Tour

For most churches, a typical online experience offers pre-recorded worship music and a biblical teaching message on video, along with live chat and opportunities for one-on-one prayer.

Overview

Online services created with Church Online Platform include:

• An embedded video area for your message and music
• A slide area for graphics you upload
• A way for people to request live prayer
• Social media connections
• Tab options including chat, visitor map, sermon notes, and other text

Environment

Customization of your church online

• You’re in control of your church online environment: the look and feel, the information, the settings—it’s all up to you. You’ll get a detailed guide that will walk you through the setup process.
• How do you want your church online to look? You can choose a ready-made theme, tweak a theme according to your preference, or go the advanced route and provide your own CSS styles.
• You’ll enter your church’s information, add your logo, set login requirements, provide links, determine donation settings, decide which tabs you’ll use, and more.

Online Events

Opportunities for people to attend your services

• The Church Online Platform gives you tools to create online events for your ministry. The schedule is in your hands. Will you offer one main service multiple times throughout the week? Or will you integrate additional experiences (like mid-week services or special events) into your schedule?
• Any event can be scheduled to occur one time or multiple times.
• Each event can be assigned different video streams, slides, and interaction.

Slides

Graphics before and during your service

• Just like some physical church services show slides on video screens, you’ll be able to upload a series of slides you create for your online experience. But there’s one big difference—these slides are interactive.
• Slides accompany the video and chat and are a way for your community to take action during the experience. Guests can answer poll questions, share the experience with their friends through social media, give to your ministry, and raise their hand in response to the teaching.
• Slides can also be purely informational: presenting helpful content about your church, providing details about your pastor or the message, offering discussion prompts, and more.

Chat

Interaction with your community

• Your team and guests interact through a live chat during each experience. Chat allows your community to engage with each other and with the video content as they experience it.
• Chat can enhance the online experience: a warm welcome, friendly chatter, answers to questions, response to the worship, reactions to the teaching, and celebration for those who give their lives to Christ. Guests who prefer to not participate in chat can watch the video full-screen or click a tab that shows them alternate content (like message notes).
• You’ll have tools to moderate your chat. If a guest posts inappropriate comments and doesn’t respond to friendly correction, your team can mute them. They’ll still be able to experience the service, but others won’t see what they post in chat.

Prayer Queue

A queue makes sure requests get personal attention

• When people request prayer, it’s important to respond quickly with confidentiality. Through an automated email system, your prayer team is put in touch with people requesting prayer.
• Each new request simply goes to the next volunteer in the queue connecting them through an anonymous email (the exchange can continue after the first contact if needed).
• You and your team can focus on relational ministry instead of managing and dispatching incoming requests.

Team

Different gifts for different roles

• As you prepare to launch your online ministry, you’ll likely be thinking about what kind of team you’ll need. Some churches assign a staff member or form a volunteer team to lead the ministry, and then recruit volunteers to serve guests at each experience. You can also choose to start with a smaller team and grow along with your ministry.
• The administration area of the Church Online Platform allows you to create staff and volunteer roles that meet your church’s needs. You determine the permissions and access for each role.
• Typical roles for an online experience might include: a captain who leads the volunteers for that service, chat hosts who welcome and interact with guests, a host who mutes inappropriate chat, volunteers who pray with individuals requesting prayer through one-on-one chat, and volunteers who help people with technical questions through one-on-one chat.

Online and Offline Modes

A way for your church to be welcoming when you’re not live

• When a guest visits your church online website, they’ll see one of two landing pages: online or offline mode.
• Online mode appears when your service is live or just about to start. Guests will experience your full church online environment.
• At all other times, offline mode informs guests of upcoming events. They’ll see a promo video, slide area, countdown clock, a schedule of your upcoming services, an opportunity to submit a prayer request and more.

Streaming

Your video, your way

• Your church’s teaching and music for your online ministry will be delivered via video. To deliver the video in the right format each week, you’ll need to choose a media streaming provider.
• Church Online Platform is completely free, with no fees. However, media streaming providers do charge for their services.
• You have options when choosing an organization to stream your video—the platform works with most providers. Popular choices for churches include: Light Cast Media, 316 Networks, Livestream and Ustream.

Mobile Devices

Online ministry, everywhere

• As our culture becomes increasingly mobile, your online ministry can reach people while they are on the go.
• Guests can experience your church’s content from their mobile device.
• Your streaming provider determines how many features your guests can access from their device. Some mobile experiences may include video and audio only.

Multiple Languages Ahead

Structured for translation

• The Church Online Platform was developed with a global perspective so your guests can experience your complete online church environment (text, links, tabs…everything) in your community’s heart language.
• Localization for different languages is part of the internal structure of the platform. That means translation can happen quickly.
• The platform is available now in English. Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese are the next languages scheduled to launch. Want to see more languages available? We do too! Please contact us if you’re able to help translate text.