Sermon transcripts are a great way to create content for digital marketing, social media and to keep accurate records, whether you’re a sermon orator or a listener.
What is a Sermon?
If you are new to this, “A sermon is an oration, lecture, or talk by a preacher usually a member of a religious institution or clergy.”
Sermons have been an integral part of life for many Christians growing up. Even if you didn’t like waking up at 7 am on a Sunday (I didn’t!) to go to church, sleepwalked to the car and slowly gained full awareness as the service started. Your first thought was “How did we get here this fast? Was I sleeping the whole way?”
But once the sermon started, whichever part of the Bible it was based on, you could always find something to relate to. Whether it was your personal or professional life.
What are Sermon Transcripts?
Sermons are recorded either in audio or video format. Trained transcribers listen to them and type into a document. Next, quality analysts proofread them for accuracy. Sermon transcripts can be in MS Word, Adobe PDF or any other rich or simple text format you prefer.
Sermon transcripts are great as backup text. Not just for the listener to have their favorite part highlighted to read at their leisure. But more so for sermon orators, pastors, ministers and churches to reach a much bigger audience.
How Can Sermon Transcripts Help Churches and Pastors Help More People?
Ever since Jesus gave his Sermon on the Mount, people have been craving for enlightened and educated speakers to shed light on solutions to modern life’s many troubles. Which is why sermons are of great importance. An irresponsible pastor can use sermons to spread hate and fear, while someone responsible can help spread love and make this world a better place.
Let’s look at a couple of ways sermon transcripts can help get more people to tune in to your amazing message:
1. Wider Reach for Your Sermons
If you are a pastor reading this, and want to have millions of followers like Billy Graham had in his hey days, or Joel Osteen does today, but don’t know where to begin. Don’t fret. You can grow your audience with the help of sermon transcripts.
How?
In the digital age, content is king. And with a sermon transcript you’re giving your listeners another option to consume your content. If you’re okay with just adding to your congregation locally, then local print advertising will do the job. But if you want national, or even global audience, you have to leverage the power of digital media. Always remember that getting more donations means you’ll be able to help and guide more people.
Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! cannot hear or see your videos. They can however read your words. So, if every sermon video or audio of yours has a sermon transcript along with it posted on your website, your chances of getting indexed at the top of Google searches get a massive boost, at times even up to 90%. Sermon transcripts work better than just a couple of sentences of show notes or description. Because it’s more content, much more, which is what Google loves.
2. Break Language Barriers
Having global presence means you will have to break language barriers. There are billions of Christians with strong beliefs around the world, especially in non-English speaking continents like South America, Africa, and some parts of Asia. And these people may not understand an English accent from USA, UK, Australia or New Zealand, but with the help of a simple translate option or plugin on your website, you can serve translated sermon transcripts for them, gaining even more followers.
Non-English speakers can also run your English sermon transcripts through Google Translate to translate it to their native language. Google’s Chrome browser already has a built-in translate option for different regions.
The internet is a wonderful place. And there’s something for everybody. So, you can leverage the power of digital media to help people around the world.
3. Help Believers that are Hard of Hearing or Deaf
Close to 30 million people in the USA alone are either completely deaf or hard of hearing. And according to the WHO, World Health Organization, “Around 466 million people worldwide have disabling hearing loss. