EP083: Dave Adamson & Ten Commandments of Church YouTube

All right, episode 83 of the Church Digital Podcast powered by Stadia Church Planning. Before we get into this excellent, most excellent podcast that we have coming up here, let me give you this one quick plug. Stadia, we are doing cohorts, learning communities to help churches figure out how to do church online better, to figure out how to do physical as well as digital at the same time effectively. It's interesting. Pre-COVID, we all knew how to do the physical ministry and that was the only thing we really focused on. Some were doing church on, majority were just focused. Mid-COVID, we're swinging completely the other way, doing all digital, but we're not really sure how to do both physical and digital at the same time, which really makes this awkward position we're in right now. Where do we focus more on the building or online? What's the tension between the two? How do we manage and survive in this without burning out our staff and destroying volunteers and really the culture that your churches have created pre-COVID and even in this mid-COVID season? That's really the heart of what we're trying to do with Stadia, because we're trying to help you churches thrive, grow, and multiply. Physically, digitally, as a combination of physical and digital. Phygital. And so the relationship here is not where physical and digital compete, but where they work together, where it complements to help you achieve your goals, your mission, your vision of your church. The physical, the digital, these are just tools. They're not the end. The end is that disciple maker. It's your discipleship pathway, your engagement pathway to help people thrive, grow, and multiply. So let us help your church figure out how to do that physically and digitally. If you're interested in the learning communities, check out stadiachurchplanting.org/digital. Phygital. We'll have it in the show notes. The link will be there. Learning communities are starting in August. Three months. We'd love to have you on board. It's gonna be great, great stuff.

So let's get back to episode 83. Wow, I could listen to Dave Adamson talk all day long. Maybe it has something to do with the whole Australian accent. Okay, maybe a little bit. There, but it's also because the dude's really smart when it comes to YouTube. I've said it. YouTube is my weakness. I don't understand it, and I'm learning more and more, even in context of this podcast. I kind of step back, let Dave and Ray talk and dig in. As I'm writing notes, I'm learning in here on how to be more effective with YouTube. Churches, if we're just looking at YouTube as a video server, we are missing the power of what YouTube is. And with a little love and a little care and a little intentionality in how we're structuring YouTube, we can find that it has far more effectiveness for us. And this is really what Dave hits on here. Because let's be honest, churches, we don't really do YouTube well. We did share some stories here on the podcast, but in whole, there's an opportunity to connect, to reach with a whole set of different people that are not engaging in your physical building, that may need help finding the physical building. And let's utilize YouTube as a digital community unto itself to connect with these people. And this is a lot of stuff that Dave talks about. Just some simple steps and processes. Some simple, some get more intermediate, advanced throughout the podcast. But there's simple, small, basic steps that we can do right now that would allow our churches to have far more impact on these YouTube platforms overall.

I mean, ultimately, the point what Dave ends up giving us here is ten commandments. Yeah, we're going biblical. Of course, it's a church podcast. Ten commandments for church YouTube. Because there are things that we churches are doing wrong. Dave's saying, "Hey, maybe do this instead." So if you're doing YouTube, listen to this. If somebody in your church is doing YouTube, share the podcast with them. Let them listen to this. Ten practical, easy, simple steps. Majority of them you could do right now with very little cost to no cost at all that would totally improve your church's YouTube game. Starting, well, dang it, starting today.

So for the conversation, we're bringing in, you know, Dave Adamson, as I said, a pastor on staff with North Point in Atlanta, and Ray de Armas, who is co-host once again, digital pastor over at Christ Fellowship Miami. Myself, Jeff, at the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planning, in a conversation that I'm calling Dave and the Ten Commandments of YouTube Church.

Okay, everybody, here you go.

Jeff: Holy crap, man. What video, what camera are you using? You've got your depth of field is incredible. Your lighting is outstanding.

Dave: Yeah, yeah, just did a whole thing on his rig. Yeah, it's a Sony A6600. This was my COVID project. I kind of built this up a month or two before, just in 2020. But I've got a Sigma Art 18-35 millimeter lens. F-stop is 1.8. So that the bookshelf's right there, like I can touch on it. It's four feet behind me, and just the 1.8 on this blurs it. Oh my gosh, like I'm in love with this thing.

Ray: So dude, I'm going to tell you, I'm listening to Jeff, but I'm looking at you because you guys, I'm late, and you pop out of that background like, "Oh, I want to know what you're using to get this." Is a whole lot of the conversation I want to know what you and you should post this into the YouTube your church group. What are you using to get it from into your computer from your DSLR?

Dave: It is a Blackmagic ATEM Mini switcher. Really, which by the way, is the, I'm a production guy. Yeah, it is the best device I've ever purchased in my life. Really, not only because of the video switcher, but my mic is running through it. Audio preamps, compression, equalization, audio delay. Like the full functioning Blackmagic video switcher software is running on this little three-hundred-dollar box. And it, I bought it because I wanted to like have multiple inputs to bring in, but the audio compression, I literally two-hundred-three-hundred-dollar audio preamps I don't use anymore because the video switcher is better at it.

Jeff: It looks, I'm not, I'm not understanding this when I say it is the best looking Zoom video I have ever seen.

Dave: Well, hey, man, Dave, just, first off, super glad you're here, of course, but just to kick it off, maybe just tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us your ministry story.

Dave: Yes, so, um, you know, the interesting thing, man, is I did not ever want to be in full-time ministry. I did not want to be a professional Christian. In fact, I went to college. I became a Christian. I became like I started following Jesus when I was a senior in high school and just started pursuing my career of choice, which was to be a sports reporter. That's all I wanted to do with my life. And so, you know, out of college, I started working for local newspapers, started working for magazines, became the youngest ever editor of Australia's highest-selling sports magazine. If your listeners didn't realize from my accent already, I'm not from the US. I'm from Australia. And, um, when that happened, when I became the youngest ever editor of Australia's highest-selling sports magazine, uh, we have three networks in Australia, much the same as you do here in the US, and one of them came to me and said, "Hey, we'd love to do a story on you." And so they did that story, and literally from that, I got a job on TV working as a reporter and producer for a show that was basically our version of ESPN Sports Center. And so I would do national live crosses every night. I would cover the biggest sporting events in Australia, and that was like the, I thought this was what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. But obviously, you know, God has other plans.

