You are still good. Yes, just don't get too excited that close to the microphone. I know. I moved it back a little bit more. All right. You can hear me okay? Yes, sir. All right. Here we go. This is episode number one hundred eighty-two. Number one hundred eighty-two. In three, two, one. Welcome to the Missional Marketing Podcast, the one hundred eighty second edition of our show. My name is Bart Blair and I am joined by the CEO of Missional Marketing and Church Communications Group, Mr. Jason Hamrock. Hello, Jason. Hi, Bart. Oh, it's exciting. We're getting close to our goal of two hundred this year. We are going to hit two hundred. You know, in the church world, if you read the old Carl George books on church growth, two hundred is a barrier for churches in attendance. And two hundred podcast episodes seems to be a barrier for us, too. We've been working towards this. We've just been so busy and have had so much stuff going on. It's been difficult to get there. But hey, if you are new to our podcast, maybe this is the first time you've tuned in either on our YouTube channel or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. We've been producing this podcast since the year twenty twenty. And our goal is to help churches grow by leveraging digital marketing and effective communications. And today we want to kind of highlight some free tools that we we both believe that churches ought to be using, you know, churches. Here's the deal. churches always seem to have limited budgets when it comes to marketing communications resources right this is something that we bump up against all the time and we think that churches should have pretty robust budgets i mean this is the world that we're in you should have a good budget typically jason i think you coach churches and saying hey you should have three to five percent of your annual budget dedicated towards marketing and digital outreach and the reality is Every little tool that you subscribe to, everything that you do kind of eats away at some of that budget. So why don't we highlight some free things that churches can be using that can actually help them maybe repurpose some of those monies for more intentional outreach oriented stuff. And hopefully, hopefully we can even do a little coaching and teaching on how to use some of these tools today as well. You good with that? I'm good with that. In fact, also, it's just it's a good stewardship thing. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, not only for small church, it's also for big churches too. Anybody, if you're a church, you should be utilizing or thinking about some of these tools we're going to share. Anything that's free. Yeah. Okay. So we're going to, these are not listed in any particular order saying best to worst. It kind of covers a few different elements of things that you can and should be doing as a church. The first one, it surprises me. You and I were just on the road last week. We met with multiple, like many, many churches in some of our church communications roadshows. And I am still blown away by how many churches are not using Canva. And as a nonprofit, if you are a five Oh one C three, you can qualify for the Canva pro account and, It's free. You get all the features, all the AI, all the image generation, everything that you can imagine in Canva and you can get it for free. Jason, what do you love about Canva? Well, I'm guessing everybody just paused their podcast listening device to go register for free. Canva, you should be doing this. But you're absolutely right, Bart. I mean, it's one of those things we all have, you know, probably have some kind of a designer either outsourced or maybe you are the designer. But just looking at a Canva tool is phenomenal. I've been using it a lot lately, especially for AI generation. It has gotten really, really good. And sometimes you're looking for that image you want to use, and you don't have time to go create a staged image. you know, photograph thing and get people in there. I'll tell you, it's really good. Now you got to, like, I was using it and actually it created an image for me and everybody was perfect. They were beautiful people. So I had to tell it, hey, rough it up a little bit, make it realistic, like, and it did. And so, I mean, all kinds of stuff, right? Design, graphics, you know, social posts, bulletins, presentations, slides, you know, the pre-service slides. But I mean, that's a that's a no brainer for nonprofits. So especially if, you know, if your church or you have a Christian school, you know, that's part of your hey, have them share it, share the love with those guys, have them use it as well. What I love about the Canva Pro account is that you can have multiple users on it. So you can share it amongst multiple staff members if that's something that you need to do. You can also create an entire brand portfolio in it. So if you have colors and logos and fonts that you want people to use, You can upload that into the Canva Pro and you can basically give your team instructions. Hey, these are the fonts that we use. These are the colors that we use. These are the versions of the logos that we use. I use it every single week. I use it for sermon note, bulletin insert. We don't create a bulletin, but we do