Countersign Church Event Promotion Request Made Easy

E signature church event promotion request

hi I'm Craig Catlett from United Methodist Communications I'm a training and development specialist so what that means basically is that part of my job is I go around and I help churches communicate better it's a big portion of what churches do is communicate right and often what comes up is social media people have all kinds of questions about how to make their social media better Facebook is a big part of that it's a huge part of that actually it's Facebook at the time of this webinar right now is still the largest social social media application out there and so there's lots of different angles that we could take when we want to talk about Facebook lots of different skills that we could home but something that's overlooked a lot is how to promote specific events on Facebook and we've got 30 minutes to talk about that today and some question-and-answer time at the end built into the end so let's get started though so let's start with the basics we've got to walk before we can run how do we get people interested in the event how can you get your audience to investigate further about this event that you have going on at Facebook well first of all you can make it easy for people to show interest in general and so if you on your screen right now you should see a Facebook post that says getting back to the table so you notice first of all they didn't just call it a potluck a potluck may be accurate but it doesn't exactly just draw your attention in and make people want to explore more so you want to come up with a good name getting back to the table it kind of has undertones that maybe there's a bigger event a bigger movement going on maybe it goes along with the values of the church and that's a good thing so getting back to the table that's a nice short memorable title and again make it easy for people to show interest through giving them an option to explore more so if you see at the top of the the post you'll see a red area red arrow that says click here it's highlighting the click here section to sign up for the church potluck that's a great idea you're generating interest through the title and then you're giving them an outlets so they can explore it more so if you're trying to generate interest when should you start trying to generate this interest I recently in my own Facebook feed got a surprise when I saw my own face show up in my facebook feed I was completely shocked I'm helping out in an event in New England later on this year in November so whoo look where the red arrow is I'm pointing out to the date here April the 4th so this coordinator of the event is like seven months out promoting this event and that's awesome if you have time to do that that's obviously going to be a time commitment because you can't just start promoting an event 7 months in advance and then stop so once you start you're committed right well they apparently have the time to do that and that's awesome for them but for the rest of us 6 weeks that's a good time frame to start promoting your event and you want to do it once a week from that point on and also you want to make sure that you're putting some posts out there on the day of and we're going to talk more about that later when you're trying to generate your interests format matters so it take your hand and kind of cover the bottom side of this post that I've put up there so not your average joe's you've got this infographic there if you take your hand and you cover that up all you see is that plain text well that's kind of bland it's kind of blah it's helpful informational wise but it doesn't really draw your attention in now if you move your hand and you cover up the first part of the text first part of the post all you see is the infographic kind of attractive but it really doesn't give you enough information to work with that but together those work well so this is a nice basic thing a principle that she can apply is mix it up in your posts don't make it an either-or situation and something that'll help you you know because you're gonna struggle at times to come up with content if you start six weeks out you're gonna be thinking about how can I make this post interesting you know I'm talking about my event you don't want to talk about everything that's going on in your event on the very first post you don't want to go ahead and put it all out there all at once Trinity United Methodist Church I haven't seen all the posts leading up to this post promoting the event in this particular event they've listed a few different things they've got Friday movie night Saturday gadgets and then they talk about Kona ice as one of the last things that you'll find there this is fine to put all that out there but if you take all of your information you put it out there all at once you may be struggling to come up with new and fresh content so if you're thinking along the same lines that I am what if you just save the different aspects the different things that you can promote during this whole promotional period if you take one post and you make it about the movie night and then the next week you do another pose to make it about the gadgets and then another post might be about the Kona ice your teas in the event and you're also bringing you're trying to bring out some anticipation that's nice I really wanted to include this post because it's just kind of interesting fun is interesting that's going to generate some interest for you as you're scrolling through your Facebook feed there's so many things that we just pass won't even think twice about it right well I saw a kitchen sink here when I was choosing these images and choosing what to include in this and I'm like well this is pretty random I love this fun is interesting the Cedar Falls first United Methodist Church