations.

Other things that came up that I was really surprised on—we do average watch time. Like, that feels like a normal thing. I was really surprised the number of customers that also asked for median watch time. That seems like an odd number to ask for, but what I was finding was that especially customers who run advertising to their church online services, they have a big distortion in their average watch time number because when you run ads, you have a lot more people who bounce after five seconds or ten seconds. And so being able to see like, what is my median number over time? Allows me to really see what is the kind of what is the average attender watching? And am I able to control that number up or down based on order of service or based on how I'm engaging messages? And so that's one that we've been really intentional about: is things that are actionable.

So another one is current concurrent viewers. Again, that's kind of like a button seat number that we have just introduced with Analytics 2.0: is how many—what's the max number of people that are watching at one given time? So that kind of is our attendance number. Other numbers that I was also really surprised with—I guess I shouldn't be surprised—just things that we hadn't been able to do before is a minute-by-minute graph. Like, how many people are watching when worship starts? At the ten-minute mark, how many people are watching? Part way through the message, at the thirty-minute mark? And being able to actually see that minute-by-minute information over time? So those were big ones. And I don't know that's surprising, but it's nice that we are able to offer that now.

Something, Jin, that if you don't mind talking about, that I thought was really interesting is all the work that you did in like aggregating social. And I know that we're about to release that part of Analytics 2.0, including stream URLs and social media and all that. But can you talk about like, you know, the question that Jeff probably would ask if he knew what I did is like, what decisions did you make in terms of like multipliers? Because we wanted to get one dashboard for pastors, you know, and we also wanted to give the detailed data so that people could do their own multipliers and their own kind of assumptions. But like, do you count someone that watched fifteen seconds on Facebook? Because of you, like, what are all the decisions you made in that kind of scenario for you know, churches to make the one dashboard, you know, accessible to give you a number and give you all those numbers that you're talking about?

Yeah, so those are really good questions. Um, one of the most complicated things when you talk about analytics and trying to compare apples to apples so that a pastor can say, "This is my information," is that every destination actually measures different things. And when they measure the same thing, they measure that thing differently. And so the way that we approached that was that we actually created five different views into your destination data. And so we were really intentional about providing customers one kind of all-destination view that gave, where we could, an apples-to-apples look. So like, every platform has a views number, and we can take that views for anyone who watched more than three seconds. Like, that is kind of like the baseline. We know every platform will give you views for more than three seconds. And so if a pastor is trying to say, "All up, this is what I did," they can look at that one number.

Not all platforms use average watch time. I wish they did. But so for all destinations, it's really—you can get your views. That was the one thing we could do apples to apples. But because we knew there were limitations there, we actually created different views into: if you have an embed code, here's the things we can give you for an embed code. We're able to track much more detailed information. And so one of the things we did was every KPI—if it's available on that platform, so if it's available for your stream URLs, if it's available for your embed code, if it's available for Facebook or for YouTube—we put that KPI on the page. If it's not available, we left that KPI off. But we didn't create like one-off KPIs. So like, Facebook has this really cool thing where you can see: do people attend three seconds, ten seconds, thirty seconds? It's the only platform that does it. So we left that off because it really kind of detracts from the what is actionable and what is consistent across my platforms.

And so trying to make really intentional decisions about: we want to give pastors and staff the ability to say across all my platforms, this is my consistent analytics data. And helping them figure out what is apples for apples, so getting that consistent number, the consistent fields, to help kind of normalize all the variances, all the weirdness, all the uniqueness out of the platforms to help, you know, apples to apples across that. That's beautiful, Colin. You said a word that you're right coming into this, and I totally should not talk about it: the multiplier. Like, are you taking the multipliers into consideration, or is there a consistent multiplier that you're seeing across when you're having conversations with churches? Like, what's the state of the multiplier, I guess, in church today? What are you guys seeing?

Yeah, I don't think anybody—you know, it's kind of funny because churches that actually do surveys on it get like varying numbers, even like based on the time that they do it. And like, Church of the Resurrection will get a certain number, and there's might be, you know, three. And then, you know, North Point will do it, and there'll be 1.7. You know, and so I think the most common is still, you know, the 1.5, the 2.5, and you know, somewhere in that range. Um, and there's outliers low and outliers high. But um, yeah, I don't think multipliers have changed drastically. But it is funny—we decided, I think I believe, Jen, you might need to update me on this, but to leave all that out. But we did give the separate data because people will assign different multipliers to Facebook because it's probably mostly individuals watching than they will to their embed code. And so we just give you how many views you had, and you can assign, you know, whatever multiplier you want based on the different platforms.

