5 Examples of Digital Signage for Churches
When people talk about the benefits of digital signage, they are usually speaking in the context of businesses that are trying to increase revenue, improve their customer experience, and bring in new customers. This is natural. Digital signage is a great marketing tool, and when people think of marketing tools they generally think of tools for making profits.
However, digital signage can have benefits for plenty of other organizations whose primary goal is not making more money, and churches are one of those organizations. In fact, digital signage can be just as effective in helping a church achieve its goals as they are in helping businesses achieve theirs. Most churches, regardless of their age, denomination, size of their congregation, or financial standing can greatly benefit from using church digital signage.
Using digital signs can help enhance the church experience for church members, aid in outreach and gaining new members, help unify the congregation and foster a greater sense of community, and in general, foster an excited, more engaged, and better-informed congregation at your place of worship.
n this article, we will inform you about the basics of digital signage and how it can apply to your church. Then we will give 5 concrete examples of digital signage for churches that you can implement and will hopefully get your creative juices flowing as you consider how you can best use digital signage to benefit your house of worship.
What Are Some Challenges that Places of Worship Face?
The use of digital signage displays can resolve many challenges that the congregation might face. Here are some of the challenges that houses of worship face:
- Offering opportunities and activities that make the members and visitors more supportive and engaging.
- Support and funding from the community are a challenge that many congregations face. That’s because it can be difficult to get the most recent announcements and news to those who don’t follow social media platforms.
- Marketing and other operating costs can take a toll on the church’s budget. Most faith-based communities want to ease these expenses to serve the needs of the congregation and the broader community better.
Digital signage can help resolve these problems that many churches face…and they can do a lot more too!
What Is Digital Signage?
Digital signage involves using digital display screens, such as TVs, LED Displays, and LCD displays, along with digital signage software or hardware in order to display digital content, such as images, text, animations, social media feeds, video walls, digital menus, infographics, real-time updates on upcoming events, inspirational messages, testimonials, wayfinding signs, interactive materials, and so much more.
Moreover, digital signage displays can range in size from billboards to tablets, so they can be strategically placed for a variety of purposes, making digital signage a dynamic and powerful tool for conveying information, efficient communication to groups both large and small, and promotions. As you can probably tell, churches use digital signage in a variety of ways. You can use digital church signs to replace church bulletin boards, church screens, and church backdrops.
You can keep easily updated directories and important phone numbers. You can use digital signage to show that your church is up to date with the tech-savvy world by displaying social media feeds from congregation members. Welcome signs can be made more effective by using eye-catching graphics for better outreach to new members. Digital signage can be put to use in fundraising campaigns and can help inform the congregation about upcoming church events, community events, volunteer opportunities, member birthdays, and service times.
Inspirational messages displayed around the church can change daily with ease, raising the morale of people, and, if your church doesn’t mind integrating technology into traditional sermons, you can use digital signage as a back-drop to the speaker in the pulpit, utilizing graphics and important text to convey information in an entertaining, engaging, and informative way. There are so many different applications for digital signage in churches, that we can’t begin to exhaust all the possibilities in this article.
What Does Digital Signage Involve?
Luckily, there are great digital signage solutions out available so getting started with digital signage for your church is pretty straightforward with the potential for low operating costs, especially when compared with the benefits that you can get.
First, you will need to get something to display your content on. TVs and LED screens are two common options, though they are by no means the only options. Additionally, you will likely want to get a wall mount for whatever display device you choose to use
The other thing that you will need is a digital signage solution. Luckily, companies like Loop TV make this easy. They send you a content player and the software you need to get your digital signage up and running. You don’t need to be a professional designer to create great displays, as your digital signage solution will come with templates that you can use to create incredible displays.
What comes next is up to you! But don’t worry. If you aren’t yet sure how you would like to use digital signage at your church, up next in this article are five great ways that churches can use digital signage to benefit the church, improve the worship experience, create a better sense of community, and inspire people to become new members.
5 Great Examples of How Churches Can Use Digital Signage (& and Their Benefits)
1) Using Digital Signage to Make the Church More Visible
The digital signage for churches typically entails a mixture of video wall displays and outdoor displays that help offer information to members and non-members. Digital signage for churches both inside and outdoor can help attract the community’s attention more effectively. In fact, they can attract at least four times more engagement than static signages over time.
