❗️Make sure you replace the placeholder text with the appropriate text for your church
The introduction is a great place to welcome people to your church service. Whether it is online or in person, people want to feel welcomed. Keep in mind you may have visitors attending your church service. Feel free to let them know a little bit about your church and what to expect during their time with you.
The outro is where you’ll do one of either two things.
This of course depends on where your announcements are situated in your service. If they are the last thing that people see before they leave or sign off, wish them a great week and let them know you look forward to seeing them again soon. Now for our favorite use.
At Announcements.church, while doing hundreds of video announcements, we’ve learned that video announcements are a great way to bridge two different parts of your service (they make for a great, clean transition) which is why we recommend placing them somewhere between worship and the start of the message. Below you’ll find examples for both to help you when it comes to closing off your weekly video announcements.
If you use announcements to close off your church service:
When it comes to video announcements there is no “one size fits all” formula. However, throughout the years, and hundreds of weekly video announcements produced, we’ve learned a few best practices. Don’t think of them as set in stone, more as guidelines so that you’ll get the most out of your weekly video announcement experience.
This one is a tempting one to break. But we’ve learned that the best way to keep people engaged and have them respond and not tune out, is by practicing what we call The 50% Rule. It’s simple,
If any announcement does not apply to 50% or more of your congregation on any given Sunday, it doesn’t warrant a spot in your video announcements.
We understand if at first, that sounds a little over the top. But what we need to realize is that we don’t want video announcements to be just good-looking video that boosts our church’s production value, we want it to be a tool that will help us communicate what’s most important. Did you catch that? Most important. This means that the missing book from the church library probably shouldn’t make your weekly video announcement cut.
It’s true, with the increase of social media and online entertainment, people’s attention spans, for the most part, are at an all-time low when it comes to focusing on any given specific thing. This is why we should aim to keep our video announcements as concise and to the point as possible.
Clear communication that gets right to the point and accomplishes what your church needs it to = 😍
Hey there, Terry here. I’m going to jump in for this one.
I remember once being in a church service for two weeks. The first week the youth pastor was making an announcement and for whatever reason, the audio and the video didn’t match up. So people were, as you’d imagine, confused. Forgiving, but confused. Well the next week, the person who was scheduled for announcements decided that it would be a great idea to play to the fact that the audio was out of sync by making what seemed to be some sort of an awkward out-of-sync Chinese soap opera.
That person was me 🤭 #ashamed
Long story short, one person thought it was hilarious, everyone else was confused. It’s good to keep in mind that there are visitors that are tuning into your online services and stepping into your sanctuary all the time. We want them to feel at home and welcomed, not an outsider due to inside jokes.
The reason we left this one for last is that it takes some practice to get right.
With our video announcements, we want people to tune in and pay attention, to be active participants, not passive spectators. That’s why we have found that the churches with the best communication, who have their people’s attention, are the ones that give people a reason to tune in.
This can be an incentive to tuning in. It can be some information that you know will really matter or be interesting to them.
The goal is to capture attention so that they will get plugged into the areas in your church that will both bless and transform their lives the most.
There you go, some tried, tested and true video announcement scripts and best practices to help you out during your video announcement journey. As always if you need any help our team of creative church media professionals are here for you.
Happy Video Announcement Writing 🙌
The Announcements team