Burning Questions | Bart & Jason

Bart Blair: [00:00:08] Well, welcome to season four, episode four of the Missional Marketing Podcast. This is episode number 128. I’m Bart Blair and am joined by the CEO, the Chief Executive Officer of Missional Marketing, Mr. Jason Hamrock. Jason, thanks for joining me today.

Jason Hamrock: [00:00:29] Glad to be here, Bart.

Bart Blair: [00:00:30] Are you glad to be in Arizona? Because that’s really, when you say here, that’s where you are.

Jason Hamrock: [00:00:35] Yeah, I am in Arizona and it’s summertime, so a little warm, but we’re getting through it. I can’t wait till October.

Bart Blair: [00:00:43] Yeah, well, by the time this episode drops, I’m guessing that the temperatures will probably have already started to dip a little bit. Of course, you guys have, it’s like summer all year round in Arizona, you don’t have a real fall and a real winter or a real spring, it goes from like…

Jason Hamrock: [00:00:58] Hot or nice.

Bart Blair: [00:00:58] It’s like not too hot to, like, too hot, that’s really the difference. Well, I’m in Texas and it’s pretty hot here, too. I wouldn’t say that it’s as hot as it is where you are. But speaking of hot, we’re going to do something new and different today. In fact, we’re doing an episode, we’re going to start doing this once a month and we’re going to call these episodes burning questions. Did you like the way segwayed that there? We’re in hot weather, and we’re going to be burning questions.

Bart Blair: [00:01:24] Now, if you’re new to our podcast, almost every episode is Jason and me, or Jason interviewing someone who’s a church communications professional, a church leader, someone that we believe can add value to you in the role that you’re in, in your church. We produce this podcast to help churches grow by leveraging digital marketing and effective communications. Missional Marketing, that is what we are all about, is helping churches do communications and marketing better, whether that’s your internal communications or your outward-facing communications and your outreach. And so the questions we’re going to be sharing today in these burning questions, this is the format, this is the way this is going to go. We’ve been collecting questions from people on our team, from some churches that we have the opportunity to work with, I’ve taken some of these questions from the church communications group. And if you’re listening and we don’t answer your question today, send me a question. You can email me at BBlair@MissionalMarketing.com and just put in the subject line, a burning question. And tell me what your burning question is, we’re going to add it to the list.

Bart Blair: [00:02:25] Now, this is what Jason and I are going to do. We have behind the screen here, you can’t see it, we have a list of burning questions that people have asked and we are going to alternate asking each other a burning question. But here’s the deal, we haven’t prepared for this.

Jason Hamrock: [00:02:39] No, I haven’t even looked at the question. I just glanced at them.

Bart Blair: [00:02:42] I’m going to ask Jason three questions and he doesn’t know what questions I’m going to ask him, and he’s going to ask me three questions and I don’t know what questions he’s asking me. And maybe we will crash and burn with these burning questions, or maybe we’ll actually provide some insight that will be helpful for you. But this will keep us on our toes and hopefully be entertaining to you.

Jason Hamrock: [00:03:03] Both helpful and entertaining, and then let us know if we are burning or sailing. So, you know, let us know.

Bart Blair: [00:03:09] Exactly. So I’m looking forward to this, it’s kind of an experiment. And really, we want to produce content that’s helpful for you, our audience. So whether you’re watching on our YouTube channel or you’re listening on your favorite podcasting platform, if you haven’t subscribed, make sure that you do that. If you’re on our YouTube channel, we’re going to post another question in the comments section of the YouTube video and would love to have some dialog with you there so you can kind of scroll down if you’re on the YouTube channel and look at the question that’s there and answer it. You can answer a burning question that we ask you, and we’ll have some engagement there.

Bart Blair: [00:03:38] So, all right, without any further delay, Jason lost the coin toss and he is going to let me ask him the first question. All right, he doesn’t know what I’m going to ask, so I’m going to ask. All right, are you ready, Jason? How do we get more people to engage with us, with our church on Facebook? How do we get more people to engage with us on Facebook?

