4 Essential Steps to Boosting Your Impact Online This Christmas

Maximize your Christmas impact.

This year may be the first time your church is doing Christmas online, and you may be asking yourself:

• How can I engage my attenders online?
• Provide pastoral care?
• Encourage someone to invite others or return to church after Christmas?

Church Online Platform provides multiple features that can help you maximize the impact you’re making during your Christmas services. Whether you’re focused on increasing engagement, creating connection, providing ample invite opportunities, or following up with attenders, we have features to help.

Increasing Engagement

With the Response Moment, you can create a custom singular poll to drive engagement with custom text and a call-to-action button. During your Christmas experience, use the candle emoji for a virtual candle lighting experience. ?️

Volunteers are also a great way to engage attenders in chat and one-on-one prayer. Prepare your Hosts to engage in the chat, and equip them with best practices from our complete guide for church online Hosts. 

Creating Connection

The power of prayer changes lives, and during the Christmas season, you’ll have the opportunity to minister to people desperate for the hope that Jesus brings. In addition to the Request Prayer button, use the Prayer Moment to engage your attenders in one-on-one prayer conversations. Consider posting the Prayer Moment multiple times throughout your service, and don’t forget to set up Offline Prayer to allow your attenders to submit prayer requests outside of Service times.

Christmas is also a great time to promote community with others, and you can encourage attenders to search for a small group with the Connect Moment. (Pro tip: Use tools that allow you to embed using iFrame—when you do this, attenders don’t have to leave your church online service to complete your form.

Inviting to Services

As you encourage your attenders to invite their family members, Facebook friends, and co-workers, try using these two features: the Invite Moment and the Quote Moment. 

Setting up an Invite Moment allows your attenders to quickly and easily share your Service details with others via text messaging, social media platforms, and more.

The Quote Moment allows you to share a powerful quote in the chat where your attenders can then share via text messaging or social media. You can share quotes from your service, scriptures, and more.   

Following Up with Attenders 

Encourage your attenders to create an account with your church—doing so will give you access to their email address so you can follow up outside of your experience times. 

We recently released two new features to prompt account creation: a welcome banner and the Sign Up Moment. The welcome banner prompts attenders to create an account when they arrive at your Service, and the Sign Up Moment will automatically appear in chat if someone starts chatting with a nickname. 

As more of your attenders create new accounts, try using these two features to begin following up with guests:

• Export Users: In the Admin, export your Users from Church Online Platform into a CSV file to store or to import other places. Learn how to export users.
• Webhooks: Webhooks allow you to share data from the Church Online Platform to your Church Management System or other computer systems. This can allow you to streamline your attender follow up and combine your physical and digital data. Spoiler alert: we’re working with Rock RMS to release a plugin for Church Online Platform and it will be released soon! Learn more about Webhooks.

First Christmas online?

If this is your first Christmas running services online, you may be wondering—how do I pastor people online? How do I make the experience personal?

Pastor Steven Roberts shares his tips for pastoring well online.