And, um, you know, so I think in 2007, ESPN and Connecticut contacted me. They offered me a position, and that led me to this crossroads where, "What am I going to do with my life? This seems like the next logical step in my career." My wife and I literally prayed about it, fasted about it, and decided to turn the offer down because we felt like I was going to call into ministry, and I didn't know what that sounded like. I had no idea. It's not something I was pursuing. And so I reached out to this pastor in New Jersey who I was listening to on podcast on my way into the studio every day, and I reached out and said, "This is who I am. This is what I do, and I think I'm getting called into ministry, but I don't know what that's like. Can you help me?" And much to my surprise, he got back to me and said, "Hey, can you call me tomorrow?" So I called him, and essentially, he basically straight up offered me a job. He said, "You're the guy I've been praying for, and would you be interested in moving to New Jersey of all places and being a church online pastor?" And in 2007, right, I had no idea what that was. Nobody knew what that was back then. This is, you know, thirteen years ago. Nobody understood the power of it, really. And but, you know, I was drawn to that, and it really matched the two things like the skills that God had placed in my hand from the point of view of media and media production and the passion he had placed in my heart, which was to reach as many people as possible with the gospel. And those two things came together perfectly in this position. So I said yes, and I quit my career and moved my family literally to the furthest place from Melbourne, Australia that you can go to, which is Morristown, New Jersey. And so we moved, and, you know, the rest is history, I guess.

In 2013, I moved to Atlanta to join North Point Ministries where Andy Stanley is the lead pastor, and I've been working there ever since as a social media pastor.

Jeff: That is awesome. By the way, Liquid was in New Jersey, right?

Dave: Yeah, yeah, Liquid Judge. Yeah, where were you? Were you there when Ben Stapley was there? Was there any overlap with you guys?

Jeff: No, so I left in 2013. A guy named Kenny Jang took over from me as the online pastor, and then Ben Stapley took over from Kenny Jang.

Ray: Okay, um, so I kicked it all off. Kenny took it to a new level. Ben took it to another level again, and now he's left and he's in Florida. I think from memory.

Jeff: Yeah, he's in my church. That's amazing.

Dave: Yeah, so, um, yeah, I never actually worked with Ben, but obviously I've seen, you know, I've met Ben several times, been at conferences where he's been, and all that sort of thing. So I know him pretty well.

Ray: Yeah, if it's one thing that Liquid seems to be generating a lot of and really pushing the envelope, even starting with you, with the church online back in 2007.

Dave: Yeah, you're right there. Were not a lot of people in '07 talking about church online. Like, maybe Life Church was doing like the Second Life thing, probably around 2006 or 2007, their experiment with that. What's interesting is when I started at Liquid and became the online pastor, I didn't know who to reach out to. So I reached out to Brandon Donaldson, who was the online, the original online pastor of Life Church, and went out and visited him. And I mean, just a fantastic guy. He's now working with YouVersion. And, um, but at the time, he said, "Hey, we've got this, um, we've got this Facebook page group thing with all the church online pastors in America. Do you want to join it?" Yeah, so he sent me an invite, and I was the ninth person to join. So and then I think we kept it at ten. So like the original, like I was in the original top ten of online pastors in the US. Pretty, pretty amazing.

Ray: Pretty amazing. Wow, things have changed a lot. I'm sure since then, even with COVID, where you know, maybe pre-COVID, maybe ten percent of churches were broadcasting now, fifty, sixty, seventy percent. Likewise, telling us seventy percent are doing something with broadcasting a service online. It's a completely new era, it seems at this point.

Dave: Well, I tell you, the thing that I wanted to, and Dave, at this point, man, you're known as the YouTube guy. And...

Your passion and your YouTube church YouTube group that we'll talk about later, like it's, you know, occasionally some people have, you know, different niches, niches, whatever the word is, how you say it, you know, Ben's kind of like the communication guy and how he does it. Kenny Jang's all about like the video production and he's kind of the gear guy, kind of, kind of with that. I tend to be more like, let's talk groups, disciple making, community that you just, you seem from the outside to really be passionate about this YouTube. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And you know, it's funny. Whenever I'm on calls with other people who are in my position, like as I said, I'm the social media pastor, and so you know, because I'm at North Point at such an influential church, I get to speak at conferences and things like that. And so I'm always talking with other social media people at churches like Beau Cochrane, for example, at Life Church. There's one guy who particularly gives me grief every time I speak to him because he's always like, "Oh, how long is it before Dave's gonna talk about YouTube?" But the reality is, you know, I think in the modern day world, YouTube has become the marketplace for an entire generation of people. And as followers of Jesus, as the church, the capital C church, we're called to go into the marketplace and preach the good news, right? And that happens on YouTube.

People always say to me, "Well, you're so big gung-ho on YouTube, but what about Hebrews? Hebrews 10 says that we have to not give up meeting together." And I always, my response is always the same. This is not a Hebrews 10 issue. I'm all about meeting together. This is a Mark 16 issue because Mark 16 says, "Go into all the world and preach the gospel," and YouTube and Instagram and Facebook and Twitter, they are included in the world. In fact, in many, in many ways, they are the world for the modern generation. And as a dad of three teenage girls, I know, and because I see it, how often my kids are on YouTube. They're three teenage girls who are on YouTube all the time. You know, statistics tell us that for men aged 18 to 28, YouTube is the number one video platform, outstripping any cable TV network and outstripping Netflix even. And when you look at the latest stats, most people access the internet through their mobile device, right, through their cell phone. Yet 38 percent of all internet traffic on a mobile device is YouTube. 38 percent. Think about that for a second. 38 percent of all internet traffic on mobile devices is YouTube. If the church is going to be anywhere, we need to be in that space. And that's why I talk about YouTube so much, and that's why I'm so passionate about it.

Dave, I think that's amazing, and really you're hitting all my love languages here, talking about both mobile content and YouTube. It's just such a big deal. Why is it that churches, why is it that churches should be more passionate about YouTube than even their own spaces, like their own website or their own Instagram? Like, why should they put more of an emphasis on YouTube in order to reach people, right?

That's a great question. It's a great question. For this one simple reason in my mind, you know, you know this yourself. I heard a stat today that every single, apparently across America, 330 million people, apparently Americans touch their phone as a collective as a whole, 8 billion times every day. So all of us together, we combine to touch our phones eight billion times. Because let's be honest, we do this when we're, I mean, we're not supposed to be, but we do when we're at the traffic lights. We do it. We're in the line at the grocery store. We do it. When we're watching TV and it might be our favorite TV show, but we're still scanning through our mobile device, right? And the reality is, when somebody's standing in the line at the bank or standing in the line of the grocery store, I know that they are not wondering, "Hey, I wonder what's happening at northpoint.org right now? Let's just go and check." No, they're not doing that. But what they are doing is they're scanning through YouTube. They're scanning through social media. And so we need to be in that space because people are on it so often.

