WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:13.660 Take the time to connect with your people one-on-one in a digital sense, because not everybody has the opportunity to do that during the week and to, you know, just be active and involved. 00:00:13.800 --> 00:00:16.560 Like maybe your church has a Facebook group and you're a lead pastor. 00:00:16.760 --> 00:00:19.500 Go in the Facebook group and just say, hey, what's up, everybody? 00:00:19.600 --> 00:00:21.120 How can I be praying with you? 00:00:21.120 --> 00:00:27.740 Those are great ways to start promoting active community and asynchronous community in your organization. 00:00:28.180 --> 00:00:30.000 Welcome to the Church Digital Podcast. 00:00:30.960 --> 00:00:34.840 Through this podcast, we'll talk about the technological innovations within the church. 00:00:35.200 --> 00:00:38.660 But more than tech for tech itself, we'll address deeper questions. 00:00:39.280 --> 00:00:40.900 Is disciple making possible digitally? 00:00:41.260 --> 00:00:43.340 How should we approach the digital mission field? 00:00:43.640 --> 00:00:46.220 Can a biblically grounded church operate in digital space? 00:00:46.220 --> 00:00:50.560 Oh, and where does the metaverse and artificial intelligence fit into all of this? 00:00:51.460 --> 00:00:56.360 Whether you're a big or small church, the Church Digital's goal is to help churches like yours 00:00:56.360 --> 00:01:00.140 learn to be a multiplying church digitally and physically. 00:01:00.400 --> 00:01:02.280 And now here's your host, Jeff Reed. 00:01:03.140 --> 00:01:03.400 All right. 00:01:03.460 --> 00:01:08.000 Episode 288 of the Church Digital Podcast brought to you by Riverside. 00:01:08.100 --> 00:01:11.580 We are going to get to Gabe DeWalk here in a second. 00:01:11.740 --> 00:01:12.540 I love this. 00:01:12.580 --> 00:01:16.240 We've got a couple of things I want to share with TCD family right up here at the top. 00:01:16.300 --> 00:01:18.620 First off, this is brought to you by Riverside. 00:01:18.800 --> 00:01:22.520 And I got to tell you, I love working with Riverside. 00:01:22.640 --> 00:01:27.440 Every week I discover some new features, some new ideas, some new concepts. 00:01:27.740 --> 00:01:31.500 And let me tell you, this is like the unofficial Riverside. 00:01:31.620 --> 00:01:39.100 This is what I don't think Riverside tech support is going to broadcast this idea. 00:01:39.240 --> 00:01:41.120 But this is what I've discovered with Riverside. 00:01:41.220 --> 00:01:42.040 And I got to tell you, I love it. 00:01:42.080 --> 00:01:46.080 I'm doing some work coming up with some other companies. 00:01:46.440 --> 00:01:51.980 And you're going to see Resi, Pushpay make some announcements after Easter and start to move forward with some things. 00:01:52.060 --> 00:01:54.280 I've been teasing this for, it feels like all year. 00:01:54.720 --> 00:01:56.880 But we're almost close to launching what we're working on. 00:01:57.020 --> 00:02:03.120 And long story short, I'm going to do a series of online events with our friends over at Resi. 00:02:04.080 --> 00:02:10.460 But the platform we're using is a, well, it's Adobe Engage, I believe. 00:02:11.260 --> 00:02:15.560 And it's a very powerful engagement platform. 00:02:15.920 --> 00:02:18.340 It's very powerful online events. 00:02:19.700 --> 00:02:21.320 But it was interesting. 00:02:21.400 --> 00:02:24.400 We were looking at that video recording of it. 00:02:24.540 --> 00:02:27.900 And it's like really low res. 00:02:28.480 --> 00:02:31.080 And this is not knocking Adobe Engage. 00:02:31.080 --> 00:02:40.960 Like, it just, like, dude, for my video long term, and the work that I want to do, putting the interviews and stuff like that online, like, I need more than 360p. 00:02:41.260 --> 00:02:42.740 Like, give me something here. 00:02:43.520 --> 00:02:47.640 And Adobe Engage, just for whatever reason, wasn't worth it. 00:02:47.740 --> 00:02:54.500 Now, through Riverside, you can stream, like, through the platform. 00:02:54.500 --> 00:03:01.800 You can stream to, like, you know, Twitch, and you can stream to Facebook and YouTube and a lot of the other popular RTMP solutions. 00:03:02.160 --> 00:03:04.260 But for whatever reason, it wasn't working. 00:03:05.120 --> 00:03:07.940 Like, Adobe Engage is not one of those platforms, which makes sense. 00:03:08.020 --> 00:03:10.040 It's a little more obscure, Adobe Engage is. 00:03:10.560 --> 00:03:14.480 But also with that, it's just not as common. 00:03:15.800 --> 00:03:20.780 And Adobe Engage, you would try to do, like, the manual RTMP, and it just didn't work. 00:03:21.700 --> 00:03:22.880 But I discovered something. 00:03:23.940 --> 00:03:30.780 I can do Adobe Engage and have Riverside running in the background, web browser open, and both records at the same time. 00:03:33.440 --> 00:03:38.320 And so, like, because it works through the Chrome web browser, and it just works seamlessly. 00:03:38.520 --> 00:03:43.120 Like I said, Riverside Tech Support is probably not going to tell you, hey, why don't you try this? 00:03:43.500 --> 00:03:48.980 And we're actually testing it now into deeper, longer time periods to record to see if it could work. 00:03:48.980 --> 00:03:58.600 But I could send video and audio from me to two separate applications simultaneously, Engage as well as Riverside. 00:03:58.820 --> 00:04:04.100 And that makes my job so much easier in post-production of this online event. 00:04:04.680 --> 00:04:05.780 So, hats off to Riverside. 00:04:05.840 --> 00:04:07.460 Literally, I'm wearing a hat if you're watching on YouTube. 00:04:07.660 --> 00:04:08.440 Man, that guy's bald. 00:04:09.180 --> 00:04:12.440 Hats off for Riverside, what they're up to. 00:04:13.020 --> 00:04:15.080 And, hey, Gabe, we're going to get to you in a second, Gabe. 00:04:15.100 --> 00:04:19.940 But I got one more leak that I want to share with the fam. 00:04:19.980 --> 00:04:20.960 Now, Gabe, this is funny. 00:04:21.060 --> 00:04:22.240 We've got Gabe DeWalk coming on. 00:04:22.800 --> 00:04:29.920 Gabe may be one of the top async, asynchronous community guys in the country when it comes to church space. 00:04:30.160 --> 00:04:34.900 And so, looking forward to having him in this conversation as we're talking about the church in async. 00:04:34.980 --> 00:04:40.600 But if we're going to talk about the church in async, then why don't we talk about the church digital in async? 00:04:40.660 --> 00:04:45.120 You know, the church digital, we've been on, you know, asynchronous community for a while now. 00:04:45.120 --> 00:04:53.380 We've been using Mighty Networks and Facebook and, you know, I love to hate Facebook groups. 00:04:53.760 --> 00:04:58.360 And Mighty Networks are, I guess, okay, but there's some challenges to that. 00:04:59.320 --> 00:05:03.840 And as we circled the wagons as an organization maybe a month ago, hey, we've got a new website coming out. 00:05:03.880 --> 00:05:04.420 What are we doing? 00:05:05.000 --> 00:05:06.200 Where are we driving people to? 00:05:06.340 --> 00:05:07.300 What's the one thing? 00:05:07.360 --> 00:05:08.680 Well, we want to drive people to community. 00:05:08.860 --> 00:05:17.520 Okay, if community is that big, if our connections in digital space are driving people to community, then we've really got to own community. 00:05:18.460 --> 00:05:21.260 And if I'm honest, Mighty Networks just isn't doing that for us, right? 00:05:21.340 --> 00:05:22.300 So, what are we going to do? 00:05:23.160 --> 00:05:27.140 And Andy Mage says, we should move to Discord. 00:05:28.360 --> 00:05:30.480 And to be honest, the rest of leadership agreed. 00:05:30.620 --> 00:05:31.880 So, we are moving to Discord. 00:05:32.620 --> 00:05:36.520 We are soft launching, literally, as you are listening to this podcast. 00:05:36.660 --> 00:05:38.740 The Discord community is being built. 00:05:39.180 --> 00:05:40.260 We're pre-populating it. 00:05:40.380 --> 00:05:42.520 It's an invite-only crowd right now. 00:05:42.620 --> 00:05:52.880 And you, podcast listeners, are the literal invite-only crowd that we are bringing into the TCD Discord for us to kind of test out the permissions, the borders, 00:05:52.980 --> 00:06:00.160 and make sure we're doing it all right before the website launches and everything goes public here in a couple weeks, days, like April 5th, 24. 00:06:00.620 --> 00:06:05.200 So, here's what I need from you, TCD family. 00:06:06.200 --> 00:06:07.180 Open up your web browser. 00:06:07.260 --> 00:06:09.680 Go to discord.thechurch.digital. 00:06:09.780 --> 00:06:12.480 Discord.thechurch.digital. 00:06:12.720 --> 00:06:17.460 That will take you to the Discord sign-up page. 00:06:17.580 --> 00:06:26.640 To get in there and create your account, sign up for our server, and get into Discord and start to discover what Discord is, or the church digital. 00:06:27.060 --> 00:06:28.480 Andy Mage is running that. 00:06:28.920 --> 00:06:30.140 He is super excited. 00:06:30.300 --> 00:06:34.460 I've heard some of his plans about what community is going to look like in that space, and I think it's going to be great. 00:06:34.900 --> 00:06:40.180 So, I'm looking forward to Andy contributing and engaging in the community over there. 00:06:40.200 --> 00:06:43.840 We've got some other awesome things kind of with the church digital in the days to come. 00:06:43.900 --> 00:06:44.980 So, stay tuned with that. 00:06:45.040 --> 00:06:49.460 But right now, TCD family, discord.thechurch.digital. 00:06:50.320 --> 00:06:52.000 Okay, so we talked Riverside. 00:06:52.100 --> 00:06:56.640 We talked the church digital launching, Discord, moving that direction. 00:06:56.820 --> 00:06:59.080 Really excited about both of those options. 00:06:59.640 --> 00:07:00.740 Teased a little bit of resi. 00:07:00.880 --> 00:07:01.660 Some of the things coming up. 00:07:01.700 --> 00:07:03.180 I still haven't told you what's going on. 00:07:03.420 --> 00:07:03.780 It's cool. 00:07:04.060 --> 00:07:04.580 Coming soon. 00:07:05.220 --> 00:07:06.420 Let's get into Gabe Duwock. 