Jason Hamrock: [00:04:04] That’s a great question. So, you know, Facebook’s algorithm seems like it constantly changes, and Meta just keeps developing stuff. So if you think about what social media is, it’s just a way to be social with people, right? That’s what it’s built for. And so, you know, typically our personal Facebook pages are just the highlight reels of how great our lives are so, you know, that’s fine. But I think for a church, it’s a little bit different. I don’t think your Facebook profile should be your event promotion platform. I think you can put events in there, but that’s kind of like one-way communication, right? This is going on this week and don’t forget, or sign up for baptisms, or something like that. Fine, but I think it should be more engaging. So I think it’d be cool if you actually allowed yourself to have a strategy around what you’re posting and thinking through what you’re posting.

Jason Hamrock: [00:05:08] So here’s an idea, what if you put out a sermon snippet but you asked an open-ended question? Right, that would be pretty cool. Along with, hey, share this with somebody who you know might be dealing with this or who you love. Right, social media, you want to be social with it. And so maybe a sermon snippet would be great. How about an open-ended question? Perhaps there’s an article that you could write on felt-need topics. You could use ChatGPT to write an article on, like, how to reduce stress, or how to pray with my kids, and you put that on social media, but you ask for engagement. And those platforms are all about engagement, if you push stuff out there and there’s no engagement, guess what? It ain’t going anywhere, not very many people are going to see it. And Meta wants you to spend money, so they really want you to boost posts because you’re spending money, so you want to be really careful with that. But if you don’t ask open-ended, engaging questions, you’re not going to get much response. So, you know, those are just two ideas, right? Sermon snippets, and then maybe some felt-need content you could push out there, and then sprinkle in events that are happening. Please don’t push out the verse of the day. We already get that, and that’s just not engaging and it doesn’t work very well. So that’s just a top-of-the-head answer. I don’t know. Bart, do you have any feedback?

Bart Blair: [00:06:39] Well, since we’re making up the rules to this game as we go, I’ll give you a 60-second bounce back. I love all the things that you said, I don’t like verses of the day, I don’t like the Sunday set list, like nobody engages with that. What I do like is open-ended questions, questions related to the sermon. I think if you will create posts and content that tell stories that reinforce your church’s core values, you will get a lot more engagement. I also think that you can increase your level of engagement by creating a digital media ministry team, like digital missionaries. So you have a team of 8 or 10 or 15 people who will feed the algorithm machine by being people who are consistently posting or commenting, posting, and sharing on your posts. So that will feed the meta-algorithm, when Meta sees that, okay, this post is getting engagement, then it’ll distribute it to more people who are, you know, following your your page. I believe that to be true, that’s anecdotal. But yeah, put a digital missionary team together to take that content and be the first people to answer those questions, right, and be the first people to share those posts. There’s my 60-second bounce back there.

Jason Hamrock: [00:07:56] There is your 60 seconds, all right. I get to go, my turn.

Bart Blair: [00:07:59] All right, I’m a little nervous, to be honest with you.

Jason Hamrock: [00:08:01] No, this is going to be pretty easy because you, you know, you’re a pastor and you’ve led churches and stuff like that. Where and how do we start generating stories in our church?

Bart Blair: [00:08:14] Oh, wow, I love that question. In fact, we are going to be actually posting an episode on our show of a storyteller in a church here, it might be it’s coming up in the next couple of weeks, I can’t remember exactly. So if this is your question, keep tuning in. How do we start with storytelling? I think the first thing when it comes to finding stories, you have to create the space in which you want to tell the story. So are we telling stories on a Sunday morning? Are we telling stories using video on Sunday morning? Are we telling stories with interviews or personal testimonies from the stage on Sunday morning? Are we wanting to create stories for our website that reinforce some of the ministry and the ministry opportunities that we have? Are we looking for stories for social media or for our weekly eNews? Now, the answer to the question that I just asked is, that it should be all of the above. You should be telling stories on Sunday morning. You should be telling stories in your e-news. You should be telling stories on your social media. Where do we get the stories? Where do we find them? Again, I’m going to start with core values. What are the core values of your church? And can you find, can you identify people in your church who are actually living out those core values? Those are the things that I, as a church leader, and as a pastor, would want to be reinforcing.