You know, when 38 percent of all internet traffic on a mobile device goes through YouTube, that tells me that churches need to be in this space more than ever before. Now, I know a lot of churches in recent times are putting a lot of emphasis on Instagram, and you know, I can understand that from a mobile perspective. But why is it because they seem heavily involved Instagram, zero, absent on YouTube? And how would you advise some of those churches in terms of, "Hey, you guys need to start paying attention to this?"

Yeah, so I wouldn't say abandon your Instagram for YouTube. I think it's a both and situation. Like, we should be doing both. But here's the biggest difference. You know, I was talking about the church in LA just this past week, you know, advising and consulting with them. And you know, we're talking about the different demographics on all the different social media platforms. And this is just reason number one, okay? Reason number one for why you should be putting as much time into YouTube as Instagram is this reason number one is, when you look at Instagram, you guys know this, you're smart. What do you think the major demographic on Instagram is? We all know it. What, what are you guys, what would you say is the major, the most dominant demographic on Instagram?

I'm going with females in their 20s.

That, that's what that is. Ray, exactly right. What about when it comes to TikTok? What do we think of demographic-wise when it comes to TikTok?

All teenagers.

All teenagers. When we think about Facebook, what do we think?

My parents.

Exactly, older people, right? And statistically, when it comes to Twitter, it's mostly men who are on Twitter, right? And so we need to target our, if we're targeting audiences and we're communicating to different demographics, then we have to pick those channels. YouTube is really the only channel that crosses all the demographics. It is equally men and women, and it ranges from 14 right up to 65. For that reason alone, we should be driving a lot of traffic, a lot of it, putting a lot of attention, a lot of our resources into YouTube.

But the second thing, point number two, would be YouTube, unlike any other social media platform, unlike Twitter, unlike Instagram, unlike Facebook, YouTube is a search engine. In fact, it's the second biggest search engine in the world, and it's owned by the biggest search engine in the world. If you type anything into Google right now, typically any topic, it's going to give you as the first option three video options to choose from that are all from YouTube because Google owns YouTube. So unlike any other social media platform, YouTube is a search engine as well. And search engines are where people go to find answers these days.

People aren't walking into, aren't just walking into a church to find out answers for questions that they have about parenting, about being, about financial awareness, about being a good spouse. You know, if they're looking for hope in their world, the reality of our modern day culture is they're not going to a church to search for those answers. But they are searching on Google for them, and oftentimes they're searching on YouTube for the answers to those questions. So if somebody's typing into YouTube, "How do I find hope today?" Somebody types in, "How do I be a better husband today?" If somebody types in, "How can I save my marriage?" or "How can I find hope so that I don't want to end my life right now?" If they're typing that into YouTube, then churches need to be there ready to answer those questions with content that's answering those questions in the secular world.

In the marketing world, Google calls this the zero moment of truth. The zero moment of truth, ZMOT, is what they call it. Is when I've searched long and hard because I want to buy for myself a new soccer, you know, t-shirt like you've got on there, right? I'm assuming that's soccer. So I've searched long and hard and I want to figure it out. I want to buy one, and I've got something in my car. I'm just about to buy it. Google would call that the zero moment of truth because I'm about to make a purchase and put money behind it, right? For churches, the zero moment of truth is when somebody types in, "How do I save my marriage?" That's our zero moment of truth. And we have to be there in the places where people are asking those questions to be the answer to that question and provide the gospel approach to those questions. That's why I think it's so important for us to be on YouTube.

And it's, and this is brilliant because so many churches that I've encountered too, not just my own, and Jeff, I know that you work with a lot of churches through Stadia. YouTube, it's a free platform, and so it's got a lot of capabilities for them to do from the get-go. I mean, there's a lot of great YouTubers, I'm sure that many, many out there follow that do everything from ranging from high quality video, 8K, right? Like, YouTube's got crazy capability now. But then we've got churches on the other end that are just getting started off and said, "Dave, um, I know we kind of talked about this. How do churches get started on YouTube? Like, what would be the advice that you would give them? Hey, so this is your starting point. This is where you would go."

Yeah, so a lot of churches straight up, they just think, "I need to buy all this new equipment if I'm going to get onto YouTube, and I don't know if I can do that yet." Our phones, the average phone that you have in your pocket right now, probably shoots HD video, potentially even shoots 4K video. So all you really need, and this is what I say to churches all the time, all you need is your cell phone and a window because a window will provide the light that you need. That's the real, it's free, completely free. God gave it to us, right? So just stand by a window and shoot with your iPhone.

Some of the, you look back at some of the biggest YouTube names in the world right now. If you go to their YouTube channel and look back at their very first video, it was a low resolution, probably potentially even black and white video, and it wasn't very good because they didn't care. The reality is, I think that, um, and I know I honestly know Jeff is probably going to cringe a little bit at this one, but I don't think production quality is as important as content quality.

And so I fully agree. Keep going.

Okay, great, great. So what's important is that you're posting content and that you're building community, and that's more important than what camera you're using, what microphone you're using, what lighting rig you're using. So if you've just got a phone, you can start on YouTube. In fact, during this COVID era, you know, I remember early on I had some conversations with some church leaders, and once you actually told me specifically, "Hey, I've been posting my YouTube messages from my church to YouTube for the past two years, and I average about 200 views. And I've been kind of, I've been doing it because I felt like I had to." But when COVID had hit, I was walking my dog around the block and I took out my phone and I went live on YouTube and just asked people, "Hey, do you need somebody to pray for you today? If you do, just let me know in a comment and I'll pray for you." And as he walked his dog around the block, he literally just prayed for anybody who left a comment. He got 18,000 views. And he was like, "I don't know why I'm ever going to preach a message in a church again when I can get more views than I've ever had in my life just by going live on my phone."

So it can be as simple as that. But the other thing, Ray, is that churches are content producing machines. That's what we do. We produce.

a 35 minute or 40 minute message every single Sunday and we post that to YouTube and we think our job's done. Well, I would say repurpose on purpose. Repurpose on purpose. Take that 35 minute message, break it down to two, three, four to seven minute videos that you post to YouTube as well during the week. One on Tuesday, one on Wednesday, one on Friday, whatever you want to do, however many you can create out of it that always have a call to action that drive people back to that full version of the message.