00:07:06.560 --> 00:07:10.140 So, Gabe's no stranger here to the church digital or to the podcast as well. 00:07:10.340 --> 00:07:11.420 He's been on before. 00:07:11.760 --> 00:07:14.540 Was it Seacoast's Secret Experiments? 00:07:14.840 --> 00:07:25.680 We did a podcast where Gabe was like the 19-year-old intern, 18-year-old intern, I think, at the time, who was running async for Seacoast. 00:07:26.320 --> 00:07:31.320 And had a lot of success, maybe a lack of vision, understanding potential of what was there. 00:07:31.860 --> 00:07:37.280 And so, Gabe spun that off, what he was doing with Seacoast, and actually turned it into a digital church. 00:07:37.420 --> 00:07:40.720 And so, I'm looking forward to Gabe sharing his vision for that. 00:07:40.780 --> 00:07:42.880 And so, I'm not going to let the cat out of the bag too much. 00:07:43.460 --> 00:07:45.160 But here, you got a young guy. 00:07:45.400 --> 00:07:47.400 It's just 22, 23. 00:07:47.520 --> 00:07:48.960 Maybe we talk about it on the podcast. 00:07:49.200 --> 00:07:52.080 But him, you got newly married, just bought a house. 00:07:52.460 --> 00:07:59.720 Still works for Seacoast and the marketing team, managing some of their ad accounts. 00:07:59.900 --> 00:08:05.040 But huge vision for what the church can be in digital space. 00:08:05.620 --> 00:08:11.860 So, hey, I want you to listen to this conversation with Gabe Duwock as we're diving into a synchronous community in the church. 00:08:11.960 --> 00:08:12.940 Okay, fam, here you go. 00:08:15.240 --> 00:08:17.140 You know, last time we talked, you were at Seacoast. 00:08:17.200 --> 00:08:18.120 You were an intern at Seacoast. 00:08:18.220 --> 00:08:18.720 Catch us up. 00:08:18.780 --> 00:08:20.140 What are you up to these days at Seacoast? 00:08:20.140 --> 00:08:25.260 Yeah, so, I think last time we talked, I was just doing a little bit of IT work for Seacoast. 00:08:25.720 --> 00:08:30.440 Also, doing some internship stuff through the college that they have at the church. 00:08:31.040 --> 00:08:33.020 Since then, taking a little break from school. 00:08:33.780 --> 00:08:35.300 Got married this last year. 00:08:35.460 --> 00:08:35.940 Bought a house. 00:08:36.140 --> 00:08:37.520 Just a ton of life things. 00:08:38.020 --> 00:08:39.800 So, just putting that on hold for a while. 00:08:40.960 --> 00:08:43.560 But right now, I'm doing marketing for Seacoast. 00:08:43.760 --> 00:08:46.060 My official role is digital marketing manager. 00:08:46.700 --> 00:08:50.980 So, I manage all our in-house marketing accounts, our Google grant. 00:08:51.780 --> 00:08:57.940 And I just help manage the campaigns week to week, month to month, and help with our live streams on Sunday. 00:08:58.080 --> 00:09:00.600 So, I'm a part of the Seacoast digital team. 00:09:00.600 --> 00:09:01.760 Well, very cool. 00:09:01.900 --> 00:09:10.080 The little intern grows up, gets married, buys a house, has got a dog, and digital marketing manager for Seacoast. 00:09:10.160 --> 00:09:15.120 What I saw on LinkedIn, you're four years, three years? 00:09:15.260 --> 00:09:16.920 What's your anniversary, or did you just hit at Seacoast? 00:09:17.020 --> 00:09:18.420 I think it was March 10th. 00:09:18.420 --> 00:09:19.680 I just hit three years. 00:09:19.900 --> 00:09:20.260 Awesome. 00:09:20.420 --> 00:09:22.340 Well, congratulations on three years. 00:09:22.500 --> 00:09:23.400 That's very cool. 00:09:24.180 --> 00:09:26.260 And so, we can talk about Seacoast. 00:09:26.340 --> 00:09:28.020 But hey, let's talk about Seacoast the other day. 00:09:28.140 --> 00:09:33.260 Let's kick into Kingstide, this digital church that you're running. 00:09:33.580 --> 00:09:34.660 So, tell me a little bit about it. 00:09:34.660 --> 00:09:39.820 So, Kingstide started as an idea between me and a few friends a couple years ago. 00:09:40.360 --> 00:09:44.020 Basically, our church campus got shut down during COVID. 00:09:44.460 --> 00:09:48.760 So, we came together just to, you know, think of ways that we could start reaching people online. 00:09:49.480 --> 00:10:01.220 We started doing some stuff through the student ministry at Seacoast, creating, like, an online network for their students to communicate with each other across campuses, stay informed about content and updates and stuff. 00:10:03.000 --> 00:10:05.400 And we've just kept expanding since then. 00:10:05.480 --> 00:10:14.040 We went from student ministry to launching our own separate Discord servers where we're hosting up to 9,000 people at some points on different servers. 00:10:14.040 --> 00:10:24.900 So, basically, over the years, me and my friends just have been kind of on the edge of digital ministry, just thinking of ways that we could impact the community, use our relationship. 00:10:25.580 --> 00:10:36.000 I like to describe the relationship I have with my buddies, who are also some of my board members, some of the people that work really hard to make Kingstide what it is. 00:10:36.980 --> 00:10:42.280 What we have is a brotherhood, and we like to kind of extend that into the ministry that we do. 00:10:42.360 --> 00:10:43.820 Well, hey, let's drill in a little bit. 00:10:44.020 --> 00:10:52.480 I think I heard you say you had 9,000 people on different servers, and then you talk about the intimacy of a brotherhood of doing ministry. 00:10:52.480 --> 00:10:55.340 So, like, how are you able to pull that off? 00:10:55.480 --> 00:10:58.800 What does intimacy with 9,000 people look like? 00:10:58.920 --> 00:11:04.100 So, if you've ever used Discord before, you know that it's like a combination of both text and voice channels, right? 00:11:04.680 --> 00:11:13.040 It's a way for people to communicate on the Internet that may be a little more advanced than some of the other social platforms that we use day to day. 00:11:13.580 --> 00:11:15.780 You can categorize things. 00:11:16.780 --> 00:11:20.840 You can, you know, separate things out by block, just make it super organized. 00:11:21.080 --> 00:11:25.140 When you put a lot of people into a Discord server, a few things have to happen, right? 00:11:26.180 --> 00:11:29.040 So, Discord is a place for people to communicate. 00:11:29.220 --> 00:11:33.980 So, naturally, when people come onto Discord, you know, they're talking about this, talking about that. 00:11:34.060 --> 00:11:37.340 So, we set our servers up to be, you know, Christ-focused. 00:11:38.080 --> 00:11:39.920 We want everything to point back to Christ. 00:11:40.020 --> 00:11:42.500 We have people, we have places for people to pray. 00:11:42.620 --> 00:11:45.180 We have places for people to talk about the Bible. 00:11:45.320 --> 00:11:48.080 We have places just for people to talk about life in general. 00:11:48.280 --> 00:11:55.740 So, it's a place that you can come to do life together with other Christians that's online only. 00:11:55.920 --> 00:12:00.560 So, you don't have to, you know, attend a physical location to do this. 00:12:00.620 --> 00:12:02.680 You don't have to leave your house. 00:12:03.160 --> 00:12:05.600 We want to meet you right where you are with King's Tide. 00:12:06.120 --> 00:12:10.100 And we take the aspect of that brotherhood and we mix it into a ton of things, right? 00:12:10.860 --> 00:12:13.020 Just the way that we disciple our volunteers. 00:12:13.600 --> 00:12:21.600 We like to have, you know, a close-knit community of volunteers that are always on call and always ready to serve. 00:12:22.580 --> 00:12:27.520 We do Bible studies over Zoom, which is a great way to, you know, develop relationship online. 00:12:27.720 --> 00:12:34.620 Discord has a great bunch of online features that help us connect to the community. 00:12:35.200 --> 00:12:37.860 I don't know if you've ever used Discord stage features before. 00:12:38.400 --> 00:12:46.700 That essentially allows you to, you know, hold what I think of as like a live podcast episode where your users can contribute and stuff like that. 00:12:46.940 --> 00:12:51.220 So, really leveraging Discord social features to impact the community. 00:12:52.080 --> 00:12:55.320 And really, we just want to encourage people to connect with each other. 00:12:56.120 --> 00:12:57.700 It's not always our place. 00:12:57.880 --> 00:13:02.720 Our administrators, our volunteers don't always have to be active in a specific conversation. 00:13:02.720 --> 00:13:07.980 That's what's beautiful about Discord is that it's asynchronous, like we talk about sometimes. 00:13:08.400 --> 00:13:15.100 Which means that when it starts growing, it kind of just keeps rolling by itself, like a snowball rolling down a hill. 00:13:16.040 --> 00:13:23.640 And how I like to describe our Discord growing is it started as a small snowball at the top of a hill and very quickly started rolling down the hill. 00:13:24.340 --> 00:13:26.660 So, we had to start building a lot of that infrastructure. 00:13:26.980 --> 00:13:31.200 Yeah, we're going to get into async here in a second, which I think is really the heart of the conversation. 00:13:31.200 --> 00:13:37.360 Where did, before that though, where did the idea of King's Tide come from? 00:13:37.560 --> 00:13:41.860 Like, you know, we talked about this a little bit on the last podcast episode you were on, I think. 00:13:42.000 --> 00:13:47.460 But give us a little background on how King's Tide came about to be. 00:13:47.840 --> 00:13:56.640 We created our first Discord server with about 300 people in it, and then slowly started growing that over time. 00:13:58.040 --> 00:14:04.700 The idea really came is, how can we foster connection in our greatest capacity? 00:14:05.320 --> 00:14:07.680 So, I know last time I talked a lot about Twitch. 00:14:07.680 --> 00:14:13.680 We were live streaming on Twitch a little bit, and we just thought, you know, man, it is really hard to reach people on Twitch organically. 