have handout sermon notes that we hand out. I use it for the thumbnails for our YouTube videos, YouTube channel. I use it for social media posts. We use it for slide deck, slide deck presentations. And what I love about it is that you can start with some really, really great templates and with very, very little experience in graphic design, you can make them your own and have really, really high quality visual images and visual graphics. Now, those of us who spend a lot of time in Canva, I can scroll through social media and I can look at some of the templates and I go, yep, that's a Canva template. Yep, that's Canva, that's Canva. But the average person that you're presenting stuff to will have no idea that you just pulled a template off of Canva. And you want to look good. I mean, you got to up your game. This is a great tool. There's no reason why you should have, you know, kind of yucky, cruddy looking, ugly slides, right? There's just no reason for it. they should be branded well, they should be uniform, right? And you can do that in Canva. Yeah. And it gives you, I think that's the game changer there is it gives you the ability to have consistent, good quality graphics everywhere you need to use graphics and you don't have to be a graphic designer. You just have to be able to spot good graphic design or the type of graphic design that fits the context of your church and your church community. So we're going to link to the application page on the Canva website for the Canva for nonprofits. I applied for it. I think it took like a day to get approved. All you have to do is have your EIN for your five Oh one C three and a lot of bang, but a boom. Maybe you're not a five one C three, but you're part of a denomination. If your denomination headquarters has the five one C three, you can use that. Yes. Yes. You had to have, I don't know exactly how it works with Canva, but I'm sure there is a way to do that. So Canva for nonprofits, that is the first free tool in our five free tools. Now, the second one is going to feel like a little, for most churches, they're going to be like, well, what do I do with this? So we're going to have to explain a little bit what a church is supposed to do with it. But this is a tool made by Google and it's called Google search console. Google search console is a free tool. It really provides you information. But it's information that you can utilize and you can leverage for more content creation and other things that you can and should be doing in your website. Why don't you give a little overview of what Google Search Console is? I mean, I'm still amazed at how many church websites I look at and they don't even have Google Analytics. Yeah. And guys, you may, oh, we don't like Google. well you may not like google but nine and a half out of ten people on this planet use google who have technology right so google still dominates and so you really if you don't want to be found in google then avoid their tools but you should use them so the google you know google analytics right google search console it does just web it's a search console it helps give insight into you know, how you show up in search, Google search, right? You can see what people are searching for or to find you or not find you. And actually it does. Another thing it does is it really helps you make smarter decisions when it comes to your website. Yeah. This is the way I use Google Search Console regularly. One of the things that you can do in Google Search Console, you may not realize this. Most people don't realize this. Let's say you publish a website. Your website's been up for a year and you have twenty five pages on your website. Did you know? I know you know this, Jason. I'm asking our audience. Did you know that you can have a website with twenty five pages? and not all of your pages show up on Google? Yes, that actually happens. And the way that you find out about that is you go to your Google Search Console account and it will say you have twenty five pages crawled. You have six pages not indexed. Well, what does non indexed mean? Non indexed means that Google had a problem or an issue with the page and for some reason decided not to put it in its memory bank. So you can, in your Google Search Console, see all the pages on your website that Google has not been able to or has refused to index. It will give you the reason why. You can then go and correct or fix the reason. And then you can resubmit your page from your website to Google Search Console to get into the queue to be recrawled so that it will get indexed. Anytime you add a new page or make a consequential update to a page on your website, you need to go to your Google search console account and submit that page to be indexed, right? So you and I talk about this a lot. We talk about content creation and Jason, one of Jason's, He stands on this soapbox all the time. Your pastor preaches a sermon every single week. You should take the transcript from that sermon and you should create a unique page on your website that's either a blog post or show notes or something that extrapolates that content and makes it searchable and findable on the internet. But just creating the page is only part of the process. Absolutely. You then need to go to Google