TL;DR: Digital Ministry News Recap 

Happy 2024! This edition of the Digital Ministry Journal recaps news of interest to the digital ministry community. Planning Center shares its task automation feature. ChurchTrac weighs in on the best Church bookkeeping software. Brady Shearer (of Pro Church Tools) shares his social media tools for 2024. Finally, Church Tech Today shares SEO best practices for sermons on YouTube.

Planning Center: Automated Task Creation

Planning Center shares “Build Your To-Do List: Create New Tasks with Automations” (3-minute watch; 10-minute read) describing how it enables administrators to set up automations that will create tasks for Planning Center users based on triggering events like a volunteer accepting a request to serve. Significance? This capability provides a productivity boost for Planning Center users and non-Planning Center users should explore their Church Management System for comparable automation and perhaps prompt their vendor if automation is not in the product or on the product roadmap.

ChurchTrac: “Best” Church Bookkeeping Software

In case you missed it…ChurchTrac shared “Best Bookkeeping Software For Churches?” (10-minute read) outlining criteria for selecting church accounting software, including weighing in on QuickBooks Online use cases. Spoiler alert: The article ends with a call to action to explore ChurchTrac’s accounting software.

One Expert’s Church Social Media Tools for 2024

Brady Shearer shares Instagram Reel “[Church social media tools I’ll be using in 2024]“ (1 minute watch).

YouTube SEO Best Practices for Sermons

ChurchTech Today shares “3 Must-Do YouTube SEO Best Practices For Your Sermons” (5-minute read) describing “quick win” actions for improving discovery of you sermons on YouTube as well as some SEO strategy thought starters. Spoiler alert: The article ends with a call to action to attend Church YouTube Lab’s next cohort.

Closing

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Disclosures

In the interest of “shunning the appearance of evil” resulting from undisclosed relationships and/or potential conflicts of interest, we disclose our relationship(s) with the providers mentioned.