00:14:14.480 --> 00:14:16.560 How can we speed this process up? 00:14:17.460 --> 00:14:25.180 So, then we had the idea of partnering with influencers, and partnering with influencers was really the backbone of our ministry when we first started. 00:14:25.560 --> 00:14:28.480 Still is a big piece of it, and I'll get into that a little later. 00:14:28.980 --> 00:14:39.240 But partnering with influencers who already had our demographic nailed down, our demographic is ages 18 to 30, if you're wondering. 00:14:39.540 --> 00:14:48.880 So, partnering with influencers that create content for that demographic allowed us to funnel those people into our communities in a way that had a very successful conversion rate. 00:14:50.280 --> 00:14:57.020 If you look at digital, I do digital marketing all day long, and we really focus on conversion rates. 00:14:57.020 --> 00:15:03.120 So, how much you spend on a certain platform versus how many people click through all the way to get to the destination. 00:15:03.360 --> 00:15:14.120 We were seeing very high conversion rates from our influencer connections, and some of them were even almost too high at some points to where we couldn't keep up with people that were coming in. 00:15:14.960 --> 00:15:24.260 So, that's kind of where the idea came from, and then we pieced it all together, the community aspect, the aspect with the influencers, to create what Kingstide is today. 00:15:24.260 --> 00:15:35.160 So, you're working, Kingstide, you're working with influencers, Christian influencers that are loosely connected to your community. 00:15:35.360 --> 00:15:38.240 There's a partnership of sorts that's there. 00:15:38.760 --> 00:15:48.820 And then with that partnership, they utilize their influence to drive their followers into your Kingstide community. 00:15:48.820 --> 00:15:53.500 Like, is that my understanding, which is your Kingstide community is running on Discord. 00:15:55.220 --> 00:16:05.840 What, and that's been working to the equivalent of as high as 9,000 individuals in a single Discord community. 00:16:06.160 --> 00:16:10.980 Yeah, over the course of one year, too, which was the biggest thing for us. 00:16:11.000 --> 00:16:14.320 It was almost every month we entered, you know, another category, right? 00:16:14.320 --> 00:16:20.160 We had 100 people, which was a lot, and then we had 500 people, which was a lot for us. 00:16:20.560 --> 00:16:29.280 And then it was, it went straight from 500 to 2,000, straight from 2,000 to 5,500, and straight from 5,500 to 9,000 over the course of a year. 00:16:29.440 --> 00:16:38.400 So, looking at the year in quarters, I guess, from January to December, almost every quarter, we doubled in growth over the course of one year. 00:16:38.400 --> 00:16:46.140 You're utilizing the connection to drive people into a community, the influencer connection you're using to get these people connected to a Kingstide community. 00:16:46.740 --> 00:16:49.580 But to what end, to what point, why are you doing this? 00:16:49.620 --> 00:16:53.180 What do you do with these people once you get them in the Kingstide community? 00:16:53.420 --> 00:16:55.140 People connect online in a lot of ways. 00:16:55.720 --> 00:17:05.460 Not everyone likes coming to, you know, a physical space to connect with other believers, especially if, you know, their faith history may be checkered, anything like that. 00:17:05.520 --> 00:17:10.280 So, when somebody comes into a Kingstide community, we want to do a couple things with them. 00:17:10.340 --> 00:17:12.080 We want to provide prayer if they need prayer. 00:17:12.440 --> 00:17:14.460 We want to provide community if they need community. 00:17:15.000 --> 00:17:20.620 We want to promote evangelism within the community if they haven't heard about Jesus and the good word. 00:17:21.580 --> 00:17:26.360 And then we also want to provide, you know, events and types of things for them to connect. 00:17:26.360 --> 00:17:33.020 So, we want to provide resources to connect with people that may not have any type of Christian media. 00:17:33.760 --> 00:17:36.840 So, if you look on our website now, you can kind of get a feel for what that looks like. 00:17:37.280 --> 00:17:39.580 We partner with a bunch of podcasts. 00:17:40.100 --> 00:17:43.680 We also do articles and topics to provide those resources. 00:17:44.700 --> 00:17:59.940 But eventually, once somebody, you know, goes through the steps at Kingstide, right, you know, they get involved, they find community, they receive prayer, get pastoral support, we eventually want to refer them to a local church in their area. 00:18:00.880 --> 00:18:16.300 So, we're working with our partners now to develop what we're going to call our church map of the United States and maybe a few other countries of after somebody connects with Kingstide, how can I take that step further and get involved in a local church? 00:18:16.460 --> 00:18:16.740 Interesting. 00:18:16.960 --> 00:18:21.940 So, do you consider yourself a church or you're just a step to help somebody get connected into a church? 00:18:21.940 --> 00:18:26.140 I would consider us a church in the ways that we serve people. 00:18:26.800 --> 00:18:31.760 So, you know, praying for people, you know, providing that pastoral support. 00:18:32.420 --> 00:18:34.800 That was a big thing last time we talked. 00:18:34.960 --> 00:18:36.800 Kingstide was not its own separate organization. 00:18:36.800 --> 00:18:42.840 So, we were relying on Seacoast to help us provide the back-end pastoral support for our communities. 00:18:43.420 --> 00:18:46.600 So, that's been a new thing for us. 00:18:47.140 --> 00:18:49.460 But it's all working out so far and it's been good. 00:18:49.460 --> 00:18:55.500 Okay, hey, so let's drill in to some details specifically on the idea of async. 00:18:55.600 --> 00:19:07.540 You know, the heart of this, we talked about in the introduction where, I mean, to be honest, I believe that asynchronous community is an untapped goldmine for the church. 00:19:07.540 --> 00:19:19.320 You know, we've had the chief technical officer of Pushpay talk about how he wishes that there were churches that were utilizing Slack and communities like Slack to help people even get connected within the church. 00:19:19.440 --> 00:19:37.900 And so, what you're experiencing is actually a great example of this as well, where you, Kingstide, has, you know, up to 9,000 people doubling almost every quarter in number and getting them, A, eventually connected to a physical church, which is awesome. 00:19:37.900 --> 00:19:43.580 But, B, being the church in that digital space throughout that transition. 00:19:44.240 --> 00:19:49.880 You know, I would love to maybe get some knowledge and some insight from you on the async. 00:19:50.380 --> 00:19:54.880 So, you're using the connections of the influencers. 00:19:55.300 --> 00:19:55.580 Yes. 00:19:55.940 --> 00:19:58.620 To come and then you're building community. 00:19:59.060 --> 00:19:59.280 Mm-hmm. 00:19:59.580 --> 00:20:10.160 What, like, what does building community look like, like, at a granular, at a, I can't talk today, at a granular level, at the base level? 00:20:10.680 --> 00:20:13.560 Like, are you doing movie nights? 00:20:13.640 --> 00:20:14.960 Are you sharing memes? 00:20:15.220 --> 00:20:19.760 Like, what is the thing that keeps people connected into an asynchronous community? 00:20:19.920 --> 00:20:28.940 I think what really keeps people, like, just like you have, you know, churches that have different, you know, building layouts and stuff, what really makes an async community unique, 00:20:29.220 --> 00:20:34.400 especially on Discord, is that you can customize it however you want to meet the needs of your demographic. 00:20:35.260 --> 00:20:40.240 So, for 18 to 30, there were a few popular channels, and I'll just read through a couple of them. 00:20:40.320 --> 00:20:45.300 And these will kind of give you a feel to how people, you know, interact in our community. 00:20:46.300 --> 00:20:49.740 So, a lot of these channels, too, were user-generated. 00:20:49.860 --> 00:20:51.180 We did not think of these ideas. 00:20:51.320 --> 00:20:56.720 The users thought of these ideas over time, and we added them to our server because that was something they wanted. 00:20:57.360 --> 00:21:00.340 So, a couple of things that just keep people engaged during the week, right? 00:21:00.740 --> 00:21:03.000 You join a community, you want to introduce yourself, right? 00:21:03.280 --> 00:21:09.080 We have a place for you to introduce yourself, and that's also where volunteers can reach out and connect with you for the first time. 00:21:09.940 --> 00:21:12.740 We have a place where you can just, you know, talk about your day. 00:21:12.820 --> 00:21:18.920 Lots of people log on to Discord, either at the beginning or the end of the day, and they say, hey, this is what I'm doing today. 00:21:19.060 --> 00:21:20.400 Would you maybe pray for me? 00:21:21.160 --> 00:21:22.760 I need some strength in this area. 00:21:23.580 --> 00:21:26.280 We also have a couple of fun channels, like for gaming. 00:21:26.540 --> 00:21:31.200 People can come on our server and talk about games with other Christians that also play the same games. 00:21:31.580 --> 00:21:37.580 That's a powerful thing because, you know, I'll just explain this. 00:21:37.780 --> 00:21:46.020 One aspect of me and my friends, like one thing that makes our relationship so great, I think, is that we play games together. 00:21:46.200 --> 00:21:50.080 That's how we interact with each other most of the time is over games. 00:21:50.700 --> 00:21:53.040 And so we have that place in the server for games. 00:21:53.160 --> 00:21:54.200 We do have memes. 00:21:54.200 --> 00:21:58.600 We have all the Christian channels like Prayer Wall, Bible Talk, Daily Verse. 00:21:58.980 --> 00:22:03.400 So we're constantly sending notifications out to people's phones from a number of channels. 00:22:03.740 --> 00:22:09.060 And all those channels put together really provide a couple options for people just to dive in and connect. 