search console and submit that page to Google so that Google finds the page, crawls the page and indexes the page so that it can return that page in the search results. Now it could eventually happen organically, but you shortcut the process by using Google search console to do that. Anything else that you want to add about Google search console? A couple of things. One thing is if you're on a third party proprietary, you know, website hosting company, I'm not gonna give any names, but you wanna really double check to make sure that you're not being blocked. Like it's not inadvertently blocking, you know, crawlers from calling your website. I found that out the other day with the church and it was blocking AI from crawling their website. Ouch. You don't want LLMs to not be able to crawl your site, just FYI there. But yeah, using the Google search console, especially with that new content, we're actually going to get a little bit here in the next point, is so critical, guys. And if you don't, what Bart just walked you through, you're like, what did he say? Hey, go to Claude or chat GPT. and say, how do I make sure I submit my new content in Google Search Console and let it walk you through step by step? Google, the search console isn't the same. Oh, it evolves. So that by the time you're listening to this podcast, it might have evolved a little bit more. So you just use ChatGP. I will say this, not all of Google's tools, ad building platforms or Google Analytics, Google Analytics is just like the most recent version of Google Analytics is brutal. I find it so hard to find what I'm looking for and navigate. But Google Search Console, of all the Google tools, they have managed to keep that relatively simple to understand. I'm not, I'm like, I'm not a super technical geek out person. I've been able to figure out how to use Google Search Console pretty intuitively. And again, find a YouTube video or ask ChatGVT to walk you through the process. It's pretty simple. The other thing that I like about Google Search Console is when you have it set up, Google will actually send you an email at the end of every month and tell you, we've crawled and indexed four new pages from your website, or we've found pages on your website that there are issues on. One of the things I've been doing, we've been teaching churches to do this for AI search, which is add schema markup on their pages. I've been using AI to write the schema for the pages on my church website. But what I've discovered is that sometimes AI makes mistakes in the schema. So I add it and then Google will tell me, hey, there are critical errors on this page. And then I go and look at it. And what are the critical errors? It's part of the schema that AI wrote for me. So I have to go back to AI and go, hey, Google is telling me there are these problems with the schema. And you know what my buddy Claude does? My buddy Claude then goes... You're right. I made a mistake when I wrote that code. Let me rewrite it for you. So, you know, Google Search Console is, when I discovered it and started using it, it became a game changer for me. Bart uses this phrase in the road shows that says, the A in AI does not stand for accurate. Yes, that is true. It does not. It's part official. You better double check the work it's doing. Yes, it is not always accurate. So yes, trust but verify. Okay. All right. On the topic of SEO and GEO, the next tool that we have in our list of free tools that churches should be using in their ministry is a plugin for Google Chrome called SEO Meta in one click. It's the clunkiest name. It's the clunkiest name for one of the greatest tools. SEO Meta in one click. You demo this for churches often. Why don't you share a little bit about what you love? Yeah. Every time I'm on with a call to church, I'm like, guys, download this tool. It is going to be a game changer for you. It's free. SEO meta in one click. It's a big red S. Then that's how you know you got it. So go to extensions in Chrome and look for it, download it, and then pin it to your bar. When you're on any page of your website, you can click on it. What I like about this tool, there's like three things that I always want to... Highlight from this tool, and that's not the only three things you do for SEO or GEO. SEO is search engine optimization, optimizing your website to be found in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, that kind of thing. GEO is generative engine optimization. Think AI, think large language models like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok. Those are large language models. You want to GEO your website for large language and you want to SEO for your for Google. OK, so this plug in, there's three things that I just love. I look at it. It first is the title. It shows you the title of the page. And so often we don't realize that Google's looking that that's good SEO juice. You should always have your church name and your city and state in your title. Every page, kids, city and church, city, state, right? For the kids page. The second thing is the meta description. The meta description is that little sentence underneath Google search where it has a name of a business and there's like a sentence right there. That's the meta description. That