Bart Blair: [00:09:41] So in my last church, as an example, one of our core values was generosity. And with generosity being a core value, I was always, as a pastor, and as a leader, on the lookout for people who were exemplifying that core value of generosity. I wanted to tell their story, because by telling their story, and doing an interview with them, we had a situation where we had a lady in one of our small groups who was a single mom, going through some financial challenges, and her small group rallied around her, helped her with some groceries, paid some bills, did some things. We didn’t highlight a specific individual who wrote a check to make that a better situation, but we told the story of that small group who rallied around that person in their group to help them out of a really difficult jam. Do you know what it did? It actually changed the culture of our small groups. Telling that one story actually forced every group to start looking inward and going, are we actually exemplifying as a group this value of generosity? And all of a sudden we started hearing more stories because somebody would say, oh, well, our group did something like that, oh, our group did something like that too, or our group is going to do something like this. So I think, you know, churches often struggle with, well, where do we get the stories? The bigger the church is, sometimes the harder it is to find those stories because you don’t have the personal connection with the people. There are always faith stories of people who are coming to faith in Jesus. At the time of baptisms, you’re going to tell their story or get them to tell part of their faith story, their faith journey.

Bart Blair: [00:11:17] You know, I was on a call with a church yesterday, and they’re wanting to promote a page on their website for a newcomer lunch. And we went to the website and looked at the newcomer lunch page, and I’m like, there’s nothing here to convince me to sign up for this thing. I said you need to go find a person who has attended the newcomer lunch, and as a result of that has taken further steps to deepen their relationship with Jesus and their connection and their commitment to the church. Just pull out your cell phone and get that person to share a 90-second to a 2-minute testimonial of how attending that newcomer lunch changed their connection with the church and post that on that page so that when people are going to that new newcomer lunch registration page, they’re not just saying, okay, this is what time I show up and this is what child care you have and this is what my meal options are going to be. But you actually have somebody that says, hey, I was new once and I came to the newcomer lunch, and as a result of going to that newcomer lunch, I figured out that I needed to serve in a ministry, and I took the steps that I needed to, and let that person’s story sell what you’re trying to communicate. Okay, I’m rambling here, so I’m going to stop. What’s your 60-second bounce back? You got 60 seconds.

Jason Hamrock: [00:12:28] I love this because stories are so critically important. I’m going to do a throat punch right now. A throat punch I got from my friend Pastor Bill at Rock Point Church, he just does that throat punch. You get, you know, you get hit in the throat and you just can’t breathe, this is how important this is. If you don’t and can’t find stories in your church, there’s one of two things going on; either A, God’s not involved in your church’ or B, you’re just not taking it seriously enough. So I’m going to go ahead and eliminate A because I hope God’s involved in your church, and God is in the life-changing business, that’s what he does, that’s the church. They’re there, you’ve just got to figure out a way, your point, Bart, on figuring out what are you going to do with that story is so critically important. Then there’s, okay, let’s figure out the strategy on how we’re going to capture that story. You got to move one more before that to say, who do we ask? Like, I love that, I think you should have a story on why get baptized, a story about small groups. A story about children’s ministry, a story about student ministry, a story about any kind of ministry. You should have a video or some kind of a story about how this ministry has changed this person’s life, and that can happen to you too, there’s hope. So you’ve got to really put some effort into how are we going to collect these stories and use your ministry staff and volunteers to help you? You can’t do it on your own. You’ve got to lean on all the staff. But once you communicate that to them, that this is so important because it gives other people, like you said, your other small groups, it gives it energy, excitement, and hope for somebody who goes, you know, I really like to say yes to Jesus and get baptized, but I’m a little bit scared. Well, if I could see other people going through that, I’m like, oh, it’s not so scary. So that’s just man, that’s probably one of the biggest things as a communications team you can do is storytelling. Huge, love it. Moving on.

Bart Blair: [00:14:37] All right, the next burning question for Jason. All right, this is a good one, I love this one. A family member of our pastor does our marketing but isn’t doing a very good job. What should we do? Oh, that’s a hard one, isn’t it?