00:22:09.900 --> 00:22:15.040 Okay, so the content you're sharing isn't even, like, exclusively your content. 00:22:15.220 --> 00:22:18.360 You're pulling in partners from the outside. 00:22:18.360 --> 00:22:27.820 So just like at a granular level, at a detailed level with Discord, like, is that just an RSS feed that you're pulling in and everything they post just comes in automatically? 00:22:27.960 --> 00:22:28.700 Like, what does that look like? 00:22:28.720 --> 00:22:33.040 I'll take the chance just to say that we're launching our mobile app soon. 00:22:33.800 --> 00:22:47.520 We are making the transition away from Discord, which is important because that will allow us to portray our, you know, topics, which is just essentially a blog with devotionals, articles, things to help you grow in your faith. 00:22:48.120 --> 00:22:52.140 Podcasts, so yes, we do partner with a bunch of people. 00:22:52.140 --> 00:22:54.900 We're going to be pulling in RSS feeds from podcasts. 00:22:55.320 --> 00:23:00.000 We're going to be taking contributors to write all of our articles and topics. 00:23:00.880 --> 00:23:07.540 So all of our content is generated by people who want to reach our online community. 00:23:08.220 --> 00:23:12.800 So, and we approach it from the heart of we want to be able to provide you with the best of the best. 00:23:13.040 --> 00:23:18.320 So, kind of the trade-off is Kingstide does marketing to grow our communities. 00:23:19.060 --> 00:23:29.280 We get high-quality content from people that want to contribute, and those people get users from our communities to go to their websites and listen to their podcasts through Kingstide. 00:23:29.380 --> 00:23:40.220 So, we're just kind of like a collection of different Christian resources that people can use, and then they can follow those to their home of origin and get connected with the ministries we partner with. 00:23:40.640 --> 00:23:41.700 Okay, very cool. 00:23:42.040 --> 00:23:47.160 So, you're moving away from Discord within the next soon. 00:23:47.300 --> 00:23:49.380 Like, how soon are you launching the separate app? 00:23:49.440 --> 00:23:50.600 The app is on the App Store now. 00:23:50.680 --> 00:23:51.460 You can download it. 00:23:51.540 --> 00:23:54.700 It's a Kingstide app on Apple only right now. 00:23:55.860 --> 00:23:58.200 It's still doing a couple updates and stuff. 00:23:58.300 --> 00:23:59.620 It's just a soft launch right now. 00:23:59.960 --> 00:24:02.840 So, it's not the finished product, but it is on the App Store right now. 00:24:02.920 --> 00:24:07.620 You can download it, check it out, just kind of get a feel for what the Kingstide community is going to look like. 00:24:07.680 --> 00:24:09.040 We have our groups included on there. 00:24:09.120 --> 00:24:17.980 We have our events included on there, our topics, our podcasts, and also just general, like, account settings and stuff like that. 00:24:18.480 --> 00:24:24.960 Your Kingstide account will now follow you from our app to our website, so we have some congruency there. 00:24:25.900 --> 00:24:33.300 A lot of great features, and we're really excited about it and hoping we can get all the changes done to launch mid-next week. 00:24:33.740 --> 00:24:34.440 Sounds good. 00:24:34.520 --> 00:24:37.540 Yeah, so this will be published when the podcast launches. 00:24:37.820 --> 00:24:41.960 Go ahead, and we'll put the link in the show notes to the App Store. 00:24:42.060 --> 00:24:42.680 Now, you said Apple. 00:24:42.780 --> 00:24:43.360 Is it on Android? 00:24:44.000 --> 00:24:44.600 Not yet. 00:24:45.600 --> 00:24:50.320 I don't know if you've ever submitted an app to the App Store before, but it is a complicated process. 00:24:51.160 --> 00:24:54.980 Just for Apple alone, we went through three different stages of review. 00:24:55.120 --> 00:24:59.040 It took over 45 days for them to approve the app to get it live on the store. 00:24:59.660 --> 00:25:08.060 So, as soon as we're ready on Apple, we're going to do Google and hopefully have that one up in the next two or three months as well. 00:25:08.940 --> 00:25:14.540 So, it's not that the iPhone users are more important, but you just decided to go to Apple first. 00:25:14.660 --> 00:25:14.740 Yeah. 00:25:15.780 --> 00:25:16.140 Whatever. 00:25:17.420 --> 00:25:17.880 All right. 00:25:17.920 --> 00:25:18.700 So, hey, do this. 00:25:18.780 --> 00:25:19.760 Give me a pros and cons. 00:25:21.040 --> 00:25:25.760 Pros on Discord, cons on Discord, pros on moving to this new system. 00:25:25.880 --> 00:25:33.260 When we took a step back in mid last year to kind of establish our legal foundation and stuff, we thought about a couple of things, right? 00:25:34.780 --> 00:25:38.440 And I'm in marketing, so I can provide some testimony to this. 00:25:39.040 --> 00:25:47.360 It's really hard to rely on a giant company, a giant secular company to run your entire ministry off of. 00:25:48.160 --> 00:25:51.740 And not only is it hard, it may not be super smart. 00:25:52.520 --> 00:26:03.540 Discord is a great tool to connect with people and stuff like that, but we didn't want to, since our, you know, model is primarily only online, we treat Discord like we would a physical campus. 00:26:03.800 --> 00:26:08.340 We don't have, you know, other platforms to fall back on, or we didn't at the time. 00:26:08.960 --> 00:26:11.460 So, what we did is we created one. 00:26:11.760 --> 00:26:17.360 We're still going to have our Discord server with a couple things on it that will be available for people to use. 00:26:18.000 --> 00:26:30.520 But we really just wanted to develop an in-house solution and deliver the same things that Discord allowed us to, you know, in a more personal way that we could, you know, stay on top of and that we could be in charge of. 00:26:30.740 --> 00:26:37.800 So, you know, the example I use is I do marketing with SEO, Google ads all the time, right? 00:26:38.420 --> 00:26:46.380 And Google has some pretty strict religious policies regarding ads, and it makes it difficult for churches sometimes to run those ads. 00:26:48.460 --> 00:26:57.800 And, you know, that's just one example of big tech, you know, coming in and establishing rules just right off the bat that, you know, you have no control over it. 00:26:57.820 --> 00:26:58.900 There's no warning for it. 00:26:59.100 --> 00:27:07.020 You know, tomorrow Discord could decide that they don't want religious content on the platform anymore, and that's their decision to make. 00:27:07.180 --> 00:27:15.640 But we just wanted to put ourselves in a position that we could move forward and grow organically without having to worry about it. 00:27:15.640 --> 00:27:23.240 Can you get into details on how you created, like what the backbone is on the app? 00:27:23.740 --> 00:27:26.280 Yeah, so we used Wix to build our app. 00:27:26.280 --> 00:27:32.700 I'm a web developer, and Wix by far isn't my favorite platform to develop on. 00:27:33.200 --> 00:27:40.140 But what Wix does have is great, what I touched on earlier, is great pass through from the website to the app. 00:27:40.640 --> 00:27:49.340 So what was important for us is that we didn't want a website where people, you know, were able to give, but that account wouldn't be tied to the app. 00:27:49.380 --> 00:27:56.840 We wanted something with some congruency, and Wix was a really solid platform to help us do that. 00:27:56.840 --> 00:28:09.840 Some of the design elements and stuff, you know, aren't up to par with other web developers and stuff, but it allowed us to deploy our structure very quickly, and it looks really good. 00:28:09.840 --> 00:28:11.240 We're really happy with it. 00:28:11.580 --> 00:28:14.840 I would definitely recommend checking it out if your church doesn't have an app. 00:28:15.580 --> 00:28:17.540 I would just go in and give it a look. 00:28:17.960 --> 00:28:22.300 It would probably rival some of the other application companies that you see. 00:28:22.520 --> 00:28:22.680 Okay. 00:28:23.560 --> 00:28:32.060 Do you, does it have the community aspects, like, you know, with like an async, like a Discord, where you're able to chat so fluidly? 00:28:32.800 --> 00:28:34.120 What does that look like on Wix? 00:28:34.360 --> 00:28:36.080 So the groups are essentially the same. 00:28:36.360 --> 00:28:38.840 The only thing that isn't the same is content moderation. 00:28:39.100 --> 00:28:42.300 That has to be done manually, where on Discord, you can do that automatically. 00:28:44.660 --> 00:28:49.800 You can create groups in, like, pretty much the Discord server-style format. 00:28:50.180 --> 00:28:51.520 You can add rules to these groups. 00:28:51.820 --> 00:28:53.440 You can add permissions to these groups. 00:28:53.660 --> 00:28:55.300 You can assign badges to people. 00:28:55.420 --> 00:28:56.800 You can move them from group to group. 00:28:57.240 --> 00:29:02.640 You can create pretty much as many groups as you want, and you can even allow the community to create their own groups. 00:29:03.160 --> 00:29:07.120 That's not something we're going to start off doing, but we may explore it as we go down the line. 00:29:07.540 --> 00:29:07.940 Interesting. 00:29:08.360 --> 00:29:10.660 I'm intrigued by this. 00:29:10.780 --> 00:29:16.500 So how much are you paying for Wix to be able to get a website and an app that's seamlessly integrated? 00:29:16.560 --> 00:29:17.880 It's a little under $200. 00:29:18.820 --> 00:29:19.560 $200 a month? 00:29:20.220 --> 00:29:21.060 Yeah, $200 a month. 00:29:21.180 --> 00:29:23.640 I mean, still, that's $2,500 a year. 00:29:23.720 --> 00:29:27.740 I mean, that's not bad for technology, if it works like you're describing. 00:29:27.740 --> 00:29:29.660 So very cool. 00:29:30.000 --> 00:29:36.020 And then, essentially, you're going to drive all of these influencers and their connections. 00:29:36.020 --> 00:29:39.760 They're going to try to drive people to the mobile app. 00:29:39.860 --> 00:29:41.240 Like, what's the funnel? 