I had a chance to connect with Alex Ehly, the Middle School Pastor at Christ Community Church (www.cccomaha.org). And who better to talk shop about church communications and SnapChat than with a Middle School ministry Pastor!
There are some really compelling reasons for a church to consider SnapChat.
Alex’s church has been using on demand custom SnapChat geofilters recently, so I asked him to share with us how it is going as well as some of the details in terms of cost and reach and engagement. Fascinating stuff!
Q. Alex, I was excited to hear CCCO was using SnapChat geofilters. What exactly were the geofilters used for?
A. We have used geofilter for multiple things. Student Finale’s, Sunday Services as a church, Baptism Event and even for a summer youth Conference with 5,500 High School Students.
Q. What did the actual custom geofilters look like?
A. Here are some samples of what we actually used:
Student Takeover Sunday (Churches Sunday AM Services)
LIFE Conference / Kansas City July 5-9, 2016
And another one for the conference event:
LIFE Conference / Kansas City July 5-9, 2016
Special Baptism Event (Sunday Evening Church-wide Event)
Q. How did you promote it? Did you announce it or message it in anyway particular? Or did people just discover on SnapChat?
A. We set up the geofilters a few days leading up to events for an hour at a time to promote them through our own SnapChat account. Encouraged people to swipe over and share them that day. We also used other social media platforms to encourage people to use the filters on SnapChat
Q. Response? Did people end up using it? Any comments back that you heard?
A. People used all of them at a pretty good rate. The risk factor was low and we are glad that we did them.
There was a great ripple from students in the church especially who just thought it was awesome that our church had a geofilter like other places they go!
There were also other local churches who saw it and reached out about how to do them.
Q. Any results / stats you can share on views, usage, etc?
By the way, I have shared all this stuff on my personal site:
First Filter / Student Ministry Finale (Student only Event)
- Time – 4:00pm – 9:00pm (5 hours)
- Size of Filter – 151,979 Sq Ft
- Cost – $28.50
- Times Used – 73
- Filter Views – 2,402
- Event Attendance – 400 approx.
- Cost Per View – $.012
Second Filter / Student Takeover Sunday (Churches Sunday AM Services)
- Time – 8:00am – 1:00pm (5 hours)
- Size of Filter – 213,230 Sq Ft
- Cost – $22.21
- Times Used – 133
- Filter Views -5,975
- Event Attendance – 4,000 approx.
- Cost Per View – $.003
Third Filter / Special Baptism Event (Sunday Evening Church-wide Event)
- Time – 3:00pm – 9:00pm (6 hours)
- Size of Filter – 298,418 Sq Ft
- Cost – $37.30
- Times Used – 47
- Filter Views -2,633
- Event Attendance – 300 approx.
- Cost Per View – $.014
LIFE Conference / Kansas City July 5-9, 2016
- Times Used: 2,823
- Filter Views: 116,725
- Total Cost for Week: $2,081
- Event Attendance: 5,500 approx.
- Cost Per View: $.017
Q. How did you define geo-fence?
We created geofences around out campus and buildings we used, as well as the parking lots and walk areas around it.
Q. Would you do it again?
Yes. We have plans to do it more throughout the year at other events and possible on a weekly basis depending on continued data research.
KJ: Thanks Alex for sharing your pioneering experiences with on-demand custom Snapchat Geofilters in the church communications space. Exciting to see how you have harnessed them for your church’s communications efforts!
BTW: if you are interested in making some custom geofilters on your own, check out this downloadable PDF step by step tutorial I put together. It doesn’t have to be hard for a church to adopt. Your church can learn Snapchat. Make sure to let me know if you end up using any for your church!
Alex Ehly is dad to one awesome wife and daddy to two great kids. Alex serves as Middle School Pastor at Christ Community Church. He is passionate about learning from social media and leveraging it to help build relationships and proclaim the Gospel. To keep up with my adventures you can find me on most social platforms at @pALEXe.
