Three Recordings Later
Three weeks and three recordings later it is still too early to determine how effective our audio conversations are as an alternative means for communicating with our people.
I did not expect any type of massive response to these audio conversations, however, unless you receive said response it is impossible to take a three week sample and gauge whether it is worth continuing to do. Here is what we have experienced so far.
Where did we make the conversation available?
The files are hosted on Soundcloud are embedded on the desktop and mobile versions of our website. You can see them here.
The files hosted on our Amazon S3 space are used to stream from our church app. Because The Church App does not provide detailed analytics, without separate tracking tools we have no way of determining if the conversation’s presence in our church app is a good idea. Because I don’t want to waste my time I signed up for Qloudstat which is an online service that takes an Amazon Bucket log files and turns them into basic web analytics.
As a side note, you will need to implement some sort of third party tracking if you decided to do a church app which does not provide any type of insights beyond very basic analytics. It is not wise to continue pumping time and effort into a medium if there is no way to track your analytics. It’s unfortunate that companies don’t make this easier for customers.
How effective has the Soundcloud source been?
Soundcloud makes it very easy to track usage. Each track hosted on Soundcloud has a very small play count graphic associated with it. Soundcloud counts a play once the play button has been clicked. I have no way of knowning if the track was completed, jus that it began.
Here are the stats for our three episodes:
- Bringing Hope to the Homeless, May 22 // 17 plays, 1 download
- Another Camp Conversation, May 15 // 7 plays
- A Camp Conversation, May 8 // 19 plays
I had hoped for play counts in the twenties from Soundcloud but I am happy with the current results.
How effective has the Amazon Church App source been?
Because of the way the logs are kept, I am counting a single request as a single play. I do have the ability to look at how many bytes of data from each individual track were transmitted and can divide that total number by the total size of the track to get an estimate of how much of the conversation the average listener consumed. It’s very raw, but it’s better than what The Church App provides, which is nothing.
Here are the stats for our three episodes:
- Bringing Hope to the Homeless, May 22 // 17 requests
- Another Camp Conversation, May 15 // 12 requests
- A Camp Conversation, May 8 // 67 requests
Current Conclusions
Considering that it has taken me about 60 minutes total to compile all three conversations and our total request/play stat is 150, I believe it has been a good investment of time. If you were to have these three conversations with 150 people you would be looking at a total of 75 hours to communicate the same information to each person individually.
If we continue producing one conversation a week, it might be worth looking into doing an official Mountain Park Radio Podcast. If that were the case it would provide folks with the convenience of downloading a podcast episode to their phone regularly.
Just a few thoughts.
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