00:29:41.240 --> 00:29:43.500 What's the circle of trust look like here for this? 00:29:43.660 --> 00:29:48.560 So a couple of the funnels, and I'll walk through what our planned funnel structure is. 00:29:48.680 --> 00:29:50.600 We want to do three different types of funnels. 00:29:50.860 --> 00:30:05.120 We want to do our influencer funnels, which we touched on, having the influencers send people to our app, and now those influencers can create their own community on the app for just their people to go on there and connect. 00:30:05.120 --> 00:30:09.080 Kind of think of it maybe as an Instagram broadcast channel. 00:30:09.180 --> 00:30:13.020 I know they launched that feature maybe last year or this year. 00:30:13.300 --> 00:30:17.040 Just a place for them to send push notifications to their community members. 00:30:18.100 --> 00:30:20.900 Just get a little more personal with them. 00:30:21.420 --> 00:30:23.800 We can also have our podcast hosts create groups. 00:30:23.800 --> 00:30:30.680 So as they get listeners, they can drive their listeners to the groups to discuss the episodes, discuss the topics. 00:30:31.700 --> 00:30:40.540 And then our third funnel, which I haven't talked about with you yet, we are launching something that we're calling our Jesus City Campaign. 00:30:41.260 --> 00:30:50.000 And the Jesus City Campaign is a super simple marketing campaign that focuses on one city at a time, starting off where we live in Charleston, South Carolina. 00:30:50.240 --> 00:30:56.320 And essentially, it's a marketing campaign that reaches the unreached. 00:30:56.760 --> 00:31:00.640 Kingside wants to reach people that are unreached in the Charleston area. 00:31:01.280 --> 00:31:06.820 So one way we're going to do that is by launching marketing campaigns that are geofenced into the Charleston area. 00:31:07.360 --> 00:31:16.960 So what we can do for this is we can create a group on our Kingside app that essentially drives people from the Charleston area into a consolidated group on our app. 00:31:16.960 --> 00:31:20.920 So people from our city can connect with other people in our city. 00:31:21.560 --> 00:31:38.740 And we want to work with our benefactors to say, hey, if you are able to donate this much money, then we can take that and put this into a campaign and we can deliver back to you, you know, kind of a real time tracking of how you were able to make a difference in the city that you live in. 00:31:39.580 --> 00:31:42.840 So I'll just use an example real quick. 00:31:43.320 --> 00:31:48.240 James Island is an island just off the peninsula of downtown Charleston, right? 00:31:48.860 --> 00:31:54.620 So if I were a benefactor from James Island, I'd be able to donate to Kingside. 00:31:55.000 --> 00:32:04.860 Being geofenced in to the Kingside marketing campaigns, I'd be able to see week to week and month to month how my donation was reaching people in my area. 00:32:05.100 --> 00:32:14.840 So I could see that if I gave $100, then, you know, that garnered, you know, 20,000 impressions and 500 clicks to go into the Kingside app. 00:32:14.960 --> 00:32:21.740 And those people went to the Kingside app, they consumed the Kingside content, and then they were referred out to a local church in the Charleston area. 00:32:21.980 --> 00:32:23.880 So it comes back full cycle. 00:32:24.340 --> 00:32:31.140 We want to be able to work with benefactors in our city to really drive change with data and analytics. 00:32:31.140 --> 00:32:36.540 So we really want to provide the back-end support to say, like, hey, how are my dollars going to use? 00:32:36.920 --> 00:32:40.540 How are they making a difference and an impact in the Charleston area? 00:32:41.360 --> 00:32:43.120 So that's something we want to do. 00:32:43.200 --> 00:32:44.940 That's our Jesus City campaign. 00:32:45.880 --> 00:32:53.700 And then for each city that we do over time, it will be Jesus Charleston or Jesus Greenville or Jesus Wilmington. 00:32:54.220 --> 00:32:58.100 We'll probably start expanding out from the Charleston area into other cities nearby. 00:32:58.420 --> 00:33:00.440 That's a big vision, man. 00:33:01.060 --> 00:33:12.360 I mean, that's essentially it's a maybe it's a little simplified version of what he gets us is and some of the stuff that glue has been doing with their Explorer campaigns. 00:33:13.260 --> 00:33:19.640 Like, have you have you had much interest with benefactors and people that want to contribute to campaigns like that? 00:33:19.840 --> 00:33:27.780 We do a lot of interest from individuals that, you know, donate to the church on a regular basis. 00:33:27.780 --> 00:33:36.720 I just want to see, you know, like one thing about the Jesus City campaign is that the analytics for the donor campaign, they're just really good. 00:33:36.880 --> 00:33:42.120 Like you can see almost exactly, you know, where your donation is making an impact. 00:33:42.120 --> 00:33:50.580 Like we have heat maps, you know, to see the city so you can see, you know, exactly which parts of the city are interacting with our content. 00:33:51.580 --> 00:33:59.940 We have, you know, analytics to show like how many times they come back, what conversion actions they took, what actions they took on the application and on the website. 00:34:00.120 --> 00:34:09.960 So we have really good data analytics to track that stuff and we have that all in our privacy policy in terms of service as well. 00:34:09.960 --> 00:34:11.920 And in order to legally capture the data. 00:34:13.020 --> 00:34:13.460 Wow. 00:34:13.680 --> 00:34:13.980 Okay. 00:34:14.120 --> 00:34:22.020 And so and then so you're building out campaigns, you're helping people get connected to churches and you're building out the King's time, King's Tide brand all at the same time. 00:34:22.680 --> 00:34:24.500 What's the success story for King's Tide? 00:34:24.680 --> 00:34:25.560 What's what's a win? 00:34:26.100 --> 00:34:35.980 We'd really like, and this just, this goes back to our Jesus City campaign, I think a little bit, but our three categories, community, evangelism and legacy. 00:34:35.980 --> 00:34:38.720 Those are our three, I guess, pillars of King's Tide. 00:34:39.300 --> 00:34:44.240 A success story is completing the goals for each of those pillars. 00:34:44.500 --> 00:34:48.600 Our goals for community are to build up our app. 00:34:48.960 --> 00:34:53.340 I think, I think we want to hit 10,000 users over the next 12 months. 00:34:54.140 --> 00:35:04.820 So our vision for the community aspect is to kind of grow our community up to 10,000, see how it feels, see if we can get, you know, a good volunteer base to care for those people. 00:35:05.220 --> 00:35:07.220 Because, you know, we don't want to grow too fast either. 00:35:08.200 --> 00:35:14.540 There's only so fast you can, you know, disciple people, you know, get volunteers. 00:35:15.040 --> 00:35:18.540 So we want to grow on, grow at a steady basis to start reaching the community. 00:35:19.180 --> 00:35:23.620 The evangelism pillar, we want to reach more people with our podcast. 00:35:24.140 --> 00:35:27.980 And we want to reach more people through prayer. 00:35:28.720 --> 00:35:35.320 So we have a couple goals of, you know, I don't want to say, you know, like specific numbers. 00:35:35.320 --> 00:35:46.340 If we want to pray for this many people, but we have goals to, you know, pray for all the requests that come in, you know, no matter if it's 10,000 prayer requests or, you know, 200 prayer requests. 00:35:46.340 --> 00:35:50.580 We want to position ourselves to be ready for an influx of prayer. 00:35:50.580 --> 00:36:02.940 So we really want to, you know, disciple prayer warriors and, you know, be a trusted source for people that, you know, if they need prayer, they can come and receive prayer almost instantly is what we want to be able to provide. 00:36:03.720 --> 00:36:12.640 And then our legacy pillar, and I'll just dive into this a little bit, but we are a fully online digital ministry. 00:36:14.000 --> 00:36:19.720 And as a part of our legacy, eventually we would like to have some physical location. 00:36:20.100 --> 00:36:22.860 This would not look like a typical church location. 00:36:23.340 --> 00:36:29.800 The best way I can describe this is kind of the ultimate usable Christian space, per se. 00:36:30.340 --> 00:36:36.920 This will have a studio in it to record content, help deliver content to the app faster. 00:36:37.100 --> 00:36:49.600 We want this campus to have access to the Christian research field so we can invite students from universities to come to Charleston, whether it's for, you know, Christian science, marine biology. 00:36:50.220 --> 00:36:53.140 We really want to, you know, take care of our city as well. 00:36:54.280 --> 00:37:02.780 And then we also want to be able to use this for, you know, in-person events, weddings, funerals, whatever we can. 00:37:02.780 --> 00:37:12.860 And so it's just kind of an open concept space that we'll use probably also as our offices to help us drive, keep driving change with the Kinkside app. 00:37:13.280 --> 00:37:14.300 Gabe, how old are you? 00:37:14.960 --> 00:37:15.420 22. 00:37:15.860 --> 00:37:20.380 That's a very large vision for a 22-year-old. 00:37:21.780 --> 00:37:26.740 Like, I mean, well thought out, different perspectives, three different pillars. 00:37:28.140 --> 00:37:30.780 Like, is this coming from you? 00:37:30.900 --> 00:37:32.240 Is this coming from your team? 00:37:33.520 --> 00:37:38.660 Who's around you that's, A, helping you develop this, and B, helping you execute it? 00:37:38.720 --> 00:37:44.360 So we do have an accountability board here at Kinkside, as I'm sure most churches do. 00:37:45.980 --> 00:37:56.400 Our accountability board is just kind of a collection of ministry leaders and just also people that we grew up with, spiritual mentors and stuff like that, 00:37:56.440 --> 00:38:00.100 that help us kind of nail down what the vision for Kingside is. 00:38:02.320 --> 00:38:08.200 When we put in the work, you know, to establish our legal foundation, we also wanted to put in the work for vision. 