Yeah, the idea of, you know, even just calculating, encountering the IP addresses, the devices, looking at like that, and trying to force—instead of trying to force that apples-to-apples consideration—you know, really thinking different about digital is a huge step in that. And so I love what I'm hearing here with some of the analytics here. You know, I'll tell you, for me, for every week in this COVID season except for maybe the half a dozen times I've been in a control room running a service, my family, we're watching through a TV app—whether it's Christ Journey, Christ Fellowship Miami, random churches that I'm checking out. The majority of the time seems to be, you know, an app that's downloaded on my Apple TV or on a Roku. And pre-COVID, I know there wasn't a lot of traction or demand really centered around this. I'm just curious: coming through this COVID season, is there more demand within churches? Is there more desire to hit that TV with through the TV apps? Or are people watching it on iPhones or iPads or AirPlay? Like, what are you hearing as some of the technical implications that are happening Sunday mornings at the actual homes where people are engaging and watching these services?

I'm happy to answer the first part of that. And like, yeah, I mean, I think the multiplier is definitely higher with TV apps, right? Like, we have stream URLs, which is hard because that, you know, and we will break it out from what I understand from you know, different TV apps and different mobile. This is why analytics is complicated, and oftentimes it's why leadership doesn't have a clear, you know, goal or number, and then also why it doesn't sometimes get as much resources, right? Is because they can't see the butts and seats in a church service. They can see the butts in seats, right? And they know, "Got four hundred people here, happy with it." When you're streaming to a bunch of different TV apps and different sources, you can't see the button seats. And so our analytics—the vision behind it is getting pastors to see the button seats and be able to, you know, care more about online, be more invested in it, and therefore reach more people digitally, you know, for Christ, right?

Um, and in terms of how TV apps play into that, you know, I think you're right. I think, um, you know, churches are doing probably more in TV apps. And I've seen now that the kind of strategy is flattening out. They'll have multiple apps for, you know, different types of content. And you know, which I think is a really great strategy because even your, you know, even after COVID, people's habits have changed. And I think churches are becoming less controlling in the way that they need them to be in person. Um, and they're more okay with them just measuring spiritual development however it happens. And so, you know, TV apps for different types of content, you know, are really great. Like, if you can stick your kid in front of a, you know, Christ Fellowship TV app, you're much more likely to do that, you know, for, and be happy about it than sticking them in front of, you know, whatever kids TV or, you know, you have older kids, Jeff, so it's probably different for you.

Yeah, we just watched Loki today. Today it's just they got out of school, summer's here, and so Loki episode one came out. So yeah, they're out there probably. I have no idea what they're watching right now. But we've got the TV app locked down. But are you, so you're seeing kind of more attraction towards that? Um, that's great. Um, Jen, were you going to add something on that? I can shift gears to something else if I need to.

You know, I was just going to say that like, it, I definitely, when talking to customers about their analytics—again, because right now we're knee-deep in what does Analytics 2.0 do and how are we improving it—is customers in general are recognizing that people are using not just apps, so Roku, Apple TV, but they're doing a lot more AirPlay, a lot more Chromecast. And so trying to be really intentional about what devices are people watching on? Because that behavior is different if you're watching on a mobile device or if you're watching on a laptop or if you're watching on a television. And so those questions are being asked more frequently now, and we're seeing more and more use cases where people are on Roku or on Apple TV or on a TV in general.

Okay, yeah, happy for you. But the one thing that churches have done that I always try to convince our customers to do is, you know, in this season when we're going back to in person, right? A lot of the pastors are really focused on: how do we get digital conversion to in person, right? And of course, the digital-only churches that you do don't care about that, Jeff. It'll still be a thing, but it'll be, you know, conversion.

To a community group for conversion to whatever coming back next week, but um, is anything that you can do to create leadership buy-in, you know, for digital is a good thing. And so I would suggest definitely if you're the tech guy in the organization or the online pastor, to put, you know, analytics 2.0 in your offices, put it in your green room live. You know, that's why we intended to do it so that it can get leadership eyeballs. Because, you know, a lot of our churches, like at ours, you know, we do it in the green room and our pastor prays over everyone watching online before he goes out into the service. And you know, there's a lot of churches that do that on stage displays for their worship team to see, you know, hey, and it just keeps them frame of mind to say, you know, it's not just about the in-person experience, the people in the room. There's, you know, little dots all over the United States that, you know, we're impacting right now. Um, and you know, that that helps change and makes the uh, the tech director vision come to life or the, you know, the Jeffrey vision, right? If we want to focus on digital discipleship and all these things, if you know, if your pastor's watching it happen as he's preaching, you know, he's also seeing a little dots, he's gonna be much more likely to put resources in the digital discipleship, et cetera. Definitely, and I love the fact, so you actually have like a skinned UI, 1920 by 1080 TV type view for a green room. I've had so many people ask for that over the years where they want that engagement. They want to know, hey, there's another 400 set of eyes on the other side of these TV camera lenses. Like that would be a beautiful idea just to make it even more applicable and more accessible for the people even when they're on stage.