Jason Hamrock: [00:14:58] I’ve run into this before. There’s a church I was working with, and the pastor’s son graduated from college, so he became the marketing and communications director, green as a brand new leaf. And so it was challenging, I had to step in and help him a lot. And so I took the position of a servant leader, I’m here to serve up and serve him well because it matters that he does a good job. Because, you know, everybody has, you know, hopefully, you have a little bit of talent in that area, but he had some deficiencies, quite a few. And so my job was to say, hey. I’m going to help you understand some stuff, and I want to help you understand some pain points that you might have or some gaps that you might have. Helping him understand those gaps that maybe he didn’t know a lot about the gaps, he didn’t know a lot about the pain points because he’s brand new. He thinks he knows everything, so my job was not to, you know, create tension, my job was to facilitate and and create a conduit for him to grow and get better because it was clear this is a pastor’s son. Now, if I’m on staff, I’m still doing the same thing because you want to always have that position as a servant leader, leading up. So he was more important than me, the mission of the church is more important than both of us. And if that’s the pastor’s goal is like, I want my son or I want a family member, whatever it might be, then your job is to support and and and, you know, continue to lift that up.

Jason Hamrock: [00:16:45] Now, I would also work with him, and I created a Google Doc, so we were writing stuff down, you messed up here, and we did this. And so I’m keeping kind of a journal, so to speak, for him and for me. So that if the pastor were ever to ask, how are things going, you can kind of point to that doc to say, well, here’s some kind of things, here’s where we’ve been living the last six months or so, and so hopefully you see an improvement. If you don’t see an improvement, then you’re not left out, but you’ve literally tried to serve up and help. So hopefully that answers it, I don’t know. 60-second rebuttal?

Bart Blair: [00:17:20] Yeah, it’s a really tough one, so much of it depends on the culture of your church. And, you know, there are some churches that we work with where, you know, there are 14 people on staff, and 8 of them are related to each other, and that can be a good thing, it can be a challenging thing. You know, think so much of it depends on the culture of your church, the culture of your leadership team, and how you work together, collaborating to improve everybody’s ministry. I’ve sat in team staff meetings where, you know, everyone is working together to try to help the student ministry be better, the worship ministry be better, and in this particular case, the communications ministry to be better. So think a lot of it starts with the culture of your church, do you have a culture in which collaboration and collaborative feedback, constructive feedback is welcomed, and is helpful? If you’re a volunteer in the church, joining the team, bringing your skills, bringing your abilities, and being super, super gracious, and patient with the person who might be less skilled or green. In some cases, there just isn’t anything that you can do about it, you know, in some cases, there simply isn’t anything that you can do about it. But, you know, I say grace and patience are always an appropriate application in those types of situations. But, you know, you have to really do a good litmus test on the culture of your church and what you think can be done versus what can’t. So that’s a hard one, that’s why I asked you the burning question.

Jason Hamrock: [00:18:52] Oh, thanks, I appreciate that. Okay, here we go. You should have been careful, Bart. All right, everybody, I’m excited about this next question. Should we be scared of AI?