00:38:08.200 --> 00:38:19.200 So we wanted to have really good vision so that when somebody, you know, takes the time and is generous to give to our ministry, we want to be able to say, hey, here's the roadmap. 00:38:19.580 --> 00:38:20.380 Here's where we're going. 00:38:20.940 --> 00:38:30.540 But yeah, all of these, all the vision came internally from our team and was talked about and discussed with our accountability board. 00:38:30.680 --> 00:38:35.060 So everyone's on board, and we're super excited to pursue this. 00:38:36.460 --> 00:38:37.240 That's incredible. 00:38:37.900 --> 00:38:43.060 So is the goal of Kingside to grow the one community as big as possible? 00:38:43.420 --> 00:38:48.380 Is there an opportunity to multiply, to create multiple communities? 00:38:48.840 --> 00:38:52.860 Like what, what is, what is that scalability or multiplication look like for you? 00:38:53.440 --> 00:38:58.000 I'll be honest, I really don't know yet, you know, just because I don't know what it's going to look like. 00:38:58.160 --> 00:38:59.560 We're launching our app now. 00:38:59.760 --> 00:39:03.740 I don't know how many users are going to be in it in the next year. 00:39:03.740 --> 00:39:08.120 I have hopes and I have goals and I have, you know, data to help me measure that. 00:39:08.180 --> 00:39:12.160 But I really don't know how it's going to look in 12 months and how many people are going to be using it. 00:39:12.360 --> 00:39:19.460 If the Kingside community ever gets to a place, maybe the 10,000 people marker is what we're shooting for. 00:39:19.960 --> 00:39:23.980 Then we'll really start to look at, you know, do we want to continue growing this community? 00:39:24.240 --> 00:39:27.660 Or do we want to, you know, start creating sub-communities? 00:39:28.600 --> 00:39:34.380 Just whatever's, whatever's the best way to connect with our users that we determine. 00:39:34.740 --> 00:39:38.500 And so it'll take, you know, a lot of, a lot of data, a lot of time to see. 00:39:39.360 --> 00:39:53.320 But the point where we're no longer effectively able to communicate with somebody, like somebody downloads the app and has a volunteer reach out to them, is able to receive prayer instantly, is able to access our topics and resources. 00:39:53.700 --> 00:40:05.740 As soon as that begins to grow to where, you know, our team can't manage that influx of people, that's when we'll start to look at, you know, maybe we'll slow the growth a little bit on the community. 00:40:05.940 --> 00:40:10.740 Maybe we'll create a sub-community and train a team of volunteers to run that by themselves. 00:40:11.560 --> 00:40:13.800 So we do have some contingency plans for that. 00:40:14.760 --> 00:40:21.140 And we're just ready to see how people interact with the app and how it's able to grow over the course of a year. 00:40:22.720 --> 00:40:28.440 Are you anticipating any issues or challenges getting people from Discord to the app? 00:40:29.480 --> 00:40:30.040 No. 00:40:30.620 --> 00:40:34.340 We have most of our Discord contacts ready to go. 00:40:35.940 --> 00:40:40.520 From our previous website, we were able to gather, like, you know, mailing lists and stuff like that. 00:40:41.640 --> 00:40:48.600 I, you know, the conversion rate will probably be somewhere in the 30, I think about 30% of the users will download the app. 00:40:49.020 --> 00:40:49.840 That's just a guess. 00:40:50.200 --> 00:40:51.120 It could be a little more. 00:40:51.200 --> 00:40:53.380 It could be a little less or a lot less. 00:40:53.880 --> 00:41:01.820 But I think the conversion action off Discord is around 30% for people that would, you know, follow it through all the way. 00:41:02.480 --> 00:41:07.480 So you'll take a little hit, you'll lose some people in the process, and then hopefully rebuild it back up. 00:41:07.940 --> 00:41:08.080 Yeah. 00:41:08.460 --> 00:41:13.780 And one thing that's important to know about Discord is that, you know, you may have a lot of people, you know, click into your server. 00:41:13.780 --> 00:41:23.020 But it is partially, or we believe it's partially our responsibility to get those people, you know, communicating and engaged in the community. 00:41:23.440 --> 00:41:27.940 Sometimes people just don't take the first step unless somebody messaged them, hey, how are you doing today? 00:41:28.060 --> 00:41:29.460 Or, you know, welcome to Kingstide. 00:41:29.800 --> 00:41:32.400 Sometimes they'll just, you know, be a passive user. 00:41:32.600 --> 00:41:34.040 And we don't want passive users. 00:41:34.120 --> 00:41:35.300 We want people to be active. 00:41:35.700 --> 00:41:36.580 We want people to be growing. 00:41:36.720 --> 00:41:39.560 We want people to be connecting with each other. 00:41:39.560 --> 00:41:47.200 So keeping those users active rather than passive is also a goal that we have. 00:41:48.480 --> 00:41:53.420 And you've got volunteers that can support, that can do those direct DM messages. 00:41:53.440 --> 00:41:56.480 Trying to pull people out of their shell to engage. 00:41:57.060 --> 00:41:57.220 Yeah. 00:41:57.400 --> 00:41:59.400 And we're not above that either. 00:42:00.180 --> 00:42:10.340 My board members and my team people that help build all this together, we take intentional time to make sure that we're active and involved in the community as well. 00:42:10.840 --> 00:42:20.940 We don't ever want to get to the point where, you know, volunteers, because, I mean, it's possible to completely automate this entire system and have, you know, volunteers run everything. 00:42:20.940 --> 00:42:28.520 And we just, you know, sit back and watch it grow like somebody would watch a, you know, a regular app grow, like not taking any action. 00:42:28.720 --> 00:42:35.320 But it's a goal of our team to intentionally spend time every week, like, communicating. 00:42:35.320 --> 00:42:46.840 And, you know, that kind of, you know, goes to what I think is great for churches right now is take the time to connect with your people one-on-one in a digital sense. 00:42:48.600 --> 00:42:55.820 Because not everybody has the opportunity to do that during the week and to, you know, just be active and involved. 00:42:55.940 --> 00:42:58.720 Like, maybe your church has a Facebook group and you're a lead pastor. 00:42:58.920 --> 00:43:01.660 Go in the Facebook group and just say, hey, what's up, everybody? 00:43:01.760 --> 00:43:03.280 How can I be praying with you? 00:43:03.320 --> 00:43:09.900 Those are great ways to start promoting active community and asynchronous community in your organization. 00:43:10.600 --> 00:43:14.840 What, how many volunteers, I mean, you mentioned board, you mentioned volunteers. 00:43:15.180 --> 00:43:17.400 Do you have any contracts or employees? 00:43:17.660 --> 00:43:20.240 Like, talk to me a little bit about your org structure. 00:43:20.800 --> 00:43:20.980 Yep. 00:43:21.140 --> 00:43:23.860 We don't do any, we don't have any employees. 00:43:24.420 --> 00:43:25.780 So we all do this. 00:43:26.380 --> 00:43:30.060 Well, I guess we all are volunteers a little bit, but we all love doing it. 00:43:30.520 --> 00:43:35.840 We each put in about 20 hours a week to King's Tide on top of our day-to-day jobs. 00:43:36.140 --> 00:43:38.560 Some of my team are still college students, too. 00:43:38.640 --> 00:43:43.720 So they put in about 20 hours a week on top of all their schoolwork and stuff like that. 00:43:44.320 --> 00:43:50.540 For volunteers, we have, you know, all the processes and stuff that a normal church has for onboarding volunteers. 00:43:50.920 --> 00:43:55.720 We have our church management system, run background checks, stuff like that. 00:43:55.720 --> 00:44:02.800 We like to have about 10 volunteers for every 1,000 people, and that leaves, you know, one per 100. 00:44:04.080 --> 00:44:11.880 And that's because, you know, we may need more in some cases, like whenever we do an event or something like that. 00:44:12.140 --> 00:44:20.100 But during the week when the community is just, you know, flowing steady, people, you know, interact on the app at different times during the day. 00:44:20.180 --> 00:44:24.820 Not everyone, not all 9,000, right, are using Discord at the same time. 00:44:24.900 --> 00:44:25.820 It comes as a trickle. 00:44:26.160 --> 00:44:27.200 Some people use it in the morning. 00:44:27.300 --> 00:44:31.060 Some people use it at 10, 11, 12, throughout the entire day. 00:44:31.100 --> 00:44:32.320 Some people only use it at night. 00:44:33.440 --> 00:44:39.720 So that 1 to 100 ratio is really good for just the kind of passive Discord model. 00:44:40.780 --> 00:44:49.000 And so you've got, you've literally got, if you've got 9,000 people, you've got 90 employees, 90 volunteers. 00:44:49.500 --> 00:44:49.820 Yes. 00:44:49.960 --> 00:45:00.260 That are interacting, that are moderating, that are answering, that are building relationships with people on Discord and now hopefully over on the mobile app. 00:45:00.560 --> 00:45:00.760 Yep. 00:45:02.560 --> 00:45:02.960 Wow. 00:45:03.860 --> 00:45:05.360 Where'd you find 90 volunteers? 00:45:06.000 --> 00:45:08.460 We pulled them directly out of our community. 00:45:08.640 --> 00:45:11.260 So we have a spot whenever you're getting connected. 00:45:11.920 --> 00:45:19.300 Discord has great features for like some conversion actions like pop-ups and stuff, actions you can take once you get onto a server. 00:45:20.140 --> 00:45:23.080 We ask people right off the bat, hey, do you want to volunteer with us? 00:45:23.360 --> 00:45:24.800 We get tons of ministry leaders. 00:45:25.660 --> 00:45:27.920 We have tons of them in Atlanta. 00:45:28.040 --> 00:45:29.500 We have tons of them down in Florida. 