Yeah, what's funny is we've had this forever. Um, you literally just, you know, you log in, you go to analytics 2.0, yeah, but you know, and then, or you click on the event analytics and then you scroll down and there's a map. Then you go full screen and it's a map and you can zoom into the world, the United States. You know, most churches probably don't have Christ Fellowship, probably has a cool world view, but most churches aren't large enough to have a cool world view. So we we do the United States. Um, and then, you know, and you just see it updates every minute of people who are watching. So it's live. And so if you have it in your green room, it literally shows, you know, the dots go in and out. And um, the pastor can be just as mad about a dot going out as he can if someone leaves the room. Um, stuff like that. Oh crap, what did I say? I'm chasing all my dots away. They're all leaving. What's going on? That's that's awesome. I love that. And you already, you had it in there. I, I'm I'm behind times, I I guess. Some, yeah, no, you, I think there's a lot of awareness around it because, you know, just because people are busy, but like, if you can, you know, because they're doing stuff, but you can literally just have that in there and let them click full screen.

Let me ask this, you know, energy focus here. I mean, we're doing this recording June 2021, you know, energy focus is going back to the building. Uh, social distancing is is is phasing out. I ordered a Starbucks this morning in Starbucks without wearing a mask, first time I've been able to be in Starbucks without a mask here in Miami, at least, uh, in 18, 15, 16, whatever months it's been. Um, is is seeing, are you seeing churches like ramp up in in digital? Are they keeping a focus on digital? Is are they losing the focus going back to physical? Are are you seeing like, what are you just seeing engagement wise? Or what are you seeing attention in in the church space? Maybe what are some stories? What are some churches doing that that you guys are tracking with? Happy to start that one and then you can go because you'll have your own answer as well. That's valuable.

Um, yeah, from what I'm seeing is that, you know, not very many churches are canceling like and going and not stopping streaming, you know, because the the vast majority of their attendance is still online. Even, you know, that that was before COVID, right? So like, even before COVID, like most people's attendance online was, you know, at least 20 to 50 percent of their in-person attendance, right? And I think after COVID, what's happened is that, you know, the majority, when you account for the multiplier attendance, will remain online and it probably won't ever go back, right? If you're doing online well, I think where people are losing focus is the intentionality from online. And they're just thinking about online is how do we transfer people back into the building? And that's what their focus is doing. So they're doing a lot of programs and focus on, you know, let's make it exciting and fun and, you know, whatever for people to come back in the building. And I think getting volunteers back has been hard. Um, all of that kind of thing. You know, and these schools are still like closed in a lot of the, you know, states, but they're opening up. Um, I think what I would love to see from more churches is more intentionally around how do we continue to grow online and how do we keep retention online, right? How do we keep people coming back every week? How do we, you know, not only do we want to get the person back in the building, but the people that aren't going to become in the building, we want them to keep watching online. We want to grow, you know, everybody that we want to reach is online, right? So how do we also remain intentional about digital and not lose the focus that we've been able to have on digital last year? And you know, I think what, for the vast majority of churches, what Corona convinced people is that they've got to be invested in digital. They've got to put more resources there. You know, one of our elder board kind of strategic team always use this as analogy of, hey, if I came, you know, to you guys, you know, whatever many years ago, five years ago, and said, you know, hey, or even a year ago before COVID, hey, I I've got, you know, a million dollars, I want to build a campus with it, and we'll have 500 people within, you know, three years, you would say amazing, okay, let's do that, right? That's a great decision. Let's see, let's hire campus pastor, do that. If I came to you, you know, the same time period and said, hey, I've got a million dollars, I want to build an online campus, spend a bunch of money on online advertising, and I'll have 500,000 people, you know, watching this thing, engaged, coming to Christ, you would have looked at me like I'm crazy, right? You know, a million dollars isn't worth it to spend 500,000 reviews, you know, whatever it is, right? And now it's like, okay, go do it. And so I think I think there just needs to be some more leadership around online. And pastors have a hard time understanding how to reach people online because it's not the face-to-face, it's not going. And so I would love to see, you know, more intentionality around that. And the good online campus pastors are doing it, but there's still not as much senior pastor attention. I think that's just because it's hard, right? It's hard shifting what you've been doing over the last 20 years and how you've thought about church. And that'll take, you know, I think another five to ten years. Um, but I think I think this is what made sure the pastors' minds have to do it, right? Like you can't just go back.