meta description needs to be written intentionally. And Google's going to pull it One for you, if you choose not to tell Google, hey, here's our meta description, they're just gonna randomly pull something from your website. It may be good, it may not be good. That's not the point. Well, it is for users. You wanna say something intelligent and invite them to church. But more importantly, if you're neglecting telling Google Hey, we don't really care. You pick one Google. We don't really care. You're basically saying to Google, yeah, we don't really care about our website. So, you know, go ahead and ding us on our SEO because we don't care. No, you do care. And so you want to tell Google every page of your website. Here's our meta description. That's the second thing. The third thing is your headings. H one, H two, H three, four, five and six. Now, Google really cares a lot about H ones, H twos. And I've learned recently, they really look at H threes. They don't crawl four or five or six. I learned this recently. And the goal of H one, two or three is you only want to have one H one for each page of your website. Think of a book. Think of a book. If you pick up a book, you know, in a library and you saw three titles and they're completely different like titles, would you be kind of confused as to what this book is about? Well, that's what Google experiences when they're looking at the homepage of your website and you have multiple H ones, you're confusing Google, only have one. H-twos are like subtitles. You can have several of those that relate to the title of this page and then have H-threes that kind of get a little bit further down into that. It could be more of a sentence type of a thing. But that little SEO meta in one click, guys, it's such a great, easy tool to overview each page of your website and have a quick little look. Are we doing well in our title, our meta description, and our headings? Free tool, download it, and use it every time you're on your website. We have so many podcast episodes that we have done over the last six years on the topic of search engine optimization, SEO. Again, if you're new to our show, make sure that you go back through our archives. We'll link to a few of those, maybe some of the more recent ones here in the show notes of this episode. But here's the deal. We talk more and more than we have lately about artificial intelligence and kind of the overlap between SEO, search engine optimization, and GEO, generative engine optimization, the fundamentals of SEO are the same as the fundamentals of GEO. If you don't have good SEO, you will never have good GEO. So you do need to continue learning about search engine optimization. Yes, there is a shift. More people are doing their searches in chat or Claude or Perplexity or Grok, and that's changing a little bit of the landscape in terms of the way people are using the internet. But the fundamentals are the same in terms of the way that you optimize your pages on your site. It's the beginning point. It's not the end point, but it is a beginning point. So SEO meta in one click. That's been a long time favorite of our whole team. And yeah, that's another free tool. Now talk about the next one. Yeah, next free tool is one that we got on the call. I asked Jason if he'd ever heard it before. He's like, nope, don't know this one. This is a new, a relatively new one to me. Okay. So I'm just going to tell you, I have a little bit of experience with it, but it is an email platform called Brevo. I guess that's how you pronounce it. B-R-E-V-O. Now I'm a Texas Longhorn and we have this very large animal named Bevo. He doesn't have an R in his name. It's Bevo. So that's why I'm pronouncing it Brevo because it looks like Bevo with an R in the middle. Brevo email. Now, the reason I've recently started using Brevo is that some of you will know this. Those of you who are in smaller or normal sized churches, if you've been using MailChimp, MailChimp just choked a lot of us out by basically saying you have too many subscribers in your email list to have a free account and we're going to start charging you or you can't send emails. In fact, they recently throttled it all the way down to two hundred contacts in your email list. Well, if you have a church of three hundred or four hundred or five hundred or six hundred people, now all of a sudden you're having to pay for MailChimp. What a hassle. I have sung MailChimp's praises for years and years and years. I'm going to stop. Until now. Until now. Now, the caveat here, here are the things that you need to know about Brevo. You can create emails in Brevo just like you can in MailChimp. There are templates. It's a drag and drop, WYSIWYG sort of email creator. So you can do your newsletters. You can make them look pretty. They look great. uh in the short time i've been using it i've had virtually no deliverability issues the emails are getting delivered you get great analytics on the back end seeing who opened the email your open rate your click-through rates the whole nine yards what brevo does is it allows you to have up to two thousand contacts on the free account okay up to two thousand contacts however here's the catch you're only allowed to send three hundred emails per day. So that