00:45:29.900 --> 00:45:48.420 We have some in Europe, ministry leaders, people who are used to serving in a church environment and, you know, some people have, you know, gone their entire lives serving in a church but may be in a situation where now they can't serve as much as they used to or they want to serve more in a greater capacity. 00:45:48.420 --> 00:45:54.600 And there's just no room for them at their church that King's Tide gives them the opportunity to do that. 00:45:54.660 --> 00:45:59.440 You can serve anywhere, anytime, 24 hours a day through King's Tide. 00:45:59.700 --> 00:46:03.360 And it's all categorized and logged, so we can see everything. 00:46:04.660 --> 00:46:06.840 And that's how we do it, and it works really well. 00:46:08.000 --> 00:46:10.160 What's the percentage of volunteers you've never met physically? 00:46:11.480 --> 00:46:15.300 I have never met any of our volunteers physically. 00:46:15.800 --> 00:46:23.560 We've made plans with one of our high-capacity volunteers to travel down to Charleston to say hi, hang out with us for a couple days. 00:46:24.040 --> 00:46:30.620 So hopefully there'll be some follow-through on that, but we've never met any of our volunteers in person. 00:46:30.760 --> 00:46:36.460 We do have voice calls and stuff with them to verify, you know, that they're real people and stuff like that. 00:46:36.520 --> 00:46:38.700 But we've never done a physical meetup. 00:46:39.600 --> 00:46:40.680 You ever been burned? 00:46:40.760 --> 00:46:43.160 You ever been catfished or anything? 00:46:43.320 --> 00:46:44.340 A couple times. 00:46:45.520 --> 00:46:54.120 Not like burned or catfish, but, like, we've had volunteers, you know, who have said that they agree with our, you know, beliefs and stuff like that. 00:46:54.200 --> 00:46:57.420 And then maybe over time have shifted to other beliefs and stuff. 00:46:58.020 --> 00:47:00.740 A couple challenges like that that have been difficult to navigate. 00:47:01.500 --> 00:47:04.600 But other than that, people are just hungry to serve. 00:47:04.960 --> 00:47:08.060 Like, they enjoy, like, they're hungry to pray for people. 00:47:08.160 --> 00:47:10.720 They're hungry to pour out into people. 00:47:11.740 --> 00:47:21.700 And Kingstide being as simple as it is with our, you know, with our prayer and Bible chat and stuff, it's really easy just to go on there and respond to somebody's questions. 00:47:21.860 --> 00:47:26.500 Like, you have a new believer who's like, how many times should I read my Bible a day in the Discord server? 00:47:26.720 --> 00:47:32.000 That's a really easy question for, you know, a volunteer just to go in and answer. 00:47:32.240 --> 00:47:33.820 And it doesn't take much time. 00:47:34.340 --> 00:47:35.400 Okay, so let me ask this. 00:47:35.760 --> 00:47:41.200 You are, you are a digital, do you consider yourself a pastor? 00:47:41.340 --> 00:47:42.180 I don't think I've asked that. 00:47:42.600 --> 00:47:44.200 On paper, I am a pastor. 00:47:44.400 --> 00:47:51.760 I'm still doing a lot of what I think, I'm a pastor with Kingstide just because we are a church and stuff like that. 00:47:52.000 --> 00:48:03.900 I do act as the lead minister in some capacity, but I do rely on mentors and other pastors to help me in areas that I'm not fully, I haven't fully growed in yet, I guess is the way to say. 00:48:04.140 --> 00:48:05.360 I was looking for another word for grow. 00:48:05.360 --> 00:48:14.780 But, you know, there are things that I'm, you know, really good at and gifted at and there are other things I'm not and that I'm still learning. 00:48:14.880 --> 00:48:18.260 I'm still learning some pastoral care things and stuff like that. 00:48:18.360 --> 00:48:28.220 Like, I really rely on the relationships I've built through Seacoast and just in life in general to help me as I finish my pastoral training. 00:48:28.840 --> 00:48:30.760 Listen, dude, I'm 46 years old and I'm still learning. 00:48:30.900 --> 00:48:32.660 So don't feel bad about still learning. 00:48:34.400 --> 00:48:40.760 I'm literally twice as old, more than twice as old as you, and I'm still, I can't believe you're 22 and doing this, man. 00:48:40.800 --> 00:48:41.500 This is incredible. 00:48:42.880 --> 00:48:44.680 So you've got a unique perspective. 00:48:45.800 --> 00:48:47.520 You're doing Kingstide. 00:48:48.020 --> 00:48:55.520 Now, you actually tried to run Kingstide inside of Seacoast and it didn't work for whatever reason, and I don't necessarily want to get into the weeds in that unless it's helpful. 00:48:56.340 --> 00:49:04.380 But really the question that I want to ask is, is there an opportunity, in your opinion, is there an opportunity for an established church? 00:49:05.340 --> 00:49:12.320 Megachurch, multisite church, mid-sized church, whatever the context, is there an opportunity for a synchronous to work in that space? 00:49:12.420 --> 00:49:14.480 What do you see as pros and cons on that? 00:49:15.060 --> 00:49:16.460 Let me just say this first. 00:49:16.580 --> 00:49:21.120 I think it's the church's job to be innovative in the way that we reach people. 00:49:21.280 --> 00:49:28.280 There's definitely an opportunity for churches to get involved in digital ministry that is greater than the capacity that most churches do it now. 00:49:28.960 --> 00:49:32.300 I would say that most churches now have social media pages. 00:49:32.460 --> 00:49:36.480 They have live streams on Sunday and things like that. 00:49:36.560 --> 00:49:43.600 But now is the time to be innovative because platforms like Discord are growing and they're growing rapidly. 00:49:44.480 --> 00:49:47.300 And it's media that people consume on a daily basis. 00:49:48.400 --> 00:49:53.260 And we think about this a lot at Kingstide, right? 00:49:53.360 --> 00:49:56.980 That there is an enemy that moves against us, even online. 00:49:57.440 --> 00:50:02.380 We call, you know, our Discord server is essentially what we call a silent war, right? 00:50:02.800 --> 00:50:16.580 Of, you know, people looking to connect with Christ in a place that's, you know, new, but also has, you know, just the world in general has, you know, places that people can do the opposite of connect with Christ. 00:50:16.580 --> 00:50:20.340 Consume media that's not Christ-like and stuff like that. 00:50:20.460 --> 00:50:42.460 So we really envisioned this as just, you know, kind of our duty to be in this space and to reach the unreached because there are thousands, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people that cannot find Christ in the normal context of just attending, you know, attending a local church. 00:50:42.940 --> 00:51:06.140 There are tons of situations that people would use app like Kingstide or an asynchronous community, and your church could very much leverage the opportunity to reach people in a way that's more relational online and has the opportunity to grow, grow steadily, grow strategically in a way that really benefits your church in the long run. 00:51:06.500 --> 00:51:16.080 What's the percentage of people now, okay, so you have Christian influencers that are driving people into the Kingstide community, you've got up to 9,000. 00:51:17.300 --> 00:51:20.020 You probably don't know the exact number, but rough guess. 00:51:20.300 --> 00:51:27.480 What's the percentage of people that are active in a local church in that community versus not active or not going to a physical building church? 00:51:28.020 --> 00:51:32.920 Just off the top of my head, it's probably about 50%, just from the people that we ask. 00:51:32.920 --> 00:51:41.100 We do polls and stuff sometimes, and those usually come out about 50-50, sometimes local church as much as like 65%. 00:51:41.100 --> 00:51:48.180 So at least 45% of the people we're reaching cannot connect with the local church in a context. 00:51:48.720 --> 00:51:52.260 They're using Kingstide to accomplish something, right? 00:51:52.260 --> 00:52:02.640 And whether that's community or, you know, prayer, these people need something spiritually, and they're coming to Kingstide to receive that. 00:52:02.920 --> 00:52:12.880 So from our eyes, about, you know, 45% of those people cannot receive that from their local church, and that's where we want to step in and fill that gap. 00:52:13.180 --> 00:52:16.700 Yeah, I mean, if that's 9,000, 45% is roughly 4,000, give or take. 00:52:16.920 --> 00:52:17.140 Yeah. 00:52:17.440 --> 00:52:23.140 What do they say why they're not connecting to the building? 00:52:23.300 --> 00:52:26.180 Is it that they've been emotionally burned? 00:52:26.940 --> 00:52:28.680 There's not a church near them? 00:52:28.820 --> 00:52:30.040 They don't fit in? 00:52:30.160 --> 00:52:37.680 Like, what's the negative perception why they're connecting with you instead of the typical building? 00:52:38.260 --> 00:52:40.100 There are tons of reasons, right? 00:52:40.420 --> 00:52:49.820 Some people's work schedules don't line up to a typical Sunday, and their church does nothing during the week that they can, you know, connect with people and stuff like that. 00:52:50.100 --> 00:52:56.320 Some people live in countries where they don't have access to local churches like we do here in the United States. 00:52:56.560 --> 00:52:57.860 Kingstide is a global ministry. 00:52:58.320 --> 00:53:04.800 About 50% of our users are outside the United States, and not all of those users have access to local churches. 00:53:05.260 --> 00:53:06.420 So that's super important. 00:53:06.760 --> 00:53:14.440 A couple other reasons, and I'm also thinking through the lenses of Seacoast here of, like, you know, why we get people that watch online. 00:53:14.620 --> 00:53:22.320 They like a particular church, and they don't, you know, they don't want to go to another church, so they watch online when they can't attend on a Sunday. 00:53:23.760 --> 00:53:28.460 And then we do get, you know, the stories of, like, you know, I was hurt by a church. 00:53:29.680 --> 00:53:37.960 And, you know, Kingstide and Discord is a great place to come if you've been hurt by a church because, you know, you don't have to use your real name. 00:53:38.040 --> 00:53:39.360 You can use a username. 