Recently we’ve had the un-pleasure of mentally fighting back with potential customers of ours on the premise of price vs. value. This debate has been going on since I can remember, but we just got a comment from a pastor about our brand new New Year’s Video called This Year. He says it was a “Good message, well done, but at 50 cents per second, way to expensive.” It’s a high end, TV commercial style sermon illustration that is only 0:44 seconds long and we’re charging $20 (as we do with every sermon illustration). One of the big problems with this kind of thinking is we don’t spend any less time or money on something because it ends up being shorter. In other words, we spend roughly the same amount of money and invest the same amount of time on something whether it ends up being 30 seconds or five minutes (And I promise you all that we are not in this to get rich but to serve God… you can check out our books :). Our intent with “This Year” was to make a very tight, powerful video that could be used by pastors to set up a great message about the coming year. A tongue and cheek style simple short for New Years that pastors can take in a lot of different directions.This issue of Price vs. Value has become a big issue within the filmmaking community…the church filmmaking community that is. I personally see an enormous divide between the price of a product/service and the value of said product/service. Others I guess don’t see it that way. Chuck Brady, from the online publication, Bizcovering, says “In simple terms price is the same as affordability. It comes down to whether or not your prospect has the means to pay for your product or service. Value on the other hand comes down to whether or not your customer thinks your product is worth the money.”

So, if the folks on the price per second side of the isle are right, and it really does come down to value for the length of the product, then that means you MUST get more value for your $8.50 movie ticket to go see Transformers (run time of 2 hours and 15 minutes) than for your ticket to the 2005 Academy Award winning movie Crash (run time of only 1 hour and 47 minutes). Maybe you did like Transformers more, but was it because it was longer? Was Crash a worse movie or worth less at the ticket window because it was shorter?

Again, our heart in all of this is to serve God and His Church with our gifts. Not to gouge churches for money by overcharging for Sermon Illustrations. I know there are a lot of churches out there barely scraping by, but so are we, and we’re all in this together, right?

Love to hear what you think. Post it. Email it. Blog it.

Beginning and Developing Your Church’s Media Ministry - Pt. 1

Greg Atkinson of Church Video Ideas is writing a 3 part series of articles for a great blog called Monday Morning Insight. The series is entitled “Beginning and Developing Your Church’s Media Ministry” and Pt. 1 is up today. I just read it and I think it will be a great resource for those of you out there who are just wading into starting this thing called Media Ministry at your church. Greg has tons of experience with Media Ministry, he’s on staff leading a Media Ministry at a church in Dallas, he used to be on staff with Worship House Media, and before that he was a Worship Leader. Not to mention he is in demand and travels the country speaking and teaching about Media Ministry at a lot of the big ministry conferences. This first article has a lot of good, practical advice about making sure to lay a firm foundation with regards to starting your Media Ministry. Seeking the Lord. Setting it up right. And always remembering that it is a ministry and that it needs to have Christ as its center. But enough from me. Click here and read it yourself.