After spending the week at GA in the Communications room, I saw a lot of video taping going on and figured it might be useful to talk about the setup at Chalice.

We started recording our services as part of a multisite program with Temecula Valley UU. Our biggest use has been by our pastoral care team showing the services to shut-ins. This has been a big draw and there has been a steady demand for the recordings by the committee.

The Sony Handycam DCR-SR100 turns out to be a nice piece of work. This is not a professional quality camera but I highly recommend it for starting to record video of your services.

The main benefit of this camera is that it has a 30-gigabyte hard drive that stores over 7 hours of high-quality video which you can download directly to your computer or burn from the camera directly to a DVD recorder. That’s pretty sweet for newbies.

 The audio captures Dolby Digital 5.1-channel surround sound via its built-in microphone. It works well and the limitations are going to from the location at the camera rather than closer to the source. That means if someone is sitting next to the camera with a sniffle, you will HEAR it.

The camera comes with Sony Vega video processing software. I use Adobe Premiere Pro because that’s what I learned. You’ll learn that processing video can take a long time and use lots of disk space. Constructing DVDs is another issue altogether. Keep it simple and forget the fancy menus for now.

The rest of the features don’t really matter too much until you get a little more sophisticated. A few notes:

• The camera stores video in 2Gb chunks which is about 30 minutes. That screwed me up the first few times until I realized what was going on.
• The shoe at the top is propriety to Sony
• There is no way to get any other audio feed into the camera.
• The camera can take 3 megapixel stills but, frankly, it sucks at taking stills. Very grainy with lots of color noise. Any cheap digital camera can do better. Save yourself a lot of headache and stick to video unless you are really really desparate.
• Don’t bother shooting in “wide-screen” mode. All it does is lop off the top and bottom of the video. And besides, it is a big pain as far as compatability.
• You’ll definitely need a tripod despite the photo above.

Because I am anal-retentive, I extract the audio and do some noise reduction on it. There is a big air conditioner compressor and an equally big “voom voom voom” in the audio.  But luckily it easily removed. Then I can’t help but adjust the lighting because we have ugly fluorescent lights.  

Someone donated a miniDV camera recently that is a little older but I will be comparing the results.

Another of my articles was published :-). The talk was called “Why Liberal Churches are Growing” but I like my title better. The characteristics apply to any congregation whether liberal or conservative. To me, this was one of the most important talks at GA.

We can learn a great deal from conservative churches. Please abandon your stereotype that they are mindless automatons who just attend and throw money at their congregation. It’s insulting and ignorant on our part.

Like any organization, they are doing something right when that many people feel that they are being ministered to effectively. Read the article.

As I am a newbie here covering GA, I get a little slack cuz I don’t quite know the process. So I kinda screwed up getting my articles submitted but, finally, my first UUA GA 2007 article has hit the UUA website! This was about the Unitarian church in Transylvania.  Okay, you can stop now, it’s not about vampires. Just read the article.

 Tonight I was at the Youth and Young Adult Coffee House. Wowser! That should have been covered by streaming video. As I write this, the ceiling over my head is a-shakin and a-rumblin’ with all the kids yelling and screaming! You’d think it was an earthquake! Man I have not heard or felt so much smokin’ hot passion, angst, emotion, energy since, well, since I was a teenager. I’d post some pictures but I figured I better not. I also can’t repeat some of the stuff. No matter how good or bad, the performances were all buoyed by a level of energy and hormones that was amazing.

What a buzz!

 Ciao!

Through the vagaries of chance, I got the opportunity to present at one of the workshops on organizing newsworthy justice events (Thank you, Janet!). One of the other speakers talked about social justice while I talked about PR. We each gave a short talk and then followed up with about 30 minutes of questions. The following is from my notes:

My name is Dean Goddette and I am chair of Outreach at Chalice Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Escondido, California. Just north of San Diego, Escondido is one of the most conservative cities in the state with a record of making it illegal for landlords to rent to illegal immigrants, to force the closure of emergency homeless shelters because they attact drug addicts, thieves and illegal immigrants. And besides, as one city councilor put it, “The bible says that the poor will always be with us. ”

In the midst of this, in fact, probably because of this, we have doubled in size from about 90 members to 193 members in about 5 years.  We are one of the fastest growing congregations in California.

And it’s not by advertising. If you leave here with one message it is that it is what you do as individuals that drives inreach and outreach and congregational growth.

For you outreach and PR people, a few questions:

• How many have a listing in your local paper’s church directory?
• How many of you know who the religion editor or writer at your local paper?
• How many have written up a news story with pictures and provided it to the religion writer?