00:53:39.720 --> 00:53:43.360 Like, people can portray themselves, you know, however they want online. 00:53:44.520 --> 00:53:52.000 And so some people just, you know, could be scared or maybe not want to come to a physical church. 00:53:52.060 --> 00:53:52.880 Maybe they have church hurt. 00:53:53.920 --> 00:54:03.280 And Kingstide and Discord gives them the opportunity just to come as they are, wherever they are, and serve, receive prayer, and stuff like that. 00:54:03.460 --> 00:54:04.720 This is fascinating. 00:54:04.940 --> 00:54:07.680 And you said 50% is outside of the United States. 00:54:07.820 --> 00:54:14.240 Did you try to go international, or did, like, find influencers that are international, or that just happened organically? 00:54:14.700 --> 00:54:16.260 It just happened organically. 00:54:16.480 --> 00:54:22.300 That, for our largest community, that just happened to be his demographic was. 00:54:23.760 --> 00:54:26.740 And at some points, this was a lot less, too. 00:54:26.840 --> 00:54:33.360 At some points, this was even as low as 30% United States only, 70% outside the United States. 00:54:33.980 --> 00:54:35.840 It just happened to be his demographic. 00:54:36.220 --> 00:54:40.120 He was a global brand, so he was able to reach people all over the world. 00:54:40.280 --> 00:54:41.780 Yeah, man, this is fascinating. 00:54:42.160 --> 00:54:43.940 I love the story of Kingstide. 00:54:44.140 --> 00:54:50.260 I mean, I've always, you know, had respect for the, I think when we talked, you were 18, 19-year-old intern. 00:54:50.260 --> 00:54:58.180 We talked maybe a couple years ago, and to see how things have developed with Kingstide, you know, moving forward. 00:54:58.400 --> 00:55:01.360 It's been exciting to just hear the stories and see the development. 00:55:03.760 --> 00:55:09.700 Asynchronous is an incredible opportunity for churches, and to build that relationship slowly. 00:55:10.240 --> 00:55:16.580 And I hope that others, you know, see what you're doing and, you know, take advantage of it. 00:55:16.600 --> 00:55:18.400 We'll put links to the Discord. 00:55:18.600 --> 00:55:23.320 We'll put links to the mobile apps as well in the show notes. 00:55:23.320 --> 00:55:27.500 And maybe one day you'll care enough about the Android audience to do it. 00:55:27.640 --> 00:55:28.520 I know, Apple. 00:55:28.780 --> 00:55:29.780 Android's coming soon. 00:55:29.900 --> 00:55:30.280 Don't worry. 00:55:30.460 --> 00:55:30.860 Don't worry. 00:55:31.220 --> 00:55:36.240 Yeah, Apple is a pill to get through on most things on iOS. 00:55:36.640 --> 00:55:37.620 So, very cool. 00:55:37.700 --> 00:55:51.740 The one thing that I would, the thing that I'm going to be watching to see how it works with you all is getting people to download the app so high in the trust process. 00:55:51.740 --> 00:55:55.240 So, like, you want to go from the influencer straight to the app. 00:55:56.580 --> 00:56:08.520 I would be curious if you have enough trust built or established at that point to get an 18 to 30-year-old male to take the time to download an app to do that. 00:56:08.620 --> 00:56:15.920 I mean, it's incredible if you do, but that's a big ask to make that happen. 00:56:16.720 --> 00:56:19.960 But, maybe you've got the thing. 00:56:20.200 --> 00:56:22.360 So, it'll be interesting to see how that develops. 00:56:22.800 --> 00:56:30.080 I know people use this terminology all the time, but they say, I'm on, you know, car TikTok or I'm on, you know, whatever. 00:56:30.520 --> 00:56:35.100 Like, when you're on consuming reels and TikToks, you know, you get certain categories. 00:56:36.160 --> 00:56:43.300 Have you ever, like, gotten what I call, like, the young Christian men category on TikTok or Instagram? 00:56:43.500 --> 00:56:45.160 Have you ever seen what that's like? 00:56:45.380 --> 00:56:49.240 No, I probably have not seen the young Christian male TikToks. 00:56:49.880 --> 00:56:51.620 Even the phrasing of that scares me. 00:56:51.960 --> 00:56:55.860 I know, but it has really blown up, like, in the last couple years. 00:56:55.860 --> 00:57:05.100 Like, pages that are coming out of nowhere, that all they do is just promote, like, you know, a lot of them, you know, promote, like, strength and stuff like that. 00:57:05.200 --> 00:57:07.360 Like, some of them are, like, weightlifting things. 00:57:07.460 --> 00:57:15.500 Some of them are, like, you know, AI overtone pages where, like, a narrator will read, like, a super powerful, like, Bible verse and stuff. 00:57:15.620 --> 00:57:18.720 And it's really appealing to my generation. 00:57:19.620 --> 00:57:27.820 And almost my entire feed is filled with, like, these pages that have hundreds of thousands of followers that are reaching young people in a creative way. 00:57:28.400 --> 00:57:34.900 And we like to reach out to these pages and just be like, hey, you want to partner with Kingside because you're reaching our demographic. 00:57:35.440 --> 00:57:50.360 So, even if you think there's not because it's not popping up on your feed or whatever, there is likely a, there is likely many influencers, maybe even a thriving community in areas that you would want to explore for your asynchronous community. 00:57:51.040 --> 00:57:57.500 There are huge amounts, huge amounts of Christian influencers right now blowing up on Instagram and TikTok. 00:57:58.340 --> 00:58:03.240 And that has been really beneficial to us, and that could be beneficial to other churches as well. 00:58:04.220 --> 00:58:09.000 Well, and it gives purpose, I mean, I don't want to say this too harshly, but it gives purpose to TikTok. 00:58:09.300 --> 00:58:16.780 Like, you're not going to be able to disciple somebody in TikTok, but through TikTok, you can build a relationship and drive them into a digital community. 00:58:17.020 --> 00:58:24.480 Through that connection, you're driving people into a community where, and within that community is where discipleship can happen. 00:58:24.740 --> 00:58:27.280 And so, definitely love that. 00:58:27.420 --> 00:58:31.540 Are you, would you say your influencers are more TikTok or more Instagram? 00:58:32.340 --> 00:58:32.960 More Instagram. 00:58:32.960 --> 00:58:33.280 More Instagram. 00:58:33.280 --> 00:58:33.580 More Instagram. 00:58:34.020 --> 00:58:34.180 Yeah. 00:58:34.320 --> 00:58:39.420 So, you're not worried about the House of Representatives shutting down TikTok in the United States? 00:58:40.260 --> 00:58:45.800 And then, as a part of our organization as well, like, I know we talked about, you know, setting vision and stuff like that. 00:58:45.860 --> 00:58:48.260 We have, you know, our different channels, right? 00:58:48.300 --> 00:58:51.620 So, we're no longer just going to be doing our influencer marketing. 00:58:51.960 --> 00:58:57.540 We've done the research and the analytics and stuff, and we're ready to move into other forms of marketing as well. 00:58:58.020 --> 00:59:03.060 So, we'll be doing, you know, our own social media marketing, building our own social media pages. 00:59:04.700 --> 00:59:07.440 We'll be doing, you know, Google Ads. 00:59:08.200 --> 00:59:15.080 One really effective tool with a super high conversion rate we like to use is Google Performance Max campaigns. 00:59:15.320 --> 00:59:20.280 Those are, like, Google Ads that pretty much spread out to almost every Google service. 00:59:20.680 --> 00:59:22.200 They can retarget people really well. 00:59:22.640 --> 00:59:30.140 They have, like, in some cases, like, 25% to 40% conversion rate we've seen from some of our campaigns, which is very promising. 00:59:30.540 --> 00:59:33.260 Is that what you're using for the city campaigns? 00:59:33.820 --> 00:59:34.120 Yes. 00:59:34.220 --> 00:59:35.480 We'll be using Performance Max. 00:59:36.420 --> 00:59:38.020 That sounds like that would work. 00:59:38.260 --> 00:59:38.580 Awesome. 00:59:39.240 --> 00:59:39.900 Well, cool, man. 00:59:39.960 --> 00:59:42.880 Hey, listen, I've loved hanging out with you as we're landing the plane here. 00:59:43.140 --> 00:59:44.160 Any closing thoughts? 00:59:44.280 --> 00:59:44.980 I don't think so. 00:59:45.060 --> 00:59:46.460 It's been great talking to you, Jeff. 00:59:49.280 --> 00:59:53.960 It's just always a pleasure to, you know, talk about what we do with online ministry. 00:59:54.140 --> 01:00:01.960 You know, sometimes it's so specific that it's hard to, you know, communicate with people on just, you know, topics and stuff like that. 01:00:01.960 --> 01:00:06.120 So, it is just refreshing to talk through online ministry stuff. 01:00:07.080 --> 01:00:09.820 And I really thank you for having me on today. 01:00:10.120 --> 01:00:11.180 No, listen, it's been great. 01:00:11.380 --> 01:00:20.220 And I always love, you know, nerding out with a 22-year, somebody half my age that is doing phenomenal work in digital. 01:00:20.360 --> 01:00:24.640 So, excited about King's Tide, excited about the city campaigns, excited. 01:00:25.080 --> 01:00:29.580 Man, I'm excited about what you're doing at Seacoast and even expanding and marketing in there. 01:00:29.580 --> 01:00:36.500 But, you know, you've got a, you know, I said it, you know, the first, with our first time we've gone on the podcast together. 01:00:36.500 --> 01:00:38.400 Like, you've got, you've got great potential. 01:00:38.540 --> 01:00:39.560 You've got a great eye. 01:00:39.740 --> 01:00:43.480 And, you know, God's been giving you a great vision. 01:00:43.480 --> 01:00:48.980 And I'm excited to see how that continues to develop here with King's Tide and beyond. 01:00:49.340 --> 01:00:52.540 So, hey, with that, we're going to land a plane for Gabe. 01:00:52.700 --> 01:00:54.500 This is Jeff with The Church Digital. 01:00:54.640 --> 01:00:56.140 Thanks for jumping on the podcast here. 01:00:56.880 --> 01:00:57.960 We'll see you next time on the show. 01:00:58.160 --> 01:00:58.680 You have a good one.