means if you have a newsletter that needs to go to five hundred people, you're going to have to cut it in half. send half of it on Wednesday and half of it on Thursday or half of it on Thursday and half of it on Friday. The reason it works for me is that we've been building our email list and our church using lead generation campaigns. And so we have different lists to send to different people. So I might have a list of, uh, we, we did an event at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony last December, and we collected like seventy-five emails from people on that list. And I might want to email that list alone. So I create the tags for it and I can send out an email of people. The problem is when I put all of those lead generation campaigns or those lead gen things into my MailChimp account, it pushed me way into the hundreds and hundreds of emails. And even though I'm not sending an email every week to everybody, I couldn't even send one email to a small subsection of the list because MailChimp says you have to pay for this now. So If you're a small to medium-sized church and you're looking for a good, solid, free email option, I recommend Bevo with the R in the middle. Bevo email. Check it out. Hey, if you happen to be listening to this podcast and you work for Bevo and you want to be a sponsor of this podcast, reach out. We can help you out. we don't know anybody we don't know anybody at brevo and right now you know they're not paying us to do this i'm it's just well a free one free you know when you talk about um strategy on email i mean let's say you are let's okay sometimes i'm kind of talking to smaller churches but actually this is a great strategy for any church and that is you you segment your audience you said you could segment your audience into males and females assuming you know That email is tied to a male or tied to a female. But think about this. Think about this. If you have a church of a few hundred people, you know, a hundred. And that doesn't include kids. So a few hundred people. So half are men or half are women, roughly. Wouldn't you want to maybe say something specific to a female in your email versus a male? Like you could have a verse. You could have. uh just a statement about hey you know here's how you'd be a great husband or a father or a man you know blah blah blah blah right your graphics could be tweaked a little bit to be more masculine or something like that i mean you you can get deeper and think deeper about how do we get better engagement out of our emails that are getting sent out instead of just one blanket email to everybody what if you thought about segmenting it Well, if you start to segment that might allow you to fit into this free, you know, sending three hundred emails because on Wednesday you send it to all the women on Thursdays and all the men or something like that. Just food for thought. That was free. Yeah. I mean, if free is important. then you got to get creative sometimes with the way that you utilize free right so this is just one of those this is one of those things and again it just became a solution it became a solution to me because i'm like yeah i don't really want to spend money on mailchimp it's not a critical enough thing for me to have to spend money on at this point and again i want to spend that money on something else so give brevo a shot if that if it sounds like it'll fit for you now last one we've got one more free tool that we want to recommend this is another one you know we We know a lot of churches actually use this tool. We use this tool exclusively for the podcast production that we're doing right here. And this is a project management tool called Asana. Jason, you have used Asana a ton over the years. Why don't you talk a little bit about Asana? Well, yeah, everybody kind of has one. In fact, in these roadshows, I ask, what are some... project management tools out there and some people say we don't have one or we use Google Sheets or we use Basecamp or Monday or Trello. There's a bunch of them, right guys? Asana, there's a free tier that works really well to maybe small to mid-sized teams. I'm a big fan of project management system. Not only can you organize and build some margin into what you've got going on per project and you have order and you have communication that's seamless. It's so good. All of your notes, all of your graphics, all of your post-event notes. you know hey this year we tried this and it sucked don't do it again or this was fantastic a year from now you're going to pull up that project and remember what you did last year so you're not like having brain fog of oh well i forget what we did well and we didn't do well so a lot of you guys are not you might have something that's scattered or you might have well our this team does it with this project management system this team our church uses this project man Come on, get on the same page. And I'm a big, big fan of Asana. I think it's one of the best ones out there. It communicates extremely well. And if you don't have one, check out Asana, especially because it's free. But if you do have one, I have this little sticky note on my monitor over there. And it says, what you're not changing, you're choosing. So if you go, well, we don't really