Churches that don’t have an in-house media production team and even ones that do often need help keeping up with demand for worship backgrounds, social media images, sermon topic bumper videos, etc. Shift Worship is a church media platform with a huge selection of images, videos, and even mini-movies. It also features built-in tools for editing to help modify media to custom fit users’ specific needs – which can be especially helpful for smaller churches that don’t already pay for editing software.
...the biggest surprise for them was mini-movies that can serve as a bumper or an ad for a sermon series.
Shift Worship has received the Church Production Road Tested Certification.
Recently Shift Worship provided access to their immense library of media to Church of Rock Creek in Little Rock, Arkansas as part of a Church Production Road Test User Experience. A large church where 1,500 to 2,000 people worship on a weekend, the Church of Rock Creek is a diverse community from all walks of life. The church’s Executive Director of Communications, Nick Burt says his team already uses several media services and Shift Worship is similar with one big advantage – it features a wide variety of producers who make the content.
“There are multiple producers that create new content I think on a weekly or pretty regular basis and I felt like you got a good mixture because you had so many different creators that have different visions and different artistic forms to produce the content,” Burt explains. “We like to change things up. We'll go through a stage set that may reflect better with abstract shapes or lines or gradients or whatever. But a couple of weeks ago our pastor said, ‘Hey, I want to use something really realistic looking behind me. So, we were able to grab a mountain scape and use that behind him. And so just having the ability to pick from a wide variety was much more helpful.”
“They put new content out every week." - Nick Burt, Church at Rock Creek
Burt says the Shift Worship images they used were as high quality as images from Shutterstock or Pexels. “We've got a really a large LED wall and the footage held up to it just fine. I mean the quality and the resolution was absolutely not a problem and it worked really well with ProPresenter. It came in multiple formats. You could get it in triple wide, you could get it in high definition, standard definition, and several different resolutions. So that was a cool feature.” He says while the quality was comparable to the stock image companies, Shift Worship is definitely more affordable and geared specifically toward churches.
“Not only do they have the worship background packs, but they have full-blown graphics pack to do a sermon graphic. They have countdowns, they have social media content and it's all editable within their platform,” Burt enthuses. “They had one for the Mother's Day period that was kind of soft and pastels, and it was gradients and subtle shapes, so it was relevant to the time it was needed. And they also had Mother's Day graphics built into that that you could take and use on social media. So, for a church with a small staff that wants to do a lot, it could serve them in that way.”
But he says the biggest surprise for them was mini-movies that can serve as a bumper or an ad for a sermon series. For the price, he says it’s not something you see with many of the other media companies. And for an upgraded package users can share the media with anyone on their team. “They have a Dropbox integration so you can save all of your content to a Dropbox,” he says. “So, when you're working in a team, if I'm picking out backgrounds, but maybe I'm not the one who's setting it up, I can go through and add all that to a Dropbox team account and somebody else can go and pull those to set that up for the weekend services. So having that built-in integration from Shift Worship was a really cool tool that I would definitely see using in a long-term sense.”
Shift Worship packages range from $150-$250 per year and they offer a 30-day free trial. With the larger plan, you get Dropbox integration and source files. Burt says the platform was very simple and easy to use. You can filter and search many ways by theme, by product, colors and if you find a producer you really like you can even search that way. “They put new content out every week. So, you're getting new fresh content every single week to choose from. And for us, we like to change things up based off the time of year, what our stage looks like, the sermon series, a number of things can go into what we picked. So having lots of fresh and new content was really attractive, having that available,” he explains.
He says this would be a great tool for small to medium-sized churches to use as a main graphics source. He thinks the Quick Editor tool would save them money from not buying extra software and the price for Shift Worship is very reasonable. “So, I could see a small church or a church from 50 to 500 that has a limited staff - or maybe a staff person that does this, but that’s not their primary role - they would be able to pick up the Quick Editor very quickly, be able to use it for those sorts of things and it wouldn't take them a lot of time. But to flip that, if you go for the pro membership, I think you could find a good place for it in a larger church.”
He says larger churches could also use it as a side source for the youth or kid spaces. He says even churches like theirs that already use different media platforms, should consider switching it up and trying something new. “I worked with one of the guys on our team to implement these backgrounds on a Sunday and he was just excited to have a new resource to pull from,” Burt concludes “He pulls the worship backgrounds and develops ProPresenter playlist every week. After you've done that for 2, 3, or 4 years, some of that can get monotonous when you're pulling from the same places. And so, giving him just a fresh set of content kind of sparked his imagination and he picked some really cool backgrounds that really matched what our look was for that particular Sunday. And yeah, I think that was just helpful for him having a new exciting toy to play with.”
