This is the final post in this series that began with “Stories, Your Website’s Secret Sauce,” In that post I wrote about our need to share stories if we want to convert website visitors into church visitors. In the next two posts, “Stories – Finding the Secret Sauce,” and “Stories – Sharing the Secret Sauce in Text,” I shared some ways to find those stories in your church and some examples of how to share them in a written format.

Now, let’s look at an even more powerful way to share those stories, video. Video is clearly the most powerful way to share stories of transformation with visitors to your website. Thanks to new technology, you don’t need to be a megachurch to pull this off. Any church with an iPhone and a decent computer can record, edit and share testimonials and faith stories on their website.

 Let’s look at some examples.

Providence Baptist Church, Raleigh, North Carolina
http://www.pray.org/media-resources/category/stories/
Providence Baptist features video stories on their Media and Resources page. They have quite a collection that is regularly updated. Don’t let these videos intimidate you. This church clearly has either a professional on staff or outsources the videos. The production values are excellent. But more important, the stories are great. Maybe you won’t be able to match their level of production, but you can share stories this good.

Check out this one:

Long’s Chapel United Methodist Church, Waynesville, North Carolina
http://www.longschapel.com/#/videos/god-stories
Long’s Chapel features “God Stories” on their “Videos Page.” They currently have ten videos posted. The production is very basic but well done. This makes them a good model for churches considering sharing video stories. The look and feel of these could be recreated with a single camera and some basic lighting. They share some amazing stories of God’s transformational power.

Chapelwood, Houston Texas
http://www.chapelwood.org/resources/stories
Chapelwood is a treasure trove of ideas for sharing stories with video. On their “Stories” page, they have a couple of different types of videos including some developed around themes that feature a number of different voices. Their production values are impressive, again making it possible that they have professional staff or outsource the work. From the look of them, some of these videos may have been originally developed for use in worship. That is a plus side of creating story videos, they can be used in more than one place.

Check out “Who is Jesus”

I hope this series has inspired you to begin the journey of collecting and recording stories for your church’s website. For churches that are interested, there is a lot more information to share.

Some things to consider:

• What equipment will I need?
• What are some best practices for shooting videos like these?
• Should I have people write a script or interview them?
• How do I best prepare people to share their stories?
• How do I edit the video?
• Where and how do I put these videos on my church’s website?
• What are the elements of a good story?

These are all questions I can tackle if there are churches looking for the answer. Depending on the feedback from this series, the answers may come in another blog series, a feature on riotexas.org, a webinar, an in-person class, a video series, or even one-on-one training.

The Rio Texas Media Center has all the equipment a church would need to record, edit and produce videos like these and we are willing to train and assist.

Considering getting started? Let me know in the comments below.