Bart Blair: [00:19:02] Should we be scared of AI? You know, no, I don’t think we should be afraid of AI, artificial intelligence is what AI means. Shameless plug, we have a website that you should check out. AI.MissionalMarketing.com, it’s a subdomain of our regular website, AI.MissionalMarketing.com. I was recently a guest on a new podcast called AI for churches, so you can probably find that on the website and you can hear me talk about my experiences with AI. And if you do that, you’ll understand why don’t think we should be afraid of AI. I think that artificial intelligence and the tools that we’re using, you mentioned ChatGPT just a few minutes ago, I’ve been using one called Claude Claude.AI, and I’ve written some great content using Claude. There are so many new and emerging tools. There are some things that I think we’ve been using for a long time that we might even consider, they are automated processes that are really somewhat artificial intelligence that we just never really considered them to be artificial intelligence because they didn’t work quite the same way that a ChatGPT does. But no, I think that we as a church need to be open-minded, we need to be cautious about how we choose to use artificial intelligence tools, and I think that we need to be honest about where we’re using them. So plagiarism in the church is something that has been rampant in the past, nobody loves to be accused of stealing content. And you know what? I think that if you’re using artificial intelligence to create content, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to disclose that you’re using artificial intelligence tools to create content. You know, to claim something that is your own, if it isn’t your own, is dicey. And I think that there are some ethics things that we have to question, and we are trying to be leaders in that space of trying to figure out what the ethics are with using artificial intelligence. But I think from a creative standpoint, we see image and video creation platforms that are coming up that think communications directors and communications team people will be able to utilize a lot. You know, Photoshop, even Photoshop has added some really interesting and neat tools that give you the ability to do some really creative stuff. I think at some point there are going to be some lines that we have to be careful, about crossing when it comes to content creation and claiming we own things or claiming we created things if we used the tool to do it. But no, I don’t think we should be afraid. And I’m excited about what our opportunities are as a church. What’s your 60-second bounce back on that?

Jason Hamrock: [00:21:41] Yeah, two things. I think number one is don’t feel like you’re behind, you already are and it’s okay because this thing is changing so fast. There are so many people that are developing new tools and utilizing AI, we are trying to stay up with it and it’s like impossible. So I think you just want to react to what comes down and what you can use. So don’t be afraid of it, learn, just keep investigating and learning. Follow certain you know, like we have AI.missionalmarketing.com, we’re going to try and stay ahead of it. So I think you can utilize those tools, but don’t be afraid of it.

Jason Hamrock: [00:22:21] I think the second thing, though, I would say is it will impact everything you do. Just like, remember when the Gutenberg Press, we talked about that when that came out, that changed the world because now you could print books in mass quantities. The next one was the Internet, when the Internet came out, that changed everything. And that took, you know, the Gutenberg Press took a long time to really find its impact. The Internet took shorter, but it was still a long time. This AI thing is going to change rapidly, and so don’t be freaked out by it, it just is what it is. But I think you can figure out how to use those tools to help you in communications, help you in the operations of a church, and help you with sermon prep. So it depends on what role you have. And yeah, it’s here and we’re all trying to learn from it, you know, not one person owns it. All these platforms, like you said, Photoshop has popped up with it. I was just on one that was really cool, I downloaded it, and I was messing with it. I’m like, this is really helpful. And it was, you know, these tools are just popping up, so embrace it.

Bart Blair: [00:23:27] All right. Are you ready for your next burning question?

Jason Hamrock: [00:23:31] I am.

Bart Blair: [00:23:31] Okay, here we go. How do I know if my advertising is actually getting people to attend my church?

Jason Hamrock: [00:23:39] That’s such a great question. It’s hard if you run ad campaigns and you are driving people to a page where you’re not converting leads, it’s really difficult to know, how do we know if they’re showing up. We’ve been putting a lot of thought and effort into this concept of a funnel from building awareness, and that’s what advertising does, it’s bringing awareness about your church. And you have this kind of funnel from awareness to attendance, and how are you tracking what you’re doing? I think there’s just the common, if you advertise things, that brings more awareness to people and some people are going to like it and some people are not. But the people who like it will keep liking it and they’ll keep investigating, and hopefully, we do a good enough job to invite them to something. And so it’s really, really difficult to measure the effectiveness of an advertising campaign if you’re just like promoting you know, your Fall Harvest Festival party. Right? You know there are some benefits to it, and people will register. But can you narrow that down to say, oh, we had 59 people that saw that ad and they clicked and they showed up? The only way you can do that is in that engagement once the click happens. Once the click happens and they actually are on your page, you’ve captured some type of a lead.