has this event going on and the doors open tomorrow afternoon and they found this nice fun of a fun image to throw in there to catch your attention which segues into what I want to talk about next which is choosing compelling images for your to represent your event images are what catch people's attention in the Facebook feed I can't tell you how many times I'm scrolling through Facebook and the more text I see you know I'm more likely just to keep on swipe and keep on scrolling the village is a church that has a great reputation in the Nashville area they do a lot of outreach and they also have a pretty strong social media game and I grabbed this post and put it up there it immediately caught my eye out of all the posts that I could use to throw in here because there's a backpack and why it caught my eyes because I have school-aged children and my first thought was hey there's something here that my kids can use your images should represent what's as most as closely as you can what's going to be going on at the event like in the back to school bash below I'm Attica Lee going to assume that they're gonna have some fun stuff for my kids to do there even before I read it it says food fun and inflatables but even before I read it I see an inflatable in the background and I know oh hey my kids love inflatables I'm more likely to stop scrolling and to look at it simply because of that image mentioning the village again another example of an image speaking to what is going to go on at your event the village has reputation of serving the community and they grabbed an image that they used that they took last year at this cent event that they did and they used it as their cover photo and so they switched out the cover photo of what would usually be there to promote their event join us this Sunday as we go into the community to help schools pack meals and create a care package this is not so such a rare thing that people are doing this but which you can also see here that takes a little bit extra work that takes it up a notch is that they've superimposed text over the image you may not know how to do this you can do it in a Photoshop you can do it even in PowerPoint I've messed around a PowerPoint before and managed to superimpose and text over pictures canva or PicMonkey are free options that you can use to superimpose some text over a picture so if that's not something that you've done yet I might consider that a quick note about images though many events that churches do involve kids so it makes sense that you're going to want to take an image of a child or children and put on your page people usually stop and and you know who and ah those pictures because kids are so cute but make sure if you're gonna use these images that you get parental approval first just a note but back to the using compelling images I really like the summer movie night image on the left its modern yet artsy but when I look at it I also can tell because of the design that if this is an ongoing thing they're gonna be able to just pull the movie logo out and keep inserting different movies in there they could it can be a trending thing that they do and nothing says pool party like a beach ball and a pool so an often overlooked tool that people forget is creating an actual Facebook event page you may not be familiar with this I wasn't always familiar with this the Facebook event page is a separate page in and of itself from your own Facebook page it's an offshoot let me show you how to do that we show you how to create one of those on the left on your screen you'll be able to see what an event page actually looks like it gives you a little bit information about the back-to-school supper and the date also of notes is if you go down about half way just under halfway on that post you'll see something about how many people are going and how many people are interested this is really good if you can't get enough people interested it gains momentum and it makes your event look good on the right you'll see a post in a Facebook feed and a regular Facebook feed that is advertising the event and you'll see at the bottom right of that post a button that says interested with a red arrow pointing down to that if your post is good enough if your post does what it's supposed to do and gains attention and gets people and gets people interested they can actually click on the interested button and from that point on whenever you make an update to the event page they'll be able to see that update in there feed if you've ever done anything in facebook with events before you'll probably recognize this page so if you scroll down on the left hand side of your screen on your Facebook feed you'll see the events section if you click on that you'll be able to see a button that says create a page this is what will happen when you click that create a page button so the very first option there on the left with numbered one you'll see a box that pops open that says create private event or create public event you're gonna want to create a public event because you want as many people as possible to be able to see what's going on you're gonna also want to make yourself the host of this event which I don't have pictured here but it's an option and then you'll want to put a really good image there and that's what you do in step two you'll be able to advertise the times and the dates for the event and then you were gonna grab a really eye-catching post to stick in there so why go through all the trouble for creating your own event and event page if you don't max it out with the appropriate image so Facebook is a tool for the people people are what make Facebook work and it makes complete sense with as many churches that are using Facebook and as many people within the churches that are using Facebook that you would reach out to your congregation and say hey can