When you are considering starting a media ministry, one of the first things you need to consider is which medium to choose from the multitude of media that are available to you. Which medium is best for your audience, for your budget, for your message?
Television is still by far the most popular and pervasive media. It is also usually the most expensive. If you choose to create your program for television, they are many questions you need to answer before you start:
- Do you have the facilities and equipment to support that?
- Is your sanctuary adequately lit?
- Will the building infrastructure support television lights?
- Should you rent or purchase your television cameras and the controls to run them?
- Will your final program be edited in house with all the equipment to support that, or will you hire an outside company to create your finished project?
- Do you have facilities for closed-captioning the program, or will you hire a company to do that for you?
- Will you train in-house staff to produce, direct, run cameras, and edit your program, or will you hire professionals to fill some—or all—of these positions?
- Will you record your program for your viewers and congregation to be able to view the program again at the time of their choice, and also to archive your messages for history?
- Will you want to mass produce copies of your program to make hard copies of them available to your congregation?
- How will you distribute your program?
Now, more than ever, there are so many distribution options for your video, from a traditional broadcast or cable television outlet to web streaming either on your own site or on an aggregate site, or perhaps podcasting. If you strategically plan, you can make your program work for multiple video options, sometimes with little or no modification.
As you consider your message and the content of your program, there are several additional questions you must resolve:
- Does your message require video in order to make it clear?
- If it is a spoken word, what are you going to do to make it video-worthy. Television is not just radio-with-pictures. The video images need to be engaging and compelling.
A famous media theorist named Marshall McLuhan said that “the medium is the message.” Many may disagree as to what he actually meant by this statement, but I believe the essence of what he said was that your message will be affected, and essentially altered, by the medium on which you choose to present it. When you are praying about how to present your message to the world, please give this consideration the gravity it deserves.
With so many media and distribution options available — and so many decisions to be made — your most valuable resource may be a knowledgeable individual or organization that can walk you through the process so that you can minimize errors and end up with a product that will meet your needs and be the most cost-effective solution for you.
Let us know if Infinity Concepts can help you build your media outreach
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