In ministry we want people to respond to our message with tangible actions and to do that we need to create what this training article refers to as "ministry motivating communications."
In contrast to administrative or teaching communications, the purpose of ministry motivating communications, is to create a change in the lives of your audience. That change might be to encourage them to grow in their walk with Jesus, to become involved in a ministry, to donate time or money, to be challenged to share their faith. To be most effective creating these behavior responses, ministry motivating communications must involve the hearts and emotions of your audience in addition to their minds. When the heart is involved, people are more likely to take action. And to involve the heart, it's helpful to stimulate emotions to drive that response.
An important point needs to be clarified here. This isn't about creating artificial, falsely generated, ramped-up emotions. This is not about by-passing the mind—solid facts, statistics, and examples are part of the foundation of our communications, but to motivate to action, conviction, and life change, we often need to go beyond the facts.
Children dying of hunger; children without education or drinking water, young people sold into slavery, these issues and many more are worthy of our deepest emotions. We should cry. They should pull at our hearts. Some situations should make us sick to our stomach and angry.
When Christians do not grow in their faith, when they act in disobedience to God's Word and harm themselves and others, when they do not walk worthy of their calling and cause the Lord shame, whether from lack of teaching, not knowing any better, or outright disobedience, we shouldn't be indifferent. This is not how the Christian life is to be lived.
These situations need to be changed. The task of the Christian communicator is to share situations and stories, physically and spiritually, locally and globally, so that people will see the needs, feel them in their hearts, and respond in concrete actions.
We can do that in print and online writing, and in addition, video gives us a powerful tool to create ministry motivation communication.
Video as a tool to communicate ministry messages
Video works well for ministry motivating communications because it is a proven and popular tool for telling stories packed with emotion. Obviously, not all the emotion generated on YouTube and other video sources is spiritually uplifting. But in addition to the silly and useless, are professionally produced videos that clearly tell ministry stories and motivate to action. These videos change lives and sometimes do great things for the kingdom of God.
We might admire them, but that admiration is often from afar, as many church communicators don't have the money or skills, time or training to create them.
The great news for church communicators is that you don't need any money and very little training to create powerful ministry videos—all you need is the free online tool for creating them available at: http://www.animoto.com. Anyone can try it for free, full use of the program costs $249 a year. However there is a free non-profit upgrade available and here is the link to it: http://animoto.com/cause.
Check it out--it's a tool that is so much fun and so easy to use, it's almost too good to be true.
To show you how it can be used, following are 4 ministry videos I created with animoto for various ministry purposes. It will take you a little over 6 minutes to watch all of them and I urge you to do that before you continue. PLEASE ignore the YouTube advertising on he videos, click it off (I didn't sign up or it or get paid for it—Effective Church Communications takes no advertising or has affiliate relationships of any kind) and the YouTube links at the end. I put the videos on YouTube for the widest possible ministry reach, but that outreach does have annoying costs with it.
After the videos, I'll share the process for creating them and then some more tips on finding photos and writing for motivational videos.
Four ministry motivational videos created using animoto
Does God care when we mess up?
This video was created to be a reminder of Jesus' love and acceptance. The images are from the wonderful group: www.freebibleimages.org
Mexico Backpack Ministry
This video was created to motivate the congregation to buy supplies and backpacks for orphanages in Mexico. I wanted them to see the conditions at the orphanage and the faces of the children.
Halloween video: Consider Jesus
This video was created to challenge people to think about Jesus at Halloween–the only person who ever conquered death. In addition it was created as an encouragement to church members to realize that Halloween can be a great evangelistic opportunity–people are already thinking about the afterlife–give them something true to consider!
Why I can be happy video
This was one of the first animoto videos I created and the images and resolution aren’t very good. It was created to encourage a very young woman who stood against strong pressure to abort her baby. She had tangible support, but this was my way to support her (I hoped) emotionally and spiritually.
Process for creating a ministry motivational video with animoto
- After you come up with the theme or message you want to share, assemble a group of images related to it. These can be anything from copyright free images from the web, to pictures you took in your ministry, to images from a group like http://www.freebibleimages.com. More later on images and how to get useful photos.
- Write brief captions or descriptions you want to go with the images. Here you want to tell your story, summarize what is going on, and ask for the response you want from your audience. More later on writing for a ministry videos.
- Select a template for your video with animoto. There is a large variety to choose from including ones that are peaceful and calm, very simple, and others that are edgy in style. The videos above where the template made the biggest impact on the creation of the video itself are the one on Backpack Ministry where the sand and butterflies were part of the template and the Halloween video where the splashes of color were part of the video.
- Upload your images and words. Edit until they fit the word limit for animoto, tell your story, and communicate your message clearly and completely.
- Select some music for a soundtrack. Animoto has a large library of music and all the ones in the videos above came from it.They have a section of Christian music.
- Click a key on your computer—wait a few minutes for animoto to assemble your words, images, and music and out pops a video like the ones above.