Moreover, when placed outside in strategic places, passersby can pay more attention to what they view than they can with a static one. Seriously, so many people pass churches without giving their outdoor signs a second of attention. This does not mean that they are not open to joining a church. In fact, they may very well be interested in joining a church. However, people are so used to seeing church signs that look the same that it barely registers when they pass by.
Moreover, outdoor signages such as welcome signage outside a church can also deliver messages to more people in far more interesting ways. Digital signage is not only more eye-catching than static signs, but they can also be far more effective in conveying messages that would make someone want to enter the church. Visuals, animations, and bright and colorful text can all signify to a person that this church is worth checking out.
2) Improve Church Worship Experience
Church digital signage solutions can help you create immersive experiences. That can include meditation, reading, prayer, and visual or audio elements. Greetings and sermons from ministerial staff are also easy to broadcast with these digital solutions. While they aren’t a substitute for in-person interactions, live streams can help give visitors an idea of what to expect during events or services.
The digital church screens will allow services or sermons to stream live throughout the church building. Parents taking their young children to quiet places don’t need to worry about missing anything from the service or sermon. Moreover, church digital signage also works well for religious education for all ages. The digital screens are ideal for showing presentations, lesson plans, and other items.
3) Increase Community Engagement
Digital screens can display church social media feeds for an enhanced sense of community engagement. For instance, photos of events and activities, birthdays, and anniversary announcements can help boost this sense of involvement. Keep in mind that the congregants are more likely to check out the displayed information on social media. As they catch up with this information, they’ll also learn more about fundraising, volunteering opportunities, and similar information.
Another great way to increase community engagement is by opening up space for congregation members to say a few words. This could be a call for people to pray for someone who is sick or struggling in some other way, or it could be an announcement about a non-church-related event. These messages could even be more personal. Maybe a parent has a child that is in need of a good tutor. By opening up the space for church members to ask for the help of other church members, people can feel much more connected to the community.
Another way to create more engagement is to ask any church members if they want to introduce themselves through a digital display. The member could say something about themselves and express how they feel about joining the church. This is a great way for the congregation to get to know new members, and once the introduction is made, it is a lot easier to talk to the new member and welcome them into the community.
Other opportunities abound. Children in a bible study group could make a video where they talk about their favorite thing that they have learned. This would not only get the kids more engaged but would also be inspirational for the rest of the congregation.
4) Improve Praise and Worship Performances
One of the major reasons people attend church is the praise and worship session. People’s attention is on the song, the singer(s), or the choir during this hour. However, that can quickly become monotonous when done every service in the same way or by the same person.
So, as an organization, you should make people feel excited about the praise and worship session. For instance, you can organize a different, well-known choir to perform at your church. You could also try to encourage other groups within your church to lead the praise and worship hour at different times. That will promote creativity among the members and make the church livelier.
The church can install digital screens on stage where the praise and worship singers or choirs perform. Then, you can use graphic design and special effects to make the stage more captivating. Moreover, you can use different motions and static pictures to bring out the appropriate theme and mood. For example, if it’s the praise session, you can create motivating and exciting content relevant to such a moment.
Alternatively, you can create deep, thoughtful, and profound content for the worship performance. That will entice the mood of the attendees, and no one can be in a hurry to leave during such moments.
5) Improve the Church Group Experience
A great way of making people stick around the church is by making them involved in the organization’s activities. Churches can form groups targeting youth, men, women, and kids. These groups can have different activities to engage the members. Every group can hold a meeting often after the main service to discuss the issues affecting the church and how they can improve them. As such, people will not hurry to leave the premises.
For congregants to remain behind after the service is over, they should receive alerts and announcements. However, the attention of any crowd is often very low during announcements. Thus, it’s likely that people will miss the announcements about the group meetings. So, churches can remind the congregation about the appointments using attractive, catchy, and easy-to-read notices on the display screen to catch the crowd’s attention. Digital screens can display such messages when the sermon starts or when it’s about to end. That can draw the attention of the crowd and let them know that they should remain behind after the service is over.
Get Creative With Digital Signage
There are so many opportunities to improve the worship experience and create a stronger sense of community when churches use digital signage. While we only covered five great ways that churches can use digital signage, we hope to have given some inspiration for you to figure out how digital signage can work best for your place of worship!