like our project management system, but we've had it forever. So we just use it. That doesn't make any sense to me. If you don't like it, change it. You're choosing it. You must really love it because you're choosing it. So we're just saying, hey, here's a really cool tool. It's free. Now there's some paid levels if you want to grow into it. Awesome. But if you don't have one, check out Asana. It's going to bring a lot of order to your life between Sundays. Yeah, I mean, if your church staff is like, you know, six, ten, fifteen people, I think that the, you know, you start getting beyond that, it starts to get a little more complicated and you probably do need a paid tier. But, you know, if you're a normal size church and you've got a normal size staff or you have some volunteers that you want to coordinate with, using Asana is a great way to do that. You can create forms. So like, for instance, let's say you as the communications director have a form that you need people to fill out. Your children's ministry person wants a poster designed for an event they're happening, they have happening, or a slide or a graphic. They fill out the form. You can create a form in Asana. That form... queues up a project and then you work on that project in the order that you want or need to in your project management tool. What I love about Asana is I'm a visual person. So we can lay out our projects in a visual timeline. And so even for the podcast here, you know, we have Bart has a task and then once Bart is done with his task, he can slide the box over to Randall and Randall does his task. And when Randall is done with his, he can slide his section over to the next person. And so we can have multiple people involved in the project and they get pinged whenever something has been assigned to them with a deadline and the date that they're supposed to do it on. And it's visually appealing to me, which is why I like it. It's not overly complicated. It's a hugely popular tool. So there are literally thousands of videos on YouTube That can give you good tutorials and walk you through how to do some of the basics when it comes to setting up your Asana team and your Asana tasks to make it work for your church. And again, they have a good free tier. So why not take advantage of it, especially if you have nothing, if you're not using anything right now, it's a good place to start. Yeah. What a great episode, Bart. I mean, five great tools. That are free. Yep. And you only have higher levels, you know, you can grow into them and, and pay for some, but five great tools that are free. That's going to help you be more effective guys. The goal of why we do this is to give you more clarity, hopefully build more margin and better strategy so that you can be more effective in your church and reach more people for Jesus. Cause that's why we do what we do. Love God, love people, create disciples. And these are, Great tools that you should be tapping into. So your challenge this week is find one of them. I'm going out on a limb here. I'm guessing that not everything we talked about today, you're going, Bart, Jason, we love all the tools we've chosen that you just mentioned. Hmm, maybe. And if that's you, please email Bart and let him know that. But I'm guessing there's some of you out there going, yeah, I really do not like our emails. I'm so tired of MailChimp. Or man, I just, our project management tools are horrible. Or we don't, what in the world is Google Search Console? I had no idea what that is. Awesome. Take the time to learn more about it. And your job this week is to pick one and grow, right? That's the call to action today. Absolutely. I love this. I mean, I often jokingly say that free is my favorite four letter word. So let's take advantage of what's out there. And Hey, maybe you're a church that, that can afford to pay for subscriptions and you have a tool that isn't working for you right now. Most of these, a Google search console is free, but you know, most of these have paid versions of them and maybe the paid version is what you need, but you can always try out at the free tier level just to make sure that it's going to be the right solution to your problem. Thanks for hanging out with us today. Again, if you're new to the show and you haven't yet subscribed wherever you listen to your favorite podcast, please do that. If you find this podcast and the content that we're creating here to be helpful for you in your ministry role, you can do two things that, well, would be kind of repayment for us. One would be leave us a rating or a review wherever you listen to the podcast. And the second thing is share with somebody else that you know who might be able to benefit from this podcast, either another person on your staff or another person that you know in ministry. Share the love, share the podcast. And if there's anything that Jason and I can do to help you as a church communicator or a church leader personally, you can always click over to the missionalmarketing.com website and you can schedule a call with one of us and we'd be happy to help. to get on a call and just talk about your pain points and see how we might be able to help you jason thanks again for hanging out with me episode in the books until the next time