Media Tip: Sermon Audio Promotion

I was sitting in church yesterday morning when my pastor, Dr. Mike Davis of Pine Forest Estates Baptist Church, made a routine comment that he says at least twice a month. He said, "Don't forget that we have CDs of the sermons available for you in the back. Let me encourage you to take one of these and pass them out to someone who doesn't go to our church. It wouldn't have to be confrontational, you could just say, 'This week, my pastor said something interesting. Would you listen to it and let me know what you think about it?'" As he held one of those CDs up in front of the auditorium, I got the idea for this week's Media Tip. As I went back there to pick up a CD as an example for this article, I saw two other people picking up CDs because of what pastor had said. It really does work. Try it some time!

There are a number of ways that you can use sermon audio to expand your ministry or promote your church. Most churches have some form of audio recording system already setup. For the longest time, the church I attended growing up used audio cassettes, but now they've moved to CDs, too. If you don't have an audio recording system already setup, or if you are a new church and can't afford a full sound system, my short audio setup guide is for you. If you already have a sound system setup, skip the guide and move on to how you can use this ministry for the benefit of your church.

Online Listening
The first avenue you ought pursue is uploading your sermon to an online listening/download service. The best and most popular of one of these is SermonAudio.com, however it costs $20/mo, a small price to pay for doubling or tripling your current ministry, but there are some free options out there.

So why should you use SermonAudio? I wouldn't have even really thought much of it until I interned with Murray River Baptist Church in the summer of 2010. Pastor Steven Maldoff uploads all of his sermons to SermonAudio. MRBC has about 60 people in attendance every Sunday morning in rural Australia; to put it quite plainly, in the middle of nowhere (but I love it there). Steven also receives about 60 sermon downloads a week from all over the world. A recent Facebook post by MRBC stated his sermons have been downloaded in France, Germany, India, the Philippines, Ireland, Japan, Malaysia, Nigeria and a host of other places. If a small church can receive that type of exposure on SermonAudio, everyone ought be doing it. Don't be discouraged by low numbers at first, Steven has been posting sermons for 2-3 years to get where he is.

Other benefits include:
• Allowing people who missed the service to catch it at their convenience
• Allowing people to listen to it again because they loved it so much
• Allowing you to have archive all of your sermons by category and not having to deal with the hard drive space yourself.

SermonAudio.com
Go to sermonaudio.com and signup for an account. Setup a profile for yourself and for your church. I've never had a SermonAudio account, so I can't really tell you what to do next, but I'm assuming there will be a big bright red flashy button saying "Click me" to upload your sermons. If it's not blaringly obvious, read the following instructions from SermonAudio about encoding and uploading.

Free Options
These include sermoncentral.com and sermoncloud.com. I would suggest Googling "Sermon Downloads" and selecting one of the top options. Anyone who looks for sermons will likely search through that keyword. You can start with the free option if you'd like, and upgrade later. Another possibility is uploading your sermon to all of these sites. If your goal is to expand your audience, this would be the best option. It may take a little bit more work, but you will catch all of the listeners who exclusively use only those sites.


CDs For Your Church
Regardless of whether or not you upload your sermons to the internet, you will want to pursue making CDs for your church.

Direct CD Printing
This route will cost the most amount of money upfront, but is by far the best design option. This requires a printer capable of printing on CDs (the cheapest being $150). Plus software to design the labels ($21.95). However, you will save on supplies. Purchasing 50 printable CDs costs $25, while 50 regular CDs costs $18 and labels cost $15 for a total of $33. But, that's only saving $8 for every 50 CDs. It would take approximately 1,050 CDs to pay off the printer and software.

Print Homemade Custom Labels
This involves the other supplies listed above. You still need a printer, but the one you already have will probably suffice. You need to buy both blank CDs and CD labels every time you run out. Most CD label kits come with an applicator ($25). After you purchase one, install the software that comes with it, design your CD cover, and start printing those sheets of labels. Peel off the label, lay it printed-side down on the applicator, put the CD top down next, then push the button. If you decide not to use an applicator be prepared for wrinkles in your label or off-center applications. Things like that would drive me nuts!

Order Pre-printed CDs

This is the route that my church uses. It costs roughly $450 for 1,000 discs depending on where you order. Compare this with buying 50 printable CDs at $25 for a total of $500 (not including the cost of ink!) or with buying 50 regular CDs and labels at $33 each for a total of $660 (also not including the cost of ink). This is by far the cheaper way to go, but you cannot print the sermon title directly onto the disk. My church takes clear return address labels and puts the sermon title on that way. You can purchase 1500 labels for $10 from Amazon. This certainly isn't the classiest way to print your discs, but it works. You probably can't even tell the label is there unless you knew it or looked up close.

Write on CD with a Marker
So you're on a low, low, low budget, and this is your very first attempt at working with CDs. You can always take the good 'ole Sharpie and write on the disc. The very minimum cost to you is the discs and some cheap paper sleeves for a total of roughly $35. This looks really tacky, though, and even return address labels with no printed design would be an improvement. That would total roughly $45.


Conclusion
Regardless of which method you use, or both. You should actively promote them to your congregation. If they are constantly made aware that you have this ministry, they will remember it when they're sick and want to hear the sermon, when someone else wants to hear it, or when they want to share what they heard with a friend (as possibly an evangelistic tool!). Don't do it every Sunday, but once every two-three weeks works fine.

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Posted in: Church Audio, Media Tips