you help us with this event we're trying to get the word out as much as possible so start marketing your event through other people's Facebook page here are garner United Methodist Church in North Carolina they say hey garner UMC peeps help us to spread the word by liking and sharing our crafts fair Facebook page and event it just makes sense when you think about it you can get a grassroots movement started just from announcing it in church and encouraging people to start to share it on their own before this training I had never thought about what I'm about to tell you about right now you can create a graphic size it as a profile picture and ask people to make it their profile picture you can actually put an ask out there and say will you donate your profile pic so a couple of weeks leading up to whatever event you have going on if you've already done the work to create a a smaller graphic you want to do anything big something smaller that people can stick into their profile pic you'll have some free advertising every time somebody makes a Facebook post you always see the person's picture another out-of-the-box idea for promoting your event is to have someone else do the marketing outside of the church for free I have an image on your screen of Glendale United Methodist Church in Nashville and they are actually known for the social media and you're actually going to be able to talk to someone who handles the social media there at the end during the Q&A Stephen Adair who works at United Methodist communications handles Glendale United Methodist Church's Facebook page so he may even be responsible for this post we have to ask him later but in the upcoming events section you can kind of see glendale's strategy of what they're doing they're connecting their church to their community by putting community events and their feed they have something for jteem or middle school and another nonprofit the room in the end in Nashville so it doesn't necessarily have to be a church you can partner with other nonprofits in the community and scratch each other's back and get some advertising that way here's what it looks like when a church is helping another church we've got Galloway United Methodist Church sharing Oakland United Methodist Church what they have going on the free community pig roast which actually sounds really good co-hosting is something you see in the business world a lot if you've ever been to a large event you may see a whole list of sponsors well you can get co-hosts on Facebook when you look at the left and you see the image for a movie night on Brookside right under that where the red arrow is pointing you'll see hosted by Brooks eye collective and two others so if you were to click on the two others you'll see the image on the right this is what happens it pulls up everyone that's involved with that event and you even have a First United Methodist Church helping out the Brookside collective so make some contacts in the community and say hey you know we can start to promote your event would you help us and promote ours and you can have some free advertising that way and I leave this for next-to-last because what you want to do a good strategy is to exhaust all of your organic reach that's your natural reach that's asking the people that you know in the congregation to do this and using your other strategies you want to get all that natural reach going before you finally start putting some money into it paid advertising is what you want to use last so Facebook makes money off of several different things one of those is when you pay for an ad there's not enough time in this webinar to go over how to create an ad but we can't talk about boosting really quickly as I've traveled around and talked to different church leaders you would be surprised how many people still are boosting organic reach where something goes viral because you've created you know the the best image and the most creative text out there and it just catches fire and people are sharing left and right it's a white squirrel it hardly ever happens that way a lot of the stuff that does really well on Facebook is boosted the screenshot on this slide was taken from our rethink church admin page if you've ever been to the inside section of the admin page you've seen something like it on the screen you can see reach and engagement for one week of posts in April of 2016 you see minimal reach and engagement except for the post on April the 27th the April the 27th post is the boosted post with engagement and reach that if you can see it just a triple and quadruple anything that's already else been that's already been on there you would be surprised though how affordable boosting remains you don't have to break the bank in order to get those type of results this is what your screen looks like when you're building your boosted posts but before I mentioned anything else your eyes will likely be drawn to the section that says total budget 500 dollars that amount is not typical for most small businesses and nonprofits especially churches you can boost a post for five dollars and still see results when boosting choose demographics you can see there the age range 18 to 65 you just need to give some thought to your target audience about who you're trying to reach younger parents people did the baby boomer generation they're all on Facebook you just need to give it some thought it doesn't show it on this screen but you'll have an opportunity to boost the post of people within a certain mile radius of your church building there will be a time question asking for how long you'd like to boost the post it'd be a good idea to boost your post all the way up to the day of your event once you've exhausted all your natural reach and as a matter of design practice you'll see some consistency between boosted posts and what we've already discussed