Newspaper reporters are almost always starved for copy. They have careers and they want to move up the ladder. Several stories that we started with a local paper “graduated” to the larger regional paper. The local reporters become a resource for you as to what is newsworthy. As you develop a relationship, you don’t have to write everything up, you can pitch them a story on the phone and they will say yea or nay.

My Outreach co-chair has focussed on PR and has a list of all the papers and newspaper reporters. He contacts them on a regular basis. But be aware that reporters have a nose for BS. You need to actually be presenting them with news.

For those of you in social action or justice, you are the ones who can lead your congregation and provide newsworthy events for outreach. They can’t make stuff up. So the more authentic the event the better.

I’ve bumped into everyone except Al so I don’t know if I believe that he is actually here ;-).

There are two things that I’d like to see happen differently next year. First, I would bring my guitar and encourage other musicians to do the same. I am shocked, SHOCKED! at the lack of random music. Second, I would encourage people to watch the streaming video. Your first choice should be to attend but, if you can’t, watch the video.

The last two days have been a bit crazy. As I mentioned, I was recruited to be on a panel  and that went well as best I can tell.

There are a number of events that are streamed live from the General Assembly but unless people actually start watching, it will be going away. Not that I have any inside knowledge. But like anything else, if it costs money (and I am sure that it is not cheap) and people aren’t using it, it will go away.

I have to admit that this is my first GA and I have not watched any of the streaming coverage of the last five or six GAs that were covered. But since I am here in the communications room at GA, I have watched a great deal of the streaming coverage.

There are some basic questions. Do people know that the streaming coverage exists? If they do, is the material covered of interest to them?

From my own experience, I had absolutely no idea about what went on at GA. Shame on me, I missed out on a great deal over the years. But also, like a lot of UUs, I was anti-authoritarian and had some real misconceptions about the UUA. So, for better or worse, the more I could ignore them the better. UU was all about my local congregation, not the UUA.

But that’s changed now. I attended an excellent session by Terasa Cooley about the characteristics of growing congregations. One of the points was that growing congregations establish a good balance between “I”, “We” and a “Larger Vision”. I have been stuck in “I” and “We” for a long time now. But the times they are a changin’…

Goooooood morning. It’s 7:30AM on Thursday. It is the calm before the storm. As I was sitting in the war room / web center / communications center at GA, I felt the strong urge that I should be smoking a cigarette along with my coffee, diet Coke and cold pizza.

People have been drifting in and I am only starting to remember their names. The two Lances (Lance 1 and Lance 2, also known as Thing1 and Thing2 or T1 and T2) have been getting things ready for streaming video. they’ve been working on it all week so right now it seems to involve sitting at a computer and working very very intently.

We started the coffee going and soon after the hotel staff came by with buckets of coffee. We were chatting and Janet says, “Oh! You’re Dean Goddette!” Not quite sure how to take that but it turns out that Janet is Janet Hayes teh UUA Public Relations Director. She had seen one of my posts on PR-L. “I wanted to ask you to tell that story at my workshop but I thought it was rude to ask someone only a week before the session.” After more coffee, she reminded me of what I had posted (ok, it was early) and I said I would be glad to do it. When is the session? “Oh, it’s at 10:30, so now I feel really bad asking you to do it two hours before the workshop.”

I’m glad to do it. As a matter of fact, I have to head out now to get ready. I probably should have eaten something…

I’ve struggled with cassette tapes, Sony minidisk recorders (multiple kinds), mp3 recorders. Finally, I did some research into small recorders and invested in a Zoom H4 and boy I have never been happier.

There are other field recorders that you might want to check out such as the Sony MZ-M100 or 200, Edirol R-09, M-Audio MicroTrack 24/96 among others. There are some great reviews of all of these units in gory detail, particularly by Mark Nelson.

Why is it handy for church work?

1. It’s easy to use. On the top panel, four small buttons select between MP3 and the three WAV sample rates. The relatively large Rec button does what you think. Press it once and it flashes to signify “standby.” A second press starts recording. Couldn’t be simpler.
2. Records up to 16 hours. The Zoom H4 uses SD memory up to 1 Gb. That’s good for about 1,000 minutes (that’s 16 hours) of recording in mp3 format. Two AA batteries are good for about 4 hours of recording. So, I get in early, set up the recorder, turn it on and go have coffee (yes, before the service!). There is no rushing around to flip tapes or changing disks.
3. The two built in microphones work great for capturing the whole service: sermons, music and anything else that goes on. You can attach the Zoom to a tripod. Or, what I typically do, attach the Zoom to a mic stand (with an Edirol  microphone stand adapter) which lets you hoist the unit up higher with a smaller footprint than the typcial tripod.
4. Download the file directly to your computer. The USB port allows you to connect to your computer and download the files directly rather than re-recording them in realtime. 