So a couple of things happen there. You're being consistently posting more original content to YouTube, so YouTube's gonna love you for that. You're providing people content that is in bite sizes. The average length of a view of your YouTube video is four minutes and 20 seconds. Four minutes and 20 seconds. Yet we're posting 35 minute messages and expecting people to watch the whole thing, and then we complain that our view time, our viewer retention time on YouTube is 20 percent. That's why it's 20 percent because people's attention spans aren't great. But if you can hook them with a four minute video that has a YouTube card, a YouTube link in the description, or a YouTube end screen that points them to the full message or points them to the full series on a playlist, then you're keeping people. You're hooking them and then you're reeling them in with the other content.

That's what that's where YouTube becomes an invaluable tool. And if your keyword optimizing each one of those videos in church, well, and what I mean by that is this: in church world we so often call our message series or our messages some sort of catchy thing that rhymes or it's an alliteration. Or you know what I'm talking about. We pastors are prone to doing this. We call them all sorts of weird titles that nobody ever types into the Google search bar. But they're all dealing with felt needs. They're dealing with things like, you know, how people can get better as spouses, how people can get better as parents, how we can just be better people.

You know, my boss Andy Stanley always says following Jesus makes my life better and makes me better in life. And because of that, everybody wants to get better at life. So what if you just called the message series "How to Get Better at Life"? Because guess what? People are typing into the search bar, "How do I get better at my life? How do I be a better husband? How do I find hope?" If we called our messages and our series things like that that are keyword optimized, what happens is YouTube's algorithm does the evangelism for us.

A year, five years, ten years from now, I honestly believe—and at North Point we do our baptism messages where our baptisms happen during the service. So worship happens, then somebody will we'll have a video on the screen, a two minute testimony, and then they'll be baptized during the service, right? I believe that in a couple of years from now, I really believe this, somebody's gonna have a YouTube video that says, "Hey, my name is Dave. I didn't used to believe in Jesus, and so I was looking for hope and I went to Google and I started searching, and Andy Stanley's video popped up and I watched one of them and that led me to watch two of them and three of them. Before I knew it, I'd watched ten videos and I'd give my life to Christ and now I'm here today to get baptized."

I honestly believe that that's going to happen because this is where people are searching for truth at the moment, and it's on YouTube. That's awesome. But I'll be honest, the first time that this really hit my radar strong, where I was like, "Hey, there's a problem," it was actually a tweet that you did. And I, you can't remember all your tweets, that's fine, but maybe a year or so ago where it was like, um, you did a search where you were searching for "teach me how to pray" or "I don't know how to pray." It was "how to read the Bible." "How to read the Bible." Okay, so it's "how to read the Bible," and that's right because it was like no churches were in the immediate results except for Joyce Meyers. Joyce Myers was in the results, but it wasn't even a Joyce Meyers approved video.

Yeah, there was somebody ripping Joyce Meyers and putting it and uploading it into YouTube. Yeah, and it's like the practical nature of how people are looking for things on the internet, the church is not realizing it. And that's probably, I assume, that's one of like maybe several issues, several other things that the church is really kind of wrestling with or misunderstanding. Yeah, in context of YouTube. And so you've got like these ten commandments for churches with YouTube, and I'm really interested because even in my own, with what I do with the church digital, I know I'm not doing all this right. So even I wanted to learn in this season for how do we do YouTube better. So yeah, take us through some stuff.

Yeah, so you know, obviously I'm a big proponent for the value that YouTube can have, especially when it comes to reaching unchurched people. This is a big passion of mine, big heartbeat of mine. It's not about being seeker sensitive. It's not about being secret where it's just trying to share the gospel, to share hope with people who are unchurched, who don't like going to church and may never walk, may never walk into the building of a church, but they're typing in things like "how do I read the Bible? How do I pray?" And I want to make sure that there are churches and there are pastors who are producing content that they've leveraged the YouTube algorithm in such a way that their content is being popped up there.

So I created this thing called the Ten Commandments of Church YouTube. And I figured it was best to call it the Ten Commandments because then I think Christians might buy into it. And if we can remember the Ten Commandments, which most of us can remember at least seven of the Ten Commandments, if people just remembered seven of these ten things, then their YouTube, that a their YouTube channel is going to be much more consistent, much more approachable. And this is the great thing about, you know, when we talk about church social media, church digital world, we're always talking about the algorithms, right? And I'm a big believer that the algorithm is always an issue, but it's never an excuse. Regardless of the channel, the algorithm is always an issue, but it's never an excuse. If you're not getting much reach on Facebook or Instagram, there's a reason for that. It's not the algorithm's fault. You're not posting content that your people, your audience are engaging with. So you need to change that.

But when it comes to YouTube, there are certain things that we know you can do to really activate the algorithm in for your benefit. So that's where I develop these ten things. And you know, I'd love to go through all ten and then have you guys, well, have you guys ask me questions as I go through. Does that sound good?

Okay, so number one, and I tried to make these as religious sounding as possible, number one is "Cover this before all posts." And what that really refers to is we get so gung-ho about jumping into posting our content on YouTube that we don't think about the community of YouTube and what our audience is actually looking at. So what I'm talking about there is cover all things. It's the cover photo. What does that cover banner photo say about you and about your church?

I always advise churches to do two things. One, show a picture of your building. So if somebody has watched your YouTube videos and wants to show up, um, they know they're at the right place by looking at your YouTube cover and going, "Yep, this is the right place. This is where I'm supposed to," because I can see that building there. But I also encourage them to have a call to have some sort of information on their YouTube cover that tells people when they're posting, "Hey, uh, come here for live content every Sunday at 9:00 a.m." Like something like that that allows people to have access. This is the thing that when you're scrolling through, it's going to stop you and go, "I know what this church is about because it's all laid out in the cover." So that's commandment number one: cover this before all posts.

Commandment number two is "You shall complete your about page." Now YouTube gives you an about page where you can put links to all your social media platforms. You can talk a little bit about what your mission and vision as a church is. You can put links to your website. You can even put a contact email on the about page. Yet a lot of churches I see haven't filled any of that out. And people are going there and they might watch the content. They go, "I'm going to figure out a little bit more about how I connect with this church," and there's nothing there.

So make sure you fill out all that information. Give people the opportunity to connect with you and leave calls to action on your about page. So that's commandment number two. What would you say is like the bare minimum? Because some churches might be, "All right, man, we want to put our mission or vision, a whole bunch of stuff on there." What would you say? "Hey, just this would give you give people a great snapshot and maybe even make you more searchable on your about page?"