in the webinar boost a post should be different from each other you know you each time you boost opposed to use a different image or graphic or different text in the posts or anything like that you can also boost your post your your actual event page rather and select friends of attendees and friends of people who like your page so you are boosting your content out to people who are actually interested in the event and you already know that you can set this demographic as part of the parameters you can start this boost process from the boost event button in the top right hand corner of the Facebook event page and you can select other demographic information here as well so after you've done all of this leading up to the event you're going to want to create some buzz on the day of on the actual day of the event we're not quite off the hook yet we want to do some day of promoting here's an ad from Galloway United Methodist Church there's a post there boosting their event they're just trying to remind people the events going on today and as they say at the top it's not too late to register join us tonight at five o'clock today's the day they also have a hashtag which is a great practice to do if you look to the right hand side of the ad you'll see the hashtag beds for kids and I'm assuming that that is some type of benefit something they're going to do to help other people and another great way to promote your event on the day of it's something that's caught fire this past year you'll probably notice as you're scrolling through your Facebook feed tons of video I just ten minutes ago before we started this maybe twenty minutes ago before we started this webinar I was scrolling through Facebook and I was watching a pastor go live and he was using Facebook life Facebook life is so easy and the Facebook algorithm actually favors video using Facebook life so if you were to link off to YouTube usually in your Facebook feed Facebook live is something that's more likely to show up in someone else's Facebook feed because Facebook wants you to stay on Facebook the picture that I have on your screen right now is kind of a collage that you'll see it's a great idea to put together a bunch of images and send them out about 30 minutes before the event in this collage you'll often see video to Facebook live can be thrown in there as well you want to do it 30 minutes during you'll take a fait you'll just if you open up your face your your Facebook app and looked at the top left hand side you'll see the button that says live when you click that take a shot of yourself take a shot of the signage and just give a brief hey this is who I am here's what's going on in the event and try to showcase the excitement that's going on interview people get that lined up and then also ask people to check in when they're at the event we don't want all of this information that I'm just giving you to be a one-way situation if you are streaming this webinar from the from the website you should see a red box that should allow you to send us messages and ask us questions so I have that up on the screen if you can find something that looks just like that we'll take your questions now I think some have been coming in during the webinar and we saw a Q&A to my left over here you're gonna see Stephen Adair who's the gentleman that I mentioned earlier who handles the the social media for Glendale United Methodist Church and he's going to help me out with the questions as well so I'm gonna take a second and consults my question sheet and see what we've gotten so far okay Steven feel free to chime anytime you want if you like it says you say post once a week meanwhile I'm glad this is a good one I've meant to say this meanwhile I am posting a bunch of other things that are not concerned with the event will the event post get lost is once a week enough so if you're already on a tight Facebook schedule and let's say you're posting a few times a week for Facebook already and then you start add adding this Facebook event on top of that if you ever felt like you're getting spammed through Facebook before what you might want to do is start to exchange one of your regular Facebook posts for one of the Facebook event posts I'm not sure as so much about it at getting getting lost there is some debate and just even you can chime in here if you want to about would you think is one weekend is once a week enough for an event post I think once you get closer to the event of course when you're far out you don't want to over post about you know what's coming because people are you know when it's coming up is when they really kind of keep it in their mind so you know if you're months out you don't want to post so frequently about it but once you're coming up to it you know a week or two out you know I don't think it would hurt to post once or twice a week and especially the day leading up and and even the day of just to remind people with the last minute and you know in a way you don't want to compete with yourself on your Facebook page so you know I think it's a healthy thing just to show that your page is active to post at least three or four times a week different content and if you and with Facebook not all of your audience is actually going to see each post so you know so posting a couple times of the same thing with different graphics or different text of course would be good and it's not going to overly spam and also you can boost certain you don't have to boost everything but like you said you can boost a post for a dollar so for my local church I put up boost most of our posts for a dollar each I mean just pay for that out of my pocket you know and it just doesn't cost that much to reach so many people and we've seen such good return on that so when you're boosting an event you can boost it for you know three days or however long you want to