Jason Hamrock: [00:25:10] I’ll give you a perfect example. A church that is in Tennessee had food trucks and fireworks, you know, a month ago, July 4th, 4th of July stuff. And so they had thousands of people on their property and all around, right, a big fireworks show. And so in working with them, I thought, do you know what we should do, we should advertise and we should drive people to an Eventbrite page. And so on that Eventbrite page, it has all the details about the food trucks and fireworks, but in it was hey register so we know how many people in your party are coming. So we asked for their name, their email, their cell phone, and the number of people that were going to attend. And we were doing that because we wanted the lead, we wanted to connect with somebody, and so we did. And we had, I forget the number, but it was over 300 people that took the step to give us their contact information. And once we have that contact information, we can now follow up with them. Now, did they show up to the event? We don’t know because we weren’t asking for like tickets, right? But it was a great way to be able to understand that if you can capture a lead, and now you can follow up with that lead, that’s really one of the best ways you can know if your advertising is working. But I would just say as a general rule of thumb, advertising is important to do, there are reasons why companies spend billions of dollars on advertising. Can they narrow that down to the acquisition that it costs, you know, to get somebody to come to your church from that? It’s really difficult. But if you can do some lead-generating things, that’ll help a lot.

Bart Blair: [00:26:51] Yeah, I agree with you. You know, if you’re a person who ever watches television, like I know these days, people are amazed sometimes when they hear that my wife and I actually watch the kind of TV that has commercials on it. But we do, especially sporting events, you know, I watch sporting events and they have commercials and ads. Most of the commercials, and most of the ads that you see on television are awareness campaigns. You know, you’re watching and you see a Coca-Cola commercial, or you see a Ford F-150 commercial, there’s no clear call to action on those ads, they’re not saying click here to buy a Coke now, or click this button or scan this QR code to buy your Ford F-150 now, so most of it is image awareness, image marketing. Churches, by and large, the majority of the advertising that we do is comparable to that. We’re trying to communicate to people that we are here and tell them what we have to offer. But think you’re really on to something there, Jason, I think it’s okay to do that type of marketing to communicate, that we are here, this is who we are, and this is what we have to offer. We want, if you’re looking for a church, we want you to think of us first. But when you’re marketing specific events or activities, or you’re really looking for engagement, lead generation content, or registration details, I think they’re paramount.

Bart Blair: [00:28:09] I love using Eventbrite or AllEvents. I think, now what I typically coach churches on if they’re going to use Eventbrite is to actually send an email out to all of the people who have downloaded their tickets on Eventbrite a few days before and say, we want to meet you when you come, print your ticket and bring it to the information center and we have a gift for you, we have a $5 coupon for you to use at the food truck or whatever it is, and that way you actually know who actually registered, who clicked on an ad, who actually registered, and who actually showed up. And you’ll see that, okay, well, we had 300 people that actually registered, we had 180 of those people who actually showed up. That’s awesome. So now, your follow-up with those people is going to be different than those that you don’t know if they followed up because now you can actually follow up with those 180 people that brought their ticket to the information booth or the information tent, got their $5 ticket, their coupon for the food truck, and you can then, you know, build an automated email sequence to follow up with them or nurture a relationship with them. So I love Eventbrite, I love AllEents, not only because it allows you to collect people’s personal information, but because it also gives you more awareness in your community when people are searching for events and activities near them. It’s free as long as you’re not charging admission to your event. So take advantage of that, churches.

Jason Hamrock: [00:29:35] Yep, awesome, cool. Last question.

Bart Blair: [00:29:39] This is the last one. All right, the last of the burning questions. What do I get?

Jason Hamrock: [00:29:43] Well, there are so many good ones to choose from. Okay, here we go, some churches have an app. Should we, if we don’t have an app, is it worth it, are we really getting a good value for our money for those who do have an app?

Bart Blair: [00:30:00] That is a really good question. I’m just going to be honest here, for years, I was an anti-app guy. And a big part of the reason that I was an anti-app guy is that my default posture on the way that we spend our resources as a church is typically outward-focused. I typically go, I want to reach more people for Jesus. I will say as I’ve grown up, as God has done a work in my heart, I definitely see use for an app. An app as a discipleship tool, it is not necessarily an effective communications tool, and it is not certainly an outreach tool. I think that if you’re going to use an app, if you’re going to spend the money on it, it is only worth what you spend if you go all in to use all of its features to disciple the people that are in your church. Most people are not going to have the notifications turned on because people just don’t turn their notifications on. So using it as a communications tool to send, you know, messages to people, is not very effective.