Yeah, and I'll I'll echo because Colin did a really good job from uh what we're what we're seeing in conversations with customers. Um, because I'm very data driven, when I look at what our customers are doing, I continue to see we have customers who are signing up who are really wanting to be engaged in digital and are asking these really tough questions about how do I continue doing that because I'm not seeing everyone come back and I know that I'm going to need to engage people online. Um, the other part of that is we're continuing to see the organizations that we do have uh do more events. Like we're consistently seeing our pattern of how many events do we do every weekend as an organization go up. So it's not disappearing. What we're doing is we're thinking about what is the way we do it on a physical campus? What is the way we do it digitally? And how do we keep that moving forward? Because we know not everyone's going to return right away and that we might not see them returned, right? We, if you look at the numbers, we're seeing our younger generations, they're not as engaged in physical church. So we have to figure out how do we engage them digitally? And what are we doing to intentionally engage them in our community? And I think digital is always going to be an answer to that.

Yeah, and we stay out of the, you know, there's a whole debate on whether, you know, digital church is the purpose of even in an in-person church because Jeff is doing a lot of cool online only thing, which we do have churches using, it's really cool thing, but for an in-person church, there's, you know, the age-old kind of thing. This was 20 years ago too. Do you have an online campus to primarily bring people in person and use it as the top of funnel activity? Or do you have an online campus to have its own campus with discipleship funnels and, you know, community groups and all of that, right? And I would love to to know your um side, Jeff, on this of did you know, did Corona change more people onto online, you know, to where they're okay with the full funnel of church being online? Did it not? Um, I would love to know that.

Yeah, I would love to know that too. Um, just kidding. But I think there's there's a there's a group that wants to go back to the building. There there's a group that has over romanticized what February 2020 was. Uh, there's there's a a group of people that that's the only thing they know. And and I mean, and the reality is is a lot of the people that are leading these organizations have have been on this planet six decades. And so the the reality of trying to get a 60-year-old lead pastor to learn something different, I mean, Colin, you're right, it may take five or ten years to really see the culture change. I think what COVID did was prove to many people that it can work. Uh, what's interesting is at the same time, and I want to say that the physical digital relationship is part of this, not the exclusionary whole of it. You're seeing a lot of people walk away from staff, right now, um, church staff jobs. Um, a, it's incredibly hard being on a church staff right now. Now we, the three of us, all work complementary to churches. We're we're not in the middle of it where we're not we're not having to deal with uh the masked wars and somebody's leaving the church to go somewhere else because of political opinions or because a church won't take a stance or because the church is wanting to do more uh racial inclusionary type things. Like it's a very controversial age for the for the church. And my fear is the next four years is going to get even worse. Like I don't, I don't think it's going to get worse far before it gets better, uh, if it gets better. But what's what's coming out of this, I I think there are churches that don't want anything to do with digital because they never did. I think there are churches where it's pivoting. I had a lead pastor tell me the other day, hey, Jeff, I I didn't understand this stuff 24 hours ago. You've successfully normalized the weird, all the stuff you were doing in digital space. I thought it was weird. Now I understand it. Now I not only do I understand it, I want to be a part of it. I I want, I have to see this happen. And so there are stories like this of of of churches of leaders that that are that are pivoting and that are learning things in this season. Honestly, a little bit for me, and I've said this a couple times publicly, like I'm I'm actually glad we're going back to the building.

Building the building model will work in some contexts. Like, I don't want to say that the buildings don't—the buildings do. Now, I think there's a termination date. I think there's an expiration date on that where the buildings will continue to lose influence. And so I think we need to be looking at other models. But really for the season, man, it's let's help those that want to be helped. Let's go with the goers. Let's run alongside those that want to run. And so for me, that's more of it. I'd rather champion the people that are thinking different, encourage others to follow suit, than to try to convince the guy that hasn't—you know, that went through a global pandemic not thinking digital ministry was effective. I don't need to convince that guy today. If I couldn't convince that guy, you know, April, May 2020, and if I can't convince him May, June 2021, I'm probably not going to convince him. I got to go convince somebody else. So it's just been, let me at this point, instead of trying to solve the problem for everybody, it's been a lot more fun. Let me just go with the people that want to run. Let's set them up to be the shining example that hopefully will inspire others along the way.

You and I have had a lot of conversations, Jeff, about this in the past, right? Is I think that the three of us are all in very unique positions. Is we enable the church to fulfill the mission they have today, but we are all very much thinking about where is the church going to be in five, ten years, and making sure that we are helping to structure that and to support it. And so we're in a really unique position to hear all these different kind of viewpoints and talk through why are they important, where, what context do they work in? Because yes, in some places physical is going to be the thing that works. In other places it's going to be digital. So we're really unique in that we see that whole spectrum in our conversations every day and are seeing what's coming in five to ten years. In our job, you know, as software developers and products, get, you know, problem solvers for churches, right, to solve problems that they're having with their workflow and create opportunities for you know to grow and monetize and you know engage their audience online, right? Like that's our vision statement. Is it's not our job to set the culture or the vision of the church, but a lot of people listening to this podcast, it is their job, right? They are having to lead up. And Jeff, you get to do that right now to a lot of different pastors, and you've had a long history of having to lead up. You know, I don't know if people know the Christ Fellowship story, but they weren't necessarily the most digitally focused church. Like every church that age, and Jeff was having to lead the vision for that and try to convince people to do that. I would love to hear—I know you've talked about this from a different lens in the podcast—but how can people use like software tools to help lead up? Like, I would love to know that answer. The question of how can we use things inside Resi? How can we use things with other type of software that, you know, puts it in front of leaders or tries to convince them, or with analytics or numbers? You know, what metrics have you been successful trying to communicate vision to churches in a way that pastors say, "Okay, I get it"? Like, I would love to hear that part of it.