and in a way if you're not over posting in general on your page you shouldn't really be competing with yourself so you just don't want to be boosting multiple things at the same time to the same audience and especially depending on what your event is like if it's you know our young adult group that's thriving right now at my church so you know we have events on Facebook that are geared towards young adults so I target a certain age group a certain location so really using your targeting it's very easy to do helps not overpopulate people's feeds or sustain them per se that's not either sin it I got you nice someone was asking about compelling images our faces are real people real members the best so the alternative to that would be you know are you using stock images are you grabbing things that may look professional but aren't necessarily representative of your church right and so I think this is a great question in terms of using faces the numbers show I can't quote all the studies here or whatever but the numbers shows that pictures of people interacting where they're having some type of connection really draw people in they're really good for engagement Instagram there's been a study on Instagram showing that people pictures of people interacting where you can tell they're know their faces or turn to each other and it's it's fairly zoomed in on that or whatever get more engagement there is a and huncle tap your expertise here if you want to or whatever I mean how much of this should be real from your own church and how much should be aspirational maybe so to speak that look how wonderful our church is look at these awesome images but maybe maybe it is representative of real members your church maybe not do you have any thoughts on that you know when I and just this is for not the denomination but for the local church I think you have to figure out a healthy balance of you know we're east our fitness classes so I did use stock imagery but I didn't use people's faces because they're not real people in our community I see so yeah I think that there's a way to use some sort of stock imagery that that's helpful and shows that you're not trying to represent your community with these other people that are from it you know wherever but I think really for event graphics to use I think if you'd like their clips like so the solar eclipse was a big thing a couple weeks ago and you know find an eclipse photo online you know find something specific to the event because in in some ways I think using real people would be helpful but also you have to frame those real people in a good way yeah not only do you need to get their permission to use their image but you know just as an example there's a church that I've seen on Facebook and you know if they're promoting a worship service or something they'll take a photo from the back of the sanctuary and there's like 20 people in this huge sanctuary you know so you have to also frame your photos to where it looks good right and make somebody want to come and some churches don't utilize photography and the best ways to to to reach out to that person on the outside that might be interested in your event or service or whatnot so you just have to really think smart about the images you use and as far as people you know if it's if it's a good image yeah I don't you know I think people respond more to like beautiful landscapes an event specific kind of image than a person's face because for one they don't know that person so I mean if it's a kids event if you have permission to use their image you know I think kids are a big selling point for people to come to an event if it's you know kids specific or even your church because kids don't know you know there's a new life and there's a new there's excitement and so it's kids right yes so I think using that to your advantage you just have to use images to where it looks like there's something going on and there's excitement gonna use people so one of the questions was do you have some recommendations for sites for images graphics and other ways to have pictures which I think we kind of touched on that a little bit just now can you cancel an event on Facebook I've never done that before I can delete an event okay but I think it does notify whoever is attending or interested in your event that you have canceled it so just keep that in mind if you need to cancel it and you might just instead of canceling it if it actually happens then it just you know it's a past event so just there's no point to delete it but if it gets canceled for something it might be good to actually notify by writing in the event itself why you're cancelling instead of just deleting it without any explanation so okay someone's asking how does one check-in I know attending but don't know how to do it to check-in it depends on if you're on your computer your mobile device you could just you can either go to the event and I believe when the events actually happening there's a check-in button somewhere on that event on the page itself but you can also just check in using your normal feed where you would post a status and there's a little check-in button right so you can you can check in that way too but I think on the event there's a there's a place to check in somewhere here's another interesting question and I get this a lot when I'm out of different trainings for a bunch of different things where's the best place to find those stock images that we were referring to so you'll always get a win with Shutterstock but you have to pay for that image is usually 30 bucks and then there's a package deal for more where you can get five images and things like that but as far as free goes well first of all we'll talk about the uncom asset Bank United Methodist Communications has thousands of images that you can use for free if you type in um combo United