- You can continue to edit, change music, add or whatever you want to do to create the video you want.
It really is that easy. All the great transitions, how everything ties together, creating the HD video—all of that is done for you by animoto.
What animoto does not do is create your content and following are some more tips to help you do that. There is much more on this site about images, writing, creating ministry content, but below are a few reminder tips.
How to get pictures that will touch hearts and motivate to action
- For mission photos, your people, church and ministry members are the best sources. However, you need to train your people to take good pictures. Because I didn't have the opportunity to coach the team before the previous year's trip on how to take pictures, I went through over 100 photos to find the few I was able to use in the video on the Mexico Backpack ministry and it was extremely frustrating to find any that were useful.
- Most mission and ministry pictures are of groups and these are virtually useless in creating videos with impact. Group shots have one purpose—to give them away to members of the group who were at the event, but they don't communicate anything to an audience not already familiar with the people in them.
- For pictures with a message or emotions, shoot up close; take people pictures, but don't always have everyone staring into the camera.
- One of the best ways to get good ministry pictures is to shoot closely AROUND people when they are engaged in action. Focus on one or two people at a time and take pictures from every angle.
- If you want effective pictures of ministry leaders, shoot them talking to someone—don’t ever just stand them up against a wall and tell them to smile. People in ministry come alive when engaged in action with others.
- DO NOT follow the current trend of having people act dumb and of leaders making stupid faces. I know many will not agree with me on this, but I believe this demeans people and ministry. They don't look cool; they look silly. We are to walk worthy in all things and to represent our Lord. You can show people having fun without making fun of them.
- Take pictures that describe the setting--big and little things--don't just show me the building from a distance--show me the front door, the view from it, what kids see from their windows. Road signs and landmarks are helpful resources for mission videos.
- NEVER, EVER take a picture of someone in a humiliating position. The classic example of this would be pictures of a child with flies on his or her face--please, never do that. Always show the "after" picture when possible—the child fed and at play; the abused woman working; the ex-convict reunited with his family.
SPECIAL NOTE ABOUT IMAGES USED IN THE VIDEO: the images for the video about the Prodigal Son came from a fantastic group: http://www.freebibleimages.org. They have created sets of images in both photograph and drawing format that they make available to any ministry to use. They intentionally do not have words with their images so ministry groups around the world can use them. In part I created that video and another one using their drawings to encourage other teachers to use their materials.
YOU MUST use words—but be very careful with your words
A picture may be worth a 1,000 words, but without captions and short phrases like what I put into the videos, the pictures alone either mean nothing, or they mean whatever story is going on in someone's head at the time.
You must guide the thought pattern of your audience with your words as they look at your images. Not too much—this is where animoto is a great help because you are limited in your word count. This forces you to create haiku-type phrases. Though short, they must be clear and almost without emotion because you don't want the emotion to come from you--you want it to clearly create a situation that will cause your reader to feel the emotion. This can be challenging to do. For example, in the video about the Prodigal Son:
I wrote: "and his only friends, were pigs"
I didn't say: "It was horrible! The mess he got in should teach us to not be self-indulgent and not to associate with bad people."
I wrote: "instead of scolding, his father threw a party"
I didn't say: "Isn't this wonderful! His father was merciful and gracious, illustrating to us the transcendent character of God in a tangible way to sinners."
You see how the second examples of what I didn't say were correct descriptions and true statements. But they said too much and the excess of words detracts from the power of the image to touch your heart.
In addition the first part of statements, "It was horrible" and "Isn't this wonderful!" tell the reader what to feel. And if that feeling does not resonate with the reader, maybe they don't think the mess was "horrible" or maybe they don't think "wonderful" is how they would describe the situation, the images lose their impact. You don't want your audience internally disagreeing with you when you are attempting to touch their hearts for action.
Instead of thinking or feeling for your audience, give them the most precise, short descriptions possible to tell your story and then let the audience feel the emotion.
Never stop with description or telling your story, no matter how compelling
Always tell your audience what to do after you have created an emotion that makes them want to respond. As we talked about in earlier, we don't create videos to stir emotions for the sake of emotions. We want to use videos to motivate to ministry action.
In the Prodigal Son video it ends with: "tell Jesus you want to come home."
In the Backpack video it tells people about the upcoming mission trip, encourages them to pick up a list and to "be part of the joy." In addition to the Video itself, a lot of additional communication was needed to make the outreach successful. I created specific shopping lists for the supplies needed, brochures that explained the mission, needs, who was in charge, and where to go for more information, and a poster display. The materials were distributed online and at the church welcome center.
The Halloween video challenges people to: consider Jesus and live
The Why I can be happy video has the response throughout--that we can be happy because Jesus loves and forgives us no matter what.
In summary, to get people to take ministry action, present the situation and the story truthfully, clearly, and completely in video or print format. Then get out-of-the-way. If God counts your story worthy, He will touch hearts to respond.
Please share your thoughts, comments, questions!