Yeah, great, great question. So I would always have the mission or the vision there. So for us, you know, we create churches. We're on church. People love to engage that might be part of what we would put on there. Or we help, uh, we help people develop a growing relationship with Jesus Christ. We might have something like that there. So that's part of the about, so people know what we're about. But then I would always, always, without fail, make sure that we're giving people a way to contact with us. Even if that is bare minimum, just an info at email, something like that, that allows people that opportunity to connect with you. Because like I said, you know, it's one thing to post content. It's a whole other thing to build community. And YouTube is all about building community.

This is the great, this is where you, why YouTube has such high stats when it comes to beating every cable news network, every, you know, beating Netflix, is because when you're watching Netflix, when you're watching cable news, it's all one-way communication. But YouTube gives you the opportunity to have two-way communication through connection points like comment sections or like the about page. So at the very bare minimum, have an email address where people can contact your church.

Okay, so commandment number three is "You shall not group content in vain." You shall not group your content in vain. A lot of us just throw content up on YouTube, videos, messages, whatever it might be, and then when people land on your page for the very first time, the only playlist that's on the page is the uploaded video playlist and everything's just random in there. So create, create playlists around series titles. Create playlists around baptism stories within your church. Create playlists around ministries: student ministry, kids ministry, family ministry. Create a parents playlist. Create, like, like, create those playlists so it's about grouping your content in ways that are easily consumable by people. YouTube loves when you create playlists. Absolutely loves it. So always create playlists on your YouTube channel.

Number four is "Remember, remember your titles for they are key." Again, trying to make it sound biblical. "Remember your titles for they are key." And what I mean by that is keyword optimized titles. This is something we already touched on, but it's making sure that what the title of the video that you're uploading is so keyword optimized that it has phrases and words in it that people are actually searching for on YouTube. So that might be "How do I read the Bible," for example. Does that make sense?

Yeah, and in that, tell me about, does that play into any kind of the creative process at North Point? Like, do you guys, like, uh, work back into the creative process like, "Hey, so..."

Andy wants to talk about this subject. Do you guys think through and actually ask that question? Well, okay, how do we make this more searchable? Man, that is such a great question. And here's the truthful answer: up until the end of last year, we weren't thinking about that. I was thinking about it, but as a church as an organization, we weren't really thinking about it. And then, what I did at the end of the last quarter of 2019 was I literally went back through all of our six Atlanta area churches. They have their own YouTube channels. I went back through all of the messages that Andy had preached for the previous two years and changed the title of every message. I got permission to do it. Changed the title of every message to a keyword optimized title. And we watched one of our churches—the first church that I did that was North Point Community Church, our original campus—and they had a 106 percent increase in views on those videos that were keyword optimized. They were two years old, but all I did was change the title. Completely free, didn't cost me a cent, just cost me my time. And then I did it for the second campus, Buckhead Church, and they had a 128 percent increase in 30 days on number of videos viewed because the videos were now titled in accordance with the phrases that people were actually typing into YouTube. So YouTube was throwing our videos up as the answer to somebody's question. And because that actually answered the question, people were watching longer as well. So our viewer retention rate went up, number of views went up to the right, retention rate went up into the right. And all I did was change titles of two-year-old videos. So churches can do this right now. Go back through your old archive, just change the title. It's as simple as that.

Wow. And what are the tools that you're using for optimization for determining those things?

Great question. So there are a number of different paid platforms. I use two paid platforms. One of them is called VidIQ, and that's a platform that you can just go to vidiq.com and you can sign up for that. I've actually got a link to a free month and I've got a link to a ten percent off. I'm more than happy to share that with you guys if you want to put it in the show notes and things like that. The other one that I use, really, really the most and the most regular now—VidIQ costs about fifty dollars a month, just FYI—the other one that I use on more than any other is called Morning Fame, and it is about fifteen dollars a month. So it's a lot less, but that has such a robust search tool that literally I can type in any keyword optimized phrase. For argument's sake, is what mark should I buy for doing Zoom calls, right? If that was the question we're asking, it will give me the ranking of that title in an A, B, C, D sort of ranking. And it will give me suggestions for other videos, for other titles. And it will give me other videos that have a similar title and tell me which one I should use based on views, based on engagement, based on subscribers. So it is an invaluable tool. Morning Fame. It's morning f-a-m-e, morningfame.me. Now that is an invitation-only platform. That's the weird thing about it. But again, I'll share my link with you so that you guys can put it in the show notes and people can click on that. It is a fantastic tool and you'll get a month for free just to trial it out. Fifteen dollars a month. It is so well worth it.

Now, you don't want to spend any money at all? Here's what I would suggest: open up a Google page and just start typing in the message. How to read the—and whatever pops up, that's what you want to go with. It's like Google literally has this built-in keyword optimization built in. We've all experienced this when you start to type something out and it starts to preempt what it thinks you're going to type. Those preempts are based on what most people are typing in when they've already typed in the words that you've typed in. This is what most people finish it with. They're preempting what you're doing. So Google keywords are already built into Google. So just start doing that if you want to do it for free. These other tools just make it much more streamlined, much more efficient. So that's the sort of things that I use.

This has been great. We'll include the links in the show notes for both of those. That is great. I was up to number four: remember your titles. Number five is honor your tags. Again, making it sound biblical, honor your tags. And tags are the things that attach to every single video. You can do default tags on YouTube. So I would always encourage churches to put the full tags in there. And default tags are multiple words. So don't put, for example, we wouldn't put "north" as one tag, "point" as another tag, "community" as a third tag, and "church" as a fourth tag. We report "north point community church." And in fact, the default tags that I have for North Point, for example, in North Point Community Church, NPCC, North Point, North Point Church, Andy Stanley, Andy Stanley North Point, and his Stanley message, Andy Stanley service, Andy Stanley Sunday, Andy Stanley sermon. And I spell Andy Stanley as many different ways as I can because people type it in wrong. And so there are all the sorts of tags that I do their default upload. So when I upload a video, they're automatically there. And then I add tags that are specific to that specific video. So always remember to add tags to every single video you do because it helps with people finding your content.

Number six is you shall monitor six key analytics. You shall monitor six key analytics. There are six analytics that I think every church should be monitoring to see, to gauge the success of what they're doing on YouTube. Again, a lot of times—and I think I said this to you guys before we started recording—but churches will often use YouTube in the same way that we use Vimeo. It's this place where we store all our videos to get them off our computers or off our hard drives. And that's what Vimeo is. Vimeo is great for that, but it's not a search engine. So when you're leveraging a tool like YouTube, you have to remember to track analytics that tell you whether or not your verses, your messages, and your videos are actually reaching the people that you want them to reach. And I'll just give you one of those six, for example. One of those six is the viewer retention rate. Viewer retention rate is so huge. That's how long people are watching your content for. If you've got a sixty-minute video up there and people are only watching ten minutes of it, well, that video is not working. And what YouTube does—and a lot of people don't know this—is it gives you a line graph with the video on top of it. So you can literally scroll through the video and see where people dropped off. Well, we lost eighty percent of our audience right there. Why did we lose eighty percent in that moment? What was said in that moment that drove a lot of people to stop watching? And then, you know, not to ever do that again. But YouTube will also give you a spike in that graph. And what that means is people have gone back and re-watched that one little bit because you said something or something was said or done that people wanted to see again. And that's a great tool to leverage to find out what your next message series might be about or what your next content might be about. So that's just one of the ones that I suggest churches analyze all the time. Again, I'm more than happy to provide you with all six and you can include those in the show notes. So monitor six key analytics.

The seventh one is you shall not use default images. This is all about thumbnails. YouTube allows you to upload a custom thumbnail, and a lot of churches will upload a video and YouTube suggests a custom thumbnail where they think a person might be smiling, but it's always the most awkward pick. So I always encourage people to make sure you upload a custom thumbnail because YouTube tracks how many people click on your thumbnail. Now, if the three of us made a video that was "How to Pray," right? We all uploaded the same video, "How to Pray," same time. We've all got the same number of subscribers. And YouTube guys didn't upload a thumbnail, but I did. And my thumbnail was of me in a very holy pose with my hands together, and I had it really clearly written on it: "How to Pray: Five Tips on How to Pray Better." All right? People are gonna click on that link more often. And so my YouTube video is going to get way above all of yours because you've just used the default thumbnail. So always make sure you're uploading custom images.

Real quick on that, and what would you recommend people use for their thumbnail? Because I've seen everything from like the wacky, zany kind of stuff to, you know, just something that just looks completely artistic and really, really well done. Like, what do you recommend for some basics in terms of thumbnail? What do you recommend they put on there?

Well, I always recommend that—and YouTube analytics have proven that a picture of a person always carries a lot more weight. So you want to use a picture of a person. If you're from a church, you know, we will pick a picture of whoever's speaking, and we try to pick a photo of them smiling so it looks inviting. We want to pick a photo that's clean. And sometimes we can pull that from, you know, just the still of the video. If the video quality that you're uploading is as good as the video quality that Jeff has right now, then you can pick a thumbnail and it will look fantastic. But you might want to have a photographer there just to take a really quick photo of the pastor smiling before or during rehearsal or before the service or during the service just to have that. And then always have the words really, really clear. Now it's really important to remember that, as I said before, most people are accessing YouTube on their mobile device. And so those thumbnails are really, really small. They're about the size of a postage stamp. So make sure the words are big enough for them to read as they scroll through. Photoshop is a great tool to use, but there are a whole bunch of things. There's online tools like Canva that you can use for free that will create thumbnails. So that is number seven.

Number eight is you shall describe your content well. And that is really all about just the YouTube description, making sure that your description describes what's in the video, is keyword optimized, and includes calls to action. This is where we always will post things at North Point about, hey, we'd love to connect with you. Follow us on these social media platforms. Here's our website. Here's an email that you can—if you have questions, email us at this email address. So always leveraging that YouTube description to make sure that you're giving people a clear call to action to help them take the next step in their faith journey.

Number nine, I think I'm up to number nine. You shall not skip introductions. You shall not. And what that is about is really, you know, YouTube gives the opportunity to create any length video as an introduction to your channel. I always suggest it should be thirty to sixty seconds because people watch shorter things. And that should be your pastor or somebody with a lot of personality saying, hey, welcome to our channel. We're so glad you're here on this channel. You're going to find these things about these topics, and we want to help you get connected. We can do that in any way and help you take the next step in your faith journey. You can email us at blah blah blah. Now, when if I'm subscribed to your channel, I can—you can set it up so that I get, as an unsubscribed person, a specific introductory video.

But if I'm a member of your church and I'm subscribed to the channel, I can get a different video all together. So you get this opportunity to have two separate videos speaking to two completely different audiences. So why wouldn't we leverage that? That makes perfect sense to me. That's something when I was in Worf, I knew that we had the opening trailer that you had for everybody, but I didn't realize that once you're subscribed, you could have a specialized video for people who are already subscribed to give them some next steps or some different stuff. And I love the ones that you guys have made over time over at North Point. So yeah, I died laughing at the one you guys made with Clay. I thought it was perfect.

Yeah, yeah, with the one with Clay. You know, we tried to make that as funny as possible, reaching a younger sort of audience who might have been on YouTube. And literally he's there saying, "I'm not going to tell you what to do. You know what to do. You're on YouTube. You're on YouTube more than I am. I'm not going to tell you to subscribe. You already know how to subscribe." But in doing that, he's creating personality, but he's also literally telling them to subscribe by saying, "I'm not going to tell you to subscribe, but we want you to subscribe." So and we have, you know, bloopers and all sorts of things. So make that entertaining, make it fun, make it a thirty-second snapshot, and let people see the people who are in your church. Because you always want people when they come to your YouTube channel and see your video—I would say this of any, whether it's your website, social media, anything—you want people who are first-time guests to your church to see themselves at your church. So if they're a family, let's show families. If they're an older couple and empty nesters, let's see empty nesters in those videos. Like, let people see who the people are in your church so that they feel connected to that community.

I always say this: social media, YouTube, introductory videos allows people to connect with your church before they connect within your church. So make sure you're showcasing all of those people, all those members of the community who make up your local community as well as a church community as well.

And number ten, the final of the ten commandments: you shall have a promotion strategy or a marketing strategy, however you want to put it. Again, one of the things that I see a lot of churches doing is, "Hey, I put my Sunday message up, so I'm done now." No, no, you're not done. That's great that it's up there and people can access it, but people don't know about it. So you need to leverage other social media platforms to drive people to your YouTube channel. This is a spot that I think a lot of churches miss.