Methodist Communications asset Bank and Google or being that it's one of the first options that comes up and you can have access to all of ours you just there's a process but you go in and you create an account and just tell us what you're using it for you can have all there where did the unsplash unsplash is another good one to use on splash a lot not you've not used other place which ones do you favored you know for the local church just um you know not you know not professional per se or finding these just professional-grade images of s at Bank of you some of you in comes images as well but you can just do a google search for something like that's where I get a lot of our local church photos and you type in free images or no so I just type in so the Eclipse image that we used found it on Google the fitness we started fitness classes in my local church so I've pushed out a bunch about that and used images for different like the yoga class the fitness class running group you just found that on Google and you just type it in but make sure that you there's a way to select on Google the usage rights and just make sure it's not copyrighted and you can there's just a ton of free images just on Google so you know use our asset Bank of course but you know you can find those images just make sure you have permission to use them before you use them okay could you please talk more about PicMonkey and canva free apps thank you that's for a melody and you'll see Virginia Beach I'm not I'm not using PicMonkey in canva as much as I know some other other people are if you ever used don't use PicMonkey but canva we use a lot for cover photos or really even just spiritual development memes that are on the United Methodist Church Facebook page you can overlay text you can edit the image you can put images together with the borders it's it's and it's free so it's it's it's a really good tool to you know update and modernize imagery that you use and how long should a Facebook live event run I know I know some people that though just throw their whole service on Facebook live or whatever that'll be like well you've got to cut the music out but I've heard mixed things about doing that because you know can we really hold someone's attention on Facebook live that long for say 30 minutes or something like that we've got a person sermon going on there but I've known people to go longer or whatever my personal thing that I tell people to do is if you could you know if you know up front you're gonna have this is the biggest you know bang for your buck this is the most interesting part or whatever I go and I catch ten minutes of that or 15 minutes of that and keep that on Facebook and that's what I tell people though what have you run into I don't think there's a magic number I think when your facebook liveing you just have to keep into account that it's going to take a second to build your audience at the beginning so don't start it right off with something strong and like even this webinar right now as being on our on unite methods communications facebook page and is streaming live there was some feed time before you actually started in on the webinar just to build your audience so a good 30 seconds of either just fluff like introduction whatnot before you really start in on what's going on but you know I think if your worship service is something you know that's just one example or your event is something to share with the community I mean you know there's people at home that I'll just use worship I guess that can't be there can't attend and they would actually enjoy doing that and as long as you have a there's a streaming license that you have to get if you have music I think that's like $60 a year or so you know and if you're a vent if there's music in the background just make sure you have the proper licenses to do that but I don't know if there's a magic number or magic timeframe you could do you know a few minutes to service so people are still trying to figure out the best things we're Facebook live I think since it's so new and yeah I know you can pin an event or post to the top of your page is this a good idea you ran into that it can't hurt you do have the option to pin a post I don't think people really go to your Facebook page a lot like your church page Facebook page and I think that's another question that's coming up in all this we're talking about churches having a Facebook page versus a group so a group that's more internal so if you have a um w circle or young adult group or or whatnot you know if you want to communicate internally with that you can always add new people to that but we're talking about a Facebook page which is outward facing and external to really promote your church and your events and stuff so question just asking it's a good idea yes it can't hurt it's there for for that oh yeah and also I don't think a lot of people go to your Facebook page a lot so whatever your posting is showing up on people's newsfeed right and they might come to your actual Facebook page but really when people are seeing your content it's your post in their own newsfeed versus actually coming to your church's Facebook page right right right here's one should we have a Facebook event for all our regular events such as a monthly book study um w work party monthly group dinners what about our Sunday worship services I say no I say every event that you put in that on that event page is gonna make every other event less important if that makes any sense so if you have a ton of events on your event page it's just gonna double as your church calendar and it minimizes anything that you're really trying to get traction on and draw attention to would you agree with that I would agree with that yeah I'd agree with that completely I mean definitely promote your services and your events you know normal posts you know