Leading from the second chair is hard, and actually I'm kind of curious at what point I'm getting interviewed on my own podcast. This is a little weird. I love this though. It's awesome. I love it. It's great. You've never had some question from a software lens. You've done it a lot on the other ones because I listen to your podcast. So like, the analytics, I would imagine, give you an opportunity to spread value to the leader that you're trying to convince. And so in context of the leading of the second chair, from the second chair—and it was funny, I said this phrase the other day and somebody's like, "What do you mean, leading from the second chair?" All right, look, chances are if you're a digital pastor or you're somewhat involved in technology, you're not the lead pastor of a church, which means somebody else at a higher level than you is making decisions. Leading from the second chair means this: How do I get that person to see the world the way that I see it? How do I get a win from somebody when they don't have the same priorities? And so leading from the second chair means that you're not in control. In the second chair, you need to understand what they're looking for.

Recently, I did a podcast on this podcast. We talked about a 250-person church reached out to me after one of the conferences I spoke at, and I don't remember the name of the church at this point, so, but the guy was like, "Hey, there's a couple elders that are involved in the church, and they don't—they don't understand digital. They don't want anything to do with digital ministry. They're forcing us back to a physical-only mindset. How do I—how do I get them to like change their mind? What do I do?" And so it's starting to figure out what are the challenges, what are the issues for them, why do they not want to do digital, and then have the conversation with them. If it's theological, hey, yeah, we just believe that, you know, Hebrews 10, the abandoning of the gathering, we don't think that gathering can happen digitally, we're theologically against that. Well, listen, if they're theologically against that, chances are you're not going to get them to change their minds because it's so hard to change the theology of that. And if you're a technological guy, they may not take your stance theologically. They may not respect that. Maybe get somebody else that they do respect to theologically have that conversation and join them in that conversation.

From a software perspective, analytics can help prove the point that you're maybe trying to solve. Maybe it's not a theological issue. Maybe it's an opinion issue. Maybe it's they don't think that digital can help meet their needs, meet their goals, meet what they want to do. You know, maybe the pastor is hugely evangelistic and doesn't think that, you know, salvations can effectively happen digitally, and the reason he doesn't think that is because he's not—you guys aren't doing small groups, and he's not seeing where these hand raises become disciple makers, okay? Well, start to show analytics. Start to show things that can refute his viewpoint. Dig into some of the stats. Maybe it's, "Hey, yeah, people, you know, the people who are watching this are just being lazy, okay?" Well, let's dig into maybe some time analytics. When are they watching this stuff? Are they engaging this content in times where it's not that they're not able to—they're just being lazy sitting on the couch? Maybe they're engaging this on demand in times where churches aren't open, and they're actually trying to squeeze it in as it's best effective. Or maybe they live too far away from your physical location to come in, and it's not them being lazy at all. It's actually them being challenged to do something different digitally that they weren't able to do physically. Or your message is connecting in a different way.

Analytics platforms, things like what they're talking about here with Resi, it's storytelling numerically. And so what, in what, generally, historically, we've had this conversation so many times, is you're able to dig into those numbers to develop the facts to tell the story that can change the mind of leadership. If it's a theological standpoint, analytics isn't going to change what this person views of the Bible. If it's not theological, if it's an opinion, if it's a model, if it's a strategy thing, yeah, you can use these numbers to tell stories in a way that could change the mind and the direction of the leadership that's involved.

Are you guys like, have you walked alongside churches that are wrestling with this stuff? What's been your experience utilizing these analytics to tell stories?