But wait, there’s more!! There are two combo 1/4″/XLR jacks that let you use, well, quarter inch and XLR cables meaning that you can use REAL microphones or take the feed off a sound system. The Zoom also comes with 24 & 48V phantom power for condenser microphones (but be sure to be using the AC adaptor, phantom power will chew through batteries fast fast fast).

But wait, there’s even more!!

For the geeks, it has an onboard limiter or compressor, numerous mic models, easy gain settings, the list goes on. You can even use it to record directly to your computer if you are so inclined. Great for multitrack recording.

 
You can use the on-board mics OR the two jacks but not both simulataneously. You can set the gain on the side panel, hi, medium or low. It’s not continuous but at least it has fixed gain settings and not autogain (although that is available through the menus).

Annoyances

Every unit has its annoyances and problems. To get at some of the advanced features you have to use their navigation system which involves a menu button (the one directly under the screen) and an a tiny scroll knob on the right hand side to move between menus and edit parameters. Yikes! I can’t tell you how many times I have overshot the menus. It is counterintuitive but luckily, you don’t have to delve down into the menus that much. The toggle switch is at the right of the view above. You can just see it in the picture at the top of the page as a bump to the right of the record button.

The screen is a bit tiny and, er, hard to read depending on your eyesight. And because of the way you use it, sometimes you have to try to negotiate the display upside down. It would have been nice if it had been a little bigger. There is a post (somewhere) describing a home-made magnifier setup that attaches to the Zoom.

Summary

The Zoom H4 is very “handy” because its small, easy to setup for recording and easy to transfer to a computer. And, beyond that, it has a parcel of additional features that make it a great tool for serious recording in a small package. Its features vastly outweigh its annoyances.

How does a person move from having never heard of your congregation to have a deep commitment? The Path to Commitment is an easy way to understand how people become members and what you can do to make it easier for people to become members. The Path to Commitment allows you to evaluate your process and identify your strengths and areas that need improvement.

Each of us has traveled a Path to Commitment. Have you ever visited a congregation and not returned? What happened that made you decide to return or not return.

Below is a diagram of a path to commitment. Each of the arrows in the diagram are interactions (or, in marketing lingo, impressions). Each subsequent interaction represents an increasing commitment on the part of the visitor. It takes upwards of 6-10 impressions for someone to become committed. And each subsequent impression requires more personal interaction on the part of someone in the congregation.

You can use the Path to Commitment to visualize how your congregation works.

• At the very top, how does someone become aware that your congregation even exists?
• Do people greet visitors or ignore them? (See below…)
• What are your strong points along the Path?
• Are there gaps or impediments in your Path to Commitment?
• Why do people exit the Path? Why do people stay?
• Are there events that you promote in the community?

Each one of these point is a long discussion. We tend to focus on the biggest, easiest chunks like a website. But why spend the money on advertising if you only lose them after their first visit.

My wife & I had moved into the area and were visiting congregations. On our first visit to one in particular, they had a great service that we enjoyed very much. After the service, we stayed for coffee and stood around, a bit nervous as we did not know anyone. No one talked to us so we looked about and found someone who had just gotten a cup of coffee and was not in a big group. After chatting with her for a few minutes, I asked her “How long have you been coming to this congregation?” Her reply, “Oh, this is my first time! It’s nice to meet people like you.”

People make their decisions quickly at each point, within seconds. It is important to take an integrated approach because what is the point of doing good advertising if they get turned off at the website or at the door? It is easier to think about point solutions such as direct mail or fix the website or get more greeters. But if you don’t have the whole plan together, you are wasting a lot of time and effort and losing many visitors who might have become committed members!

Technology, no matter how neat, does not create an audience.  Lots of technology gets implemented but never used.  So, how do you create services or content that people will actually use?The key is to find an existing process in the congregation and find an application that’s actually useful to the people involved without changing the process. After a great deal of effort, we now have an online calendar that the administer uses which also generates tons of dynamic content for the website. But the process is essentially the same as the paper process that she had in place before.Some time ago, I implemented an online calendar several year ago but it was soundly ignored. I could not get anyone to use. And because it was not accurate, no one used it. The problem was a process/social/requirements issue not a technological one.