Bart Blair: [00:31:12] Here’s the other thing that I think is super important. Most churches get an app and for about the first month or six weeks that they have the app, they promote the app, and they get a whole bunch of people in their church to download the app. And then a year later, they haven’t mentioned the app at all in 9 months or 12 months, and new people are coming to the church and they have no idea that there is an app. So if you’re going to use an app, you have to make sure that you are continuously putting the app in front of people who are coming to your church, giving them a legitimate reason to add the app to their mobile device and giving them legitimate reasons to log into the app on a regular basis.

Bart Blair: [00:31:51] Now, you know, we are friends with Blue Van Dyke and his team at Studio C, and all of a sudden like my mind went blank. Studio C, they can take your app and put it on steroids and help you do things with your app that out of the box the app won’t necessarily do, and they’re related to engagement and discipleship. So if you’re looking for more information about how to do that, that’s Studio C. Now, obviously there are, you know, some considerable added costs to that, but if you’re a church of notable size and you’re utilizing an app or you have an app but you’re not fully utilizing it, you should connect with Blue and the team at Studio C because they’ll show you how you can really leverage that sucker for all it’s worth. So, you know, don’t put the app in your church marketing and communications budget, it is not a marketing and communications tool. It is a discipleship tool, so it goes into your discipleship budget. I’m helping you, I’m helping the church communicators here push back on that in those budget planning meetings. Don’t put it in your communications budget, put it in the discipleship budget and keep all your communications budget for communications needs. But there’s there’s my $0.10 worth, Jason, what’s your 6O second bounce back?

Jason Hamrock: [00:33:09] Well, my recommendation is to do just that. But communication should own it because your app is communicating. So even though it’s a discipleship tool, it’s a member engagement tool as well, it can be a member engagement tool. So, you know, when you’re at church every weekend, your pastor should do this as they’re preaching and they say, here, fill in the blanks. Go ahead and download the app, it’s free if you haven’t done so. Like they should say that every single time that we use our app around here, you bring your Bible or get, you know, get your app, get your phone out. Because when you’re doing that, now they have that open, right? And if it’s a member engagement tool, it can actually help you, right? So if you use the right tool, it can help you clean up your data. So, you know, people’s birthday, you know how many people are in their family, you, you know, if they’re engaged or not. So it’s a tool to help people that are in your congregation move closer to being more like Jesus. And do those things that your leadership said that this is the priority, you know, we give, we serve, we’re in a small group, we attend, that stuff. And you can use that as, I think it’s a great tool for that, as well as watching past messages or filling in the blanks and taking notes. And give, you can have a link for give and all that kind of stuff. But that’s really what it’s for, it’s a discipleship tool like you said, and it’s a member engagement tool, so that tells us we know our people. So when we say, hey, we’re having a baptism thing, so if you haven’t been baptized right, you don’t need to send an email out to everybody because if you send an email to me just saying it’s time to get baptized, I’m like, I got baptized years ago, you don’t know me, that’s what you’re saying. So you can use this data and you can use your app to help communicate messages that are relevant to that audience. Don’t invite me to women’s things, invite me to guy’s stuff, or missions, or whatever I want to be involved with. So it’s a tool, a discipleship tool, and a member engagement tool. You should use it that way.

Bart Blair: [00:35:22] Well, that is going to conclude the Burning Questions Episode, the very first one. Episode four of Season four of the Missional Marketing Podcast. Jason, thanks for hanging out, that was a lot of fun. If you are listening or you are watching on our YouTube channel and you’ve got a burning question, make sure that you send it to me at BBlair@MissionalMarketing.com. Just put burning questions in the subject line. I will add it to our list, and yeah, hopefully, we’ll get to it at some point in the near future. Thanks again. Again, if you haven’t ever left us a rating or review, wherever you listen or watch the podcast, make sure that you do that, that feeds the machine and more people will find this podcast if you do that. So thanks again for tuning in. Jason, good day to you, sir.

Jason Hamrock: [00:35:22] Good day.