In business, there's a concept of like cost per acquisition of the customer, right? Um, which like our analytics show the beginning of, but like I know that, you know, at Resi, if we do x amount of advertising for money, let's say 20 bucks, it's not 20 bucks. I don't know what it is, but if it's 20 bucks, then we get a customer, right? Um, and then that pays us a certain amount of money, so that's financially worth it or not, right? Um, and you know, different organizations have different, you know, kind of gates on what's financially worth it percentage-wise and what's not. Um, the in the church, you know, like what I think would be really cool that we've tried to get to at our, the churches that I help out, is what's the cost for acquisition of a salvation, of a community group attender, of an in-person visit, right? Of however you want to measure it. And I think the more that you can get a funnel to your leadership, the more that they're going to invest into digital, right? So analytics is completely key to getting a funnel to leadership because that's how they see. They know that if they can get someone in person, right, if they can do, you know, they've known, they've done advertising forever, right? They're comfortable with print advertising. They're comfortable with whatever to get it funneled into the in-person building. And you know, they know that a certain percentage of those give, certain percentage of those become saved, right? And so if you can get them to, if you can show them numbers that relate in the same ways that they're thinking, which is how many people do you have coming, how many people do you have sitting butts in seats, the way the pastors think about it, that if you know, if you could see the cloud, if you could see everybody watching, that's how many people they would see watching, and that's life's being impacted. And then how many do you see taking action, right? And what actions are they taking digitally? And what ways did that influence that? And then if you can further get it down to a cost of those things of what's happening, then I'm sure you can get a lot more budget and focus to the online world. And so if I was a campus pastor to church, um, those are kind of the initiatives that I would be trying to do. And a lot of churches that I'm involved with are, you know, raising capital campaigns around reaching people digitally, and they're very forward thinking about it, right? And they're saying, "Okay, if we raise x amount of money, this allows us to do why for the online church, right? And to create this many disciples online, however they think about it." Um, and you know, using these analytics will, yeah, greatly help them to do that and hopefully help pastors, you know, see the vision for it, which I'm sure it will.

Jen, I would love your answer on it.

Yeah, well, so I was going to take it a little bit step further, right? Is viewer data for us is just one piece of a church's puzzle, right? It's, and Jeff, you and I have had so many conversations on this, but it's right, we measure what matters. Um, and when we measure what matters, we're able to actually understand if things are working or not. And the things that matter to one church may not be the same things that matter to another church. And so we really need to be able to understand, like, when I talk to churches about their data, it's what are the things that you think are valuable in a user's spiritual growth? Those are the things that you measure. And then if the things that are valuable are, "I want to see someone participating in a small group," well, then how many people do you have doing that? How many small groups do you have? How frequently are they attending? Is the thing that matters to your church? "I want to see people out ministering my community," well, then that's

The thing you measure and so the way we measure the viewer data is just one piece of that. It's similar to that butts and seats number that's the first number. What's coming down the funnel are the other numbers. You start to measure those things, you're able to actually make changes and informed decisions. I'm excited about analytics 2.0 and I think the more that we have these facts, the more that we have these numbers, the more that we can dive into the stories and understand the value of what digital can provide.

You know, it is funny. Church Home, Mark Venti is famous for saying, "Hey, you know what? You can spend hundreds of thousands to reach hundreds of people, or you can spend thousands of dollars to reach hundreds of thousands of people." And so yeah, maybe the numbers may be a little skewed, and you know, Church Home is incredible, some of the stuff that they're doing. But the fact is digitally, if we can find the methods, if we can find the formulas, if we can find the heart behind what we're doing digitally to reach these people, likely there's a phenomenal opportunity in the digital space. And the analytics and the things that Resi is providing here is an awesome way to start to make those connections, to start to give us the numbers so we can figure out some next steps.

Well, let me ask this. Because I got Colin here, and honestly, Colin, there's a little bit of what we've been talking about here in the show lately. We've been talking about the idea of personal mission, trying to help people find their purpose with it, even if it doesn't sometimes align with like the church brand and the church mission and vision and values and some of those things. We've even been talking about—we've had Steve Pike on recently toward the idea of, "Hey, maybe churches need to diversify away from just tithes and offerings on how business is funded." And he was talking about like bivocational, co-vocational pastors in ministry, or even nonprofit fundraising, even to the point of like churches being involved in starting for-profit businesses. And honestly, when I'm having these conversations with Steve and some of the other people recently in this conversation, Dave Ferguson as well, kind of pulled on that thread. Some honestly, Colin, I thought of you here a little bit. So just with a little bit of time that we've got left, like I know Rezzy, Living as One at the time, was really started out of Chase Oaks in Dallas, and I would love to maybe just hear that story about how an idea that ended up being a business ended up being started in this idea of helping a church do ministry more effectively. And what it looked like, what that Chase Oaks relationship was and wasn't, and how you went from, you know, an idea within a church to a full business at this point, you know, running full steam ahead several states away. So like, what would that genesis and maybe some of those early steps look like?