So, you know, I try to encourage people, whether they're pastors, ministry leaders, or churches, to have some sort of content distribution strategy that allows them to post something to YouTube. And what are you going to do with that YouTube URL now that you've posted the video? And I always suggest on the day that you post, tweet about it at least twice a day for the first week, and then once a week for the next six months. That's my strategy. That's a strategy that I like to use from a Twitter point of view. And then leverage things like Instagram to post, let people know that your videos are up as well. If you've got the swipe-up function in YouTube—in Instagram Stories—make sure you're leveraging that to literally just let people swipe up to land on your YouTube page. Facebook, post it there as well. Even if you're posting the message to Facebook, do a post mid-week that says, "Hey, if you missed our video, it's right here on demand on our YouTube channel." Like, do things like that and let people know that you are on YouTube.

And promotion also includes in the room. You know, when COVID's over and we're back in the room again, make sure you're letting your people who are coming to your church know that you've got a YouTube channel. That seems like a simple thing, but a lot of churches miss it. So if you have slides playing pre-service that have your social media handles, include your YouTube handle in that as well. During a hosting spot or during the farewell: "Hey, we're so glad you're part of our church today. We'd love to stay connected with you on video, and if you want to watch this whole service again or this message, you can find it on our YouTube channel." It's really as simple as that.

At Northwind, we do that on our podcasts as well. "Hey, we're so glad you joined us for this podcast. I don't know if you know, but we've got a YouTube channel as well. So if you'd like to watch this message, check out our YouTube channel." Like, we leverage as many channels as we can to promote our YouTube channel because we know that the YouTube channel is a search engine and people are going to be driving—we want to drive traffic to it as an on-demand platform as well so that it's constantly churning up the algorithm in our favor.

So that's all ten of them. That's the ten commandments. I don't know how long that took. Is anybody still listening? That was awesome. I hope they're still listening because all of this is worth more than the price of admission, which of course was free with our podcast, but that's besides the point.

But the big thing is, Dave, and one of the things that I try to tell a lot of churches—because a lot of churches think internal stuff like, "Man, we think we need an app or we think we need like a better, you know, website"—and the thing that I remind them with YouTube is with YouTube you get a free TV app, you get a free mobile app. Like, everywhere you want to be, you can be for free.

Yeah, totally. I totally agree. And people are already going to it, right? People are downloading the church app or they're not. Necessarily, even if they have—I've got all six church apps, and I don't go to them nearly as often as I go to our YouTube channels because YouTube is on my home page because I watch it so often. And I, I would—as a dad of teenage girls, I can tell you that that is the number one app in our house. It is YouTube. And we, if we as church leaders, as if we as pastors want to reach the next generation, then why aren't we leveraging that tool? That's not to say don't ever get a church app, don't ever build—no, do all of those things, but lean heavily, heavily into YouTube as well because it is such a fantastic tool.

One of the things that we hear often, and you touched on it briefly, the average YouTube video is like four minutes thirty seconds, a sub-five minutes. Average sermon at thirty, thirty-five, forty, you know, something longer than that. And the idea of preaching a shorter sermon, editing, you know, taking, reusing content—you talk a little bit here. So COVID, coming out of this season, I've already had conversations with churches. We just, we want to, we want to focus on the building. We're not sure how much resources we want we want to pour into here. Like, talk to me a little bit behind the mindset and what to really, if we do want to reuse the content, if we want to break it up, like what's the strategy behind breaking it up?

Yeah, so, you know, one of the things that I feel—such a good question, Jeff—one of the things that I feel is that when people, when churches open up again, when the buildings open up again, because let's be honest, the church has never closed. The buildings have been closed, but when buildings open up again, my biggest fear is that many, many church leaders, many pastors, as soon as they walk back into their buildings, they're going to walk back in time and they're going to go back to an old model that for the past four or five months we've said wasn't as important because we always talk about how church is not a building, church is the people. But pre-COVID, no, church was about the building because that's how we stopped it, that's how we resourced it, right?

Um, and so I would be saying if you can at all in your church, in the quote-unquote new normal when life after lockdown begins and church buildings open up, try to leverage both—both digital and physical—in equal amounts. And it's what I would call an omni-channel approach to doing church, not multi-channel where one channel, physical, has its own strategy and resources and online has its own strategy and resources. Combine those two things because this is what the marketplace has done for so long. Combine those two things into a seamless integration so that people who listen to the podcast can still show up second week of the month and know what's going on because they've listened on the podcast, and that was okay.

Um, so that's part of what I would be suggesting when it comes to repurposing on purpose. You know, it's really about breaking down the content that you're already creating. Um, it's about reusing the content that you're already creating and turning it into bite-sized pieces that are not watering it down but are just putting it into situations that allow people to share it more easily, that allow people to access it more easily on multiple platforms, and always have a call to action to it.

The example that I can often use is, you know, my neighbor—if he's having problems with his marriage, um, I'm not going to go over to him and say, "Hey, man, do you want to come to church with me on Sunday?" You know, I might do that depending on the relationship, but that's a big ask for somebody to take a whole day or half a day, and I might need to bribe him with lunch as well in order to get him to come to church on Sunday. But likewise, if we're having a chat out the front and he says, "Hey, man, my marriage isn't going really well at the moment," I'm not going to go, "Hey, you know what? My pastor actually did a thirty-five-minute message on YouTube. Let's watch, let's watch this right now on our cell phone." Well, that's the digital equivalent of taking half a day to go to church and bribing him lunch.

But if I consider him, you know, my pastor preached on that last week, and "Hey, can I just send you a like a three-minute video with one point that will help make your marriage better?" Most people are going to go, "Yeah, yeah, I'll do, I'll watch that." And when he watches that and says, "Hey, is there any more to that?" "Well, yeah, actually there is, and here's the link to the full-length message." "Hey, I watched that full-length message. Is there any more?" "You know what, there actually is. It was part of a six-week series that's on our playlist, and here's a link to the playlist." Like, that's when, that's when we're breaking down barriers and reaching people where they are and we're meeting their physical needs as well as meeting their spiritual needs as well.

And I think this is what Jesus constantly did, right? Whenever I read the Gospels, I see Jesus meeting people's physical needs, whether it's, you know, providing water for them like the woman at the well, but then he provides spiritual truth at the same time. Like, I think we need to be doing those sorts of things. And I'm a big proponent, um, guys, of, you know, the Apostle Paul used the technology of his day to reach people who are far from God and connect them with each other and with God. The technology of his day was letter writing. Technology of our day is Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook. And if it's YouTube, we need to be leveraging it for all it's worth to help people connect with each other and how people connect with God and grow their faith in the process.

