How we save time in Church Production

I am all for doing anything that helps the workflow and means time isn’t wasted on chasing details, finding information, or just generally waiting around unnecessarily. Yes, at times I can be that guy hurrying a meeting along when it starts to go off track and would generally prefer to make a snap decision and fail quickly, then wait around for all the facts! 

I realised recently that as a Production team at Kerith we are now using quite a selection of different applications to help our workflow. Sometimes these are to save time, but some also save us money and particularly help to keep our volunteers focused on the creative parts of their role, rather than tied up in logistics. 

Asana

I’ve been using Asana for about eight years now, and it was Martin Baker who introduced it to me while we were working together at Congo Blue Design. If you hadn't heard of it, it's basically a task tracking application. You can create tasks for yourself or your team, assign them, give them deadlines, organise them into projects and even make them repeat on schedule - perfect for those weekly tasks. 

I have found this to be incredibly key to keeping me on task and free of distractions. It also visually lays out a project to keep you on top of it. If I ever start to become stressed or overcome by a project, it’s nearly always because I’ve failed to keep it documented in Asana. Once I take time to get it loaded in, I feel more in control. I also find it useful for quickly noting a task that you think of at inconvenient times (weekends or when with the kids). On the phone app, you can quickly make a note of it and then forget it. It’s then ready for you to properly fill out, assign and deadline when you’re back in work mode. 

I haven't tried it yet, but I see it can now integrate with Microsoft Teams - which sounds great. Best bit - the free version has always been more than enough for me and my teams. 

1Password

When you work in Production, you’ll always have a never ending list of usernames, passwords, IP addresses etc to remember. I inherited a password-protected Excel spreadsheet, which did the job, but was slow to load up in a rush. Instead, we spent some time loading all that data in a 1Password account, and now we can access it through the mobile phone app in seconds. 

On an account you can have a family account and then individual users have their own account linked to that family. That way, you can choose what data to share with which people. It’s secure (I'm no expert, but there's a good few steps to log into a new device, and that's enough reassurance for me) but, as with any data package like this, it’s only as good as the information you put in it. I have to be really disciplined about making sure it’s kept up-to-date and if anyone creates any accounts, they get added into this straight away. 

It also has nice touches like an auto password generator, Chrome integration and computer app, as well as mobile. We pay around £50 a year for this, and it covers a small team.

Planning Center 

If you’ve worked or volunteered in a larger church in the last five years, I'm almost certain they will have been using the Planning Center. It's the absolute go to for Church management software. Now to be clear from the off, it can do a lot. From event scheduling, kids work check-in, membership management and giving tools, it’s a one-stop-shop for managing a church. That said, we only use the ‘Services’ module, which is for organising all the details around your Sunday meetings or special events. In short, we found ChurchSuite (its competitor) covers all the other components, but Planning Center hands down wins for sorting your meetings. 

Planning Center will help you organise and arrange every part of your meeting. You input everything that's happening in your meeting, what teams you have, who’s on those teams, what media you’re playing out etc. It then packages that all up into user friendly viewable information. It has tools to automate a huge amount of it, layers of permissions so it can be alternated by whoever needs it, and will even track the timings of your meeting live, so you know how long each part took. If anything here is of interest, and you’ve not used Planning Center before, just let me know and I’d be happy to show you around. 

Downside is that it’s not cheap as you have to pay per team member (which includes all your volunteers). We have the 400 members plan (we currently have around 300 active users) and it works out at about £1000 a year. That said, the amount that it automates and organises saves the team a huge amount of time which more than covers this cost. It’s also a bit of a task to get it up and running as you need to input so much data (I understand you can import from some other programs though). 

Frame.io

Now, we’ve only been using Frame.io for about three months, but you won't stop me banging on about how good this piece of software is. In short, it's a web based application which allows you to share video content with whoever you want, quickly. Perfect for people who need to sign off a video, check content, or just preview something ahead of a broadcast. 

Right, so it might not sound all that groundbreaking, so why am I so hyped about it? It’s all down to how we use it. We do a video edit, then on the export page we can export and upload directly to our frame.io account (nifty plug-in for Davinci Resolve). Then we can create a review link to send to anyone we want, no accounts needed. They can instantly watch the video and leave comments connected to exact timestamps on the video. Now the best bit - those comments show up directly on the editor’s timeline! I can’t imagine that we could go from finishing an edit - sending for review - receiving feedback - then actioning that feedback, any quicker than what Frame.io allows us to do. 

We recently did a project (see previous blog post on Journey to Bethlehem), which had 33 video clips, which each got reviewed at two points, so 66 clips to watch and receive feedback on. Frame.io just handled this so brilliantly throughout and saved us hours of boring admin and at around £15 a month, it’s an absolute steal. 

Spreaker

Now this one is more specific than all the others, but it's worked so well for us over the last 18 months I decided to include it. Josh Boyle, the production engineer at Kerith, was working on a project to overhaul our podcasting, and we needed a web-based application which could manage several different podcast shows, give us great analytics, and be volunteer friendly. He landed with Spreaker and we have been so pleased with it. 

In a normal weekend (pre-Covid) we would have up to five different preachers across our four locations. We wanted to quickly edit these down and upload to each of our four different podcast streams and be available ASAP. Previously, people would have needed specific software to access our servers to upload the files, and direct our web pages to that file. Now, the file and all the information can be added directly through the Spreaker page. We then did some magic to make it appear in a user friendly way on our webpage, as well as appearing on all the usual podcast feeds (iTunes, Spotify etc).

We pay around £180 per year, which allows 500hrs of audio to be hosted. There doesn't appear to be a limit on the amount of shows you can have and we are currently at ten! It has been faultless since the day we switched onto it, and when we need support their technical helpline is always so helpful.

I’d love to hear what tools you are using to make the dull tasks just that bit easier!