there should be a promotional post about your worship service during the week at some point there should be a promotional post if you're starting something new that's just ongoing but as far as an event you know I think it takes something special like a solar eclipse party or you know that that Fall Festival or whatnot that's you really want people new people that are outside of your church to come to not just you know a rotating event of a worship weekly worship service or anything so yeah that guy could do his instrument Instagram good for promoting event his Instagram good for promoting events or more of a what's happening now images we're talking about Facebook I did briefly mention Instagram earlier do you have an opinion on that the thing about Instagram is is that what we use it for on the local church in as a denomination is just photos of what's going on it's not really I don't personally use it as a hey check this out it's coming the issue with that is you can't actually have links and you can have a link in the post but it's not actually going to be a live link so unless you have a friendly URL when if you're in charge of your church's website like just for example Glendale UMC org slash worship or slash I don't know Fall Fest or you know if you don't have something that's friendly there's just this long URL then nobody's going to take the time to actually type that in or they'd have to go back and forth so as far as event promotion you can totally throw out the picture of there with your graphic of I did that for our solar eclipse party you know saying hey come to this and so I mean you can definitely utilize it as that I would I would probably gear more on Facebook you're gonna get a lot more traction on Facebook and using events on there to get people to come I agree and it's probably worth saying too that the the demographic for people that use Instagram it based on what statistics show take it with a grain of salt it shows a much younger demographic using Instagram than the people that tend to comprise Facebook you'll get some older Millennials that are really into Facebook but and then Gen Xers of baby boomers but the younger Millennials who love Instagram not so much for Facebook so can I send an invitation to all my page followers to the event or only my friend my friends can I send an invitation to all my page followers to the event or all my friends I don't know the answer to that either you can definitely invite your friends and I think when you create as your page create an event that lives on your church's Facebook page I'm pretty sure it'll send out a notification to all of your followers saying that your church is hosting whatever the event may be so I don't know if you can necessarily go down the list and hit invite to all your page followers but I think that they will get a notification I believe saying you know this is happening so that's probably the best way to do that and hopefully by posting the event on Facebook and you know emailing it out or whatnot you can get people to to RSVP and say that they're coming because the more people that are coming internally then that creates it's a buzz itself for external or an outside audience to say oh I might want to check this out if there's you know not zero people coming so definitely engage your your audience that you already have your congregation to engage with the event on Facebook so that will encourage outside participation as well I think and it looks like this could be our last question how about using video announcements to promote an event in advance is this a good idea I think so yeah I yeah I think video video is you could do Facebook live like you were saying that Pasteur was doing yes to promote an event and the good thing about Facebook live that we haven't talked about is that when your page goes live it actually notifies your followers that you're going live so it's actually better than just posting a pre-recorded video a pre-recorded video and then just posting it so you can totally do that which is better than just a text post but if you can do live if your pastor or whoever's leading they have been or somebody that's just you know going to be good on camera and engaging I think that that would be better than just a text post even with a photo you know video people are going to engage with a short video announcing your event don't go 45 minutes explaining your event on Facebook but you know a couple minutes or a minute or two you would be good so we're getting a lot of questions about video recording on this webinar in general so we're getting a lot of them coming through the recorder webinar of what we've done today is going to be archived to just to watch it just click the link that you clicked to view this live webinar and it be available later on today I'm gonna leave you with a slide of my information I'm Craig Catlett again the training and development specialists and that's my email address yeah if I don't know the answer to your question if we didn't cover it today we didn't get to whatever or if you just want me to elaborate on some things shoot me an email I'll be happy to get back with you if it's something that I don't know I'll probably hit Stephen up or someone else in this office we've got a lot of smart people so thanks for joining us today for this webinar there's lots of things that you can learn and check out on Facebook I'll point you to a training that we have on the the training website here United Methodist Communications we've got what's called a micro training meaning you can finish it in like ten minutes about boosting and ads all in itself so if you go to the United Methodist Communications website and just look up the training homepage you'll be able to find that very fairly easily Stephen yeah thanks man I appreciate it yeah everyone thanks joining us joining us you