Yeah, I'd love to tell that story. And what's cool is, you know, there's a lot of Chase Oaks Church in Plano, Texas was the church that we came out of. And it's called—I mean, any church, you know, this large or small, is going to have, you know, a lot of this ancillary impact that, you know, the pastors or the staff doesn't know until they reach heaven, right? And that's true of whether it's, you know, more salvations or providing jobs or having businesses come out of it, you know, relationships made that spark really great things, or poverty alleviated in ways that they have no idea about, right? And that's the cool thing about the church is the primary cool part about the church is decentralized. You know, the pastors have no idea about it. They didn't try to control it. It's just God moving in ways that they have no idea, which is gonna be awesome, I'm sure, for pastors and just people in the whole church to get to heaven, you know, because we a lot of the bad stuff is public and a lot of the good stuff isn't. So just to hear all the good stuff, you know, on the other side of the world.

That said, like, our story at the church was volunteers, you know, trying literally every product that we could to stream our video out, and it all being really terrible. And we had, you know, not very many viewers because of it for what we were expecting, and a really hard time at our different campuses to play back video. And so Paul and Brad, you know, we're both software people, streaming people. You know, Brad, who's our CTO, did all the kind of WebEx infrastructure, which used to be the Zoom of ten years ago, before Zoom killed them. The founder of WebEx started Zoom. And then Paul did all the corporate streaming for Hewlett-Packard. And so they had much larger budgets and were able to not have the same problems that we had, you know, to church with a smaller budget. And so they created Living as One at the time, Resi now, and we rebranded in August. And then other churches just started asking about it because, you know, it's a network. That's the cool thing about the church is that it's a network. And so, you know, other churches we had asked other churches what they were doing before we built it, right, because we were trying to find a solution. And there wasn't any good solution. And any of the other churches were doing it was all very expensive or really crappy and didn't work, had the same problems as ours. And so once we built it, all those same churches, you know, wanted it immediately.

And we started as a nonprofit. It just made a lot more sense for a lot of reasons to do it as a for-profit company, right, that had its own resources, because you want something that's going to be sustainable for a long time, right? And while a nonprofit sounds like the godly thing to do, it would have been probably the least godly thing to do because long term we wouldn't have been around for the church, right? Because we wanted enough resources to innovate on our solution and stay right and keep being able to provide solutions for churches. And that said, there's different decisions. Like, I'm not—our decision is not prescriptive of what other people should do. It's just what we believe was right in that time for our product, for our situation. And that so don't hear me ever saying that this is what you need to do for your nonprofit or business or whatever.

And then yeah, anytime you put church and money together, so we're completely separate from Chase Oaks. You know, it's volunteers doing this, and Chase Oaks really don't even know about it, right, until it's bigger. And then it's a really cool story that they tell. But there's also a lot of other businesses that have been started out of Chase Oaks of things like this, which were pretty cool.

Your question when you asked—no, so like, they've, you know, okay, maybe they weren't directly responsible for you or for Resi, Living as One, but there were other businesses as well that kind of came out of that ecosystem of Chase Oaks?

Yeah, and I think it's probably true for other churches, but Chase Oaks has a really great culture of a lot of smart people that aren't very political, which is great. And so they're, you know, it has a really neat culture, especially in the Dallas area where you have a lot of churches that are very focused on, you know, "This is my idea and we have all old white people coming to our church," whatever. Chase Oaks just has a lot of diversity both in thought. And they kind of keep—their whole church founded on the gospel is what's central, and God cares a lot about unity. So we shouldn't let anything disunify us that isn't the gospel or isn't key to what God cares about. And so they define those things of what God cares about, and they have those very clear. And then all the other stuff like politics or worship styles or teaching styles or whatever should not disunify those. Problems—actually, it's a big shame when those things disunify the church. And so they have a lot of innovative things that come up for that just because they attract a lot of people that value that. But I would imagine that a lot of churches do, you know? Like, I hear a lot of culture like Saddleback is trying to create a product. You know, Church Home created their app and is looking at that same thing with Crossroads. And you know, there's a lot of different churches that create different technology tools that can get them out. Typically though, they don't have what we had, which was, you know, our CTO infrastructure of, you know, being able to build things that can scale, right, and build things that, you know, thousands and thousands of churches can use. Most of the time when things come out of a church, just resource-wise, talent-wise, you know, it's pretty limited. And so a lot of the products that we use today are, you know, corporate products because of that reason. And even if they're church products, you know, it's a we're gonna use, you know, a corporate product unless there's something unique about our workflow as a church. And then typically those products really suffer in terms of, you know, reliability and quality. And so yeah, I think like your ways of exploring different ways of funding, I don't know much about. You know, I know that like, you know, church and money is always a complicated relationship and always will be this side of heaven. And so I'm weary about stuff like that because we've seen churches try to launch products that, you know, they own. And I don't—it's never really worked from my side. But funding there has been projects.