Amen. Yeah, the whole thing of utilizing YouTube not to reach your people but instead to reach the YouTube community, to reach others, and being utilized, utilizing that platform as evangelism, reaching out and connecting with others. I love the idea of what you're sharing. Five years, ten years from now, somebody's gonna get saved as a result of a YouTube video and finding it. I can tell you, I can tell you similar stories as an online pastor. I can tell you names of people that...

Whose marriages were saved as a result of Christ Fellowship Miami? We don't even live in the state of Miami, and it's all centered around YouTube and in marriages and sermons on marriages because we were intentional about structuring and marketing that and placing it in such a way that it was searchable for it.

It's almost like it just happens as a result of this content. We're content machines. I think you alluded to it, Dave, and yeah, the more that we can leverage this content with the search engines, with the platforms to reach people in a new way, it's a different person than who's going to come to the buildings that's going to engage with this YouTube. I believe I totally agree. I think, you know, pre-COVID, most churches, whether we admitted it or not, we were event-driven organizations. The event was Sunday. Everything was geared towards Sunday, or at least most things were geared towards having that event on Sunday that people are actually going to come to. But I think what COVID has given us the opportunity to do is to rebrand ourselves, to rethink about what we actually are. And we're actually content distribution organizations. That's what we are. We've got all this content, and a lot of churches, big or small, spend money on Facebook ads, spend money on all sorts of campaigns to get that content distributed out to people, yet we miss this free distribution tool that is the second biggest search engine in the world and will do the evangelism for you and the marketing for you if you do all the things right.

It's not about playing by their rules. This is what a lot of people say: "What about the algorithm? Study the algorithm." No, no. I say, you know, Craig Rochelle says, "Do anything short of sin to get the gospel to as many people as possible," right? I'm saying when it comes to YouTube, here's ten things you can do that will get your video out to more people than you could possibly have imagined. Jesus said, "Go into all the world and preach the good news." All the world includes YouTube, and YouTube gives us the chance to accelerate that. That's the beauty of this.

The three of us right now, we could record a video, and if there was an angry or dancing cat in that video, it would go viral and we would have millions of views around the world within forty-eight hours, right? So again, if we can do something like that from a church perspective that carries a message of hope, a message of encouragement, a message of inspiration, don't we want that to go everywhere as well? And YouTube just gives us the ability to do that unlike any other social media platform that I know of. And I'm a big proponent of all social media platforms. My biggest audience is on Instagram. I'm trying to get them to YouTube because my friend Kenny Jang, he says, "Video is the new black." I love that quote. Video is the new black. You look at a video that's posted onto Twitter. It averages, I think the statistics are somewhere around seventy percent more engagement than just a text post alone. So we need to be leveraging more video. We get that, but when it comes to video, the best platform to have that video on, even outside of TikTok, is YouTube. And so why aren't we using it?

I think we all should. Awesome, very, very well said, and I don't even know if there's anything else we can add to that. This has been a great podcast. Hey, thank you very much, Dave, for jumping on this. Hey, Ray, remember landing the plane. Anything on your side? Any closing thoughts?

Yeah, and I'm glad that you brought it up early in the podcast because I am a Dave Adamson disciple. Like, I literally took you up on that challenge, and we made "How to Read the Bible" videos. Like, we did that particularly for YouTube because I thought, man, we have to be in the space, and we do have to phrase it in the form of questions, and we do have to take a look at how we're critiquing some of this stuff. And so, Dave, thank you for even some of those suggestions. And I want to encourage others that if you're not aware, there is a Facebook group that if you've got more questions, you should definitely be a part of to continue learning for your church. Yeah, so that is called, if you just go to facebook.com/groups/youtubeyourchurch, or if you just go in and search "YouTube Your Church," it'll pop up. And it is a place now. There are over a thousand different churches represented there, and it's a place where we all just share our information.

This is the thing that I love about this: if I've got a secret that's causing North Point to be successful, then North Point isn't successful. It's just that we've cracked the code and we've got a little secret and I don't want to be competitive with other churches. I want to help as many other churches as possible. So this is a YouTube group where not only do I give away a whole bunch of just information and resources, but there are churches in there—this is a great thing—that are posting, "Hey, we had this huge success today because of this little thing that we found, and here's how we did it, and now your church can do it as well." There's a church up in Canada, Connexus Church, and their YouTube guy, Justin, is always posting in the group. And I've watched him post, and his graphs were flat, and then they started to go up, and now they're spiking through the roof. And he's literally sharing, "This is step by step how we did it." So this is just the resource that I created to help try to drive as many churches as possible to have this group mindset of all helping each other, all supporting each other, and all sharing what they've learned. So YouTube Your Church on Facebook, go check it out.

Awesome, yeah, we'll include a link in the show notes for that as well. A phenomenal resource there. Love just love Facebook groups in general for gathering churches together, but then that's one of probably the top five that I stay tapped in with. So that's awesome. Hey, Dave, any closing thoughts for you as we're landing the plane?

Yeah, look, I'm all about if I can help anybody in any sort of capacity, of any church, anything like that, I would love to help you guys out as much as possible. And so I want to just let you know, you can DM me on any of my social media. I'm usually at Aussie Dave—A-U-S-S-I-E—at Aussie Dave on all my Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all those sort of places. Also, you know, one of the things I love to do, and this might be highly unusual, but if you've got a question and you want to text me, I'm going to give you my cell phone number. Just text me if you've got any questions about YouTube, any questions about online church, any questions about social media. Text me 201-267-2156. That number again is 201-267-2156. Seriously, it's weird, but text me. I would love to just connect, and even if it's just, "Hey, I need prayer as I go to my lead pastor and ask him whether or not I can have budget for YouTube," I would love to pray for that. And I just love to do that because I just want to help people. I just want to help the church.

That's awesome. I don't know that I've ever had a cell phone number given on the podcast, so it took eighty something to get there, but we finally did it. Thank you for that, Dave. Hey, included in the show notes as well. Seriously, if I can help anybody, that's why I'm here.

Awesome, yeah, and I've loved that about you and your graciousness, even jumping on this podcast has been great. Hang out with them. We'll get the resource and the other things, but that Facebook group and approach Dave on social. So that's awesome. I've loved this because there's an opportunity for the church to look beyond just storing video, have it being free video storage like a Google Drive, and instead utilizing it as a platform to reach people that you're not reaching with your buildings in ways that the buildings aren't working towards. So we're going to wrap the podcast right here. Dave, thank you for jumping on today. For Ray, this is Jeff for the Church Digital. Thanks for being here, and we'll see you next time here on the show. You all have a good day.