Yeah, yeah. The contextualization of that is, and with Steve Pike, he's doing inner city ministry, and nobody ever wants to give money to the urban churches. And tithing isn't happening within the urban churches, and so, you know, not to the level to support the ministry that's happening. And what's needed in those areas. And so it's creating businesses to help within the community. And you know, what's interesting is just even like the Living as One, the Resi, is such a unique and necessary idea at the time, at that moment. I was literally, you know, I've been doing video teaching in churches going back 2007, 2008, was the first time we did it. And we were spending two, three, four hundred thousand dollars on systems that were garbage. And so having something stable come through that came out of a church that was engineered by—it was revolutionary at the time. So you know, love the idea even as it was built in and of the church in an ecosystem of support, at least in freedom to explore and to do things. That's beautiful. Would love to see churches do even more of that.

Well, hey, this has been a great conversation. Anytime I get to hang out with Resi people is fun. Hey, like, let me just ask as we're landing the plane here, what's next? What's on the development roadmap? What can you tell me without me getting in trouble for asking? What are you guys working on?

We're working on a lot. I'll let Jen talk about the high level, but you know, our mission statement is engage and grow online audiences. And so it's kind of funny because we haven't released a ton other than analytics, but we've got a ton in our backlog right now that's about to be released. We've like tripled our dev team in the last year. Jen, do you want to give some highlights?

Yeah, sure. I'll kind of give the top three. As Colin said, on analytics version 2.0, there's still a lot coming for that. We've released the embed player at this point. We're actively working on releasing stream URL data, being able to dig into device types, so like Roku, Apple TV, all that stuff, Facebook, YouTube, that stuff's right around the corner. So I'm really excited about that coming. The other big thing for us is we've...

Actually been working on redesigning control a lot of our new users. One of the things we learned was that as COVID happened, a lot of our new users were not as technical as our original users, and so the paradigm of what scheduling looks like has really changed. So we've been rebuilding our scheduler from the ground up. And part of that was a whole new facelift for control into what we've called Studio. So we announced that two weeks ago in a webinar and are starting to look for beta customers for that. And then our VOD library is we've been working really hard on allowing customers to be able to save content to simplify their workflow so they're not having to download from us and then re-upload to another platform. And so that is right around the corner as well. So we have customers already using that. Those are our big, big three.

Wow, yeah, I know, I know the VOD piece. That's been, you know, on the roadmap for a while, so excited. And a lot of effort's been going into building out those modules, so excited to see that coming to fruition. And I love the fact you're aware enough of your customer base to realize, hey, what we're doing in Control, maybe this UI, this interface is maybe it's a little too complicated for where the customers are. Instead of trying to force the customers into the shoe that may not fit, adjust things. Maybe some of the ways that you're handling things. That speaks a lot to organizationally you trying to meet the needs of the customers instead of making them into something that they're not. So thank you for that. That'll make support on the flip side of that probably a lot easier, a lot, lot less phone calls coming in.

Yes, hey, this has been great. Love it. You had, yeah, Jen's smiling ear to ear. She knows, she knows those. Listen, when I get the calls and listen, I get the calls when you guys aren't getting the calls. And so when I get the frank call Saturday night and something's happening like Sunday morning, it's like, oh dear God, let's hold on, we'll get through this. So awesome. Hey, as we're landing the plane, any closing thoughts? Jen, any closing thoughts from you?

I mean, I think we've covered most of it, right? It's analytics are really important to the church understanding not just our engagement from a video perspective, but that whole end-to-end funnel of how do we get people in and then how do we help their spiritual growth and make sure that we're doing the right things is so important. And that's one of the reasons why I love being here at Rezzy, right? We've had a lot of conversations about ministry. The fact that we get to be part of that, it's really exciting to me. So keep it up, Jeff. I love the work you're doing with the digital stuff.

Awesome, love it. Colin, anything for you wrapping up?

No, I always love talking to you and would love to continue. It's awesome hearing about the bi-vocational type of churches and seeing more pastors doing that in the digital space because that's, you know, how the church got started, right, in a lot of areas like that, how it expanded so quickly. And so it's pretty cool to see that coming back around and people thinking, you know, innovatively about how to lead people to Christ, whether it's the inner city people and bi-vocational church leadership or anything like that. And so yeah, we're excited about the future and want to empower, you know, every church to reach more people online. And you know, always love talking to customers to hear how to do that better.

Love it. Yeah, so believe me, anytime I can get Colin Jones and Jenn Miles on a podcast to have a conversation, it's a win. I would love to do this sometime. You know, I don't know, I need to find an excuse to fly out to Colorado.

Same thing. I think there's trade shows in Orlando coming up, so I don't know if you go to the tech trade shows anymore, but maybe, maybe some. I mean, it's four hours away and I'm always looking for an excuse to go to downtown Disney. So yeah, call out, let's find the time to get together.

But we're gonna wrap here. This is great. For Jen, for Colin, this is Jeff at the Church Digital and State Interest Planning. Thanks for jumping on the podcast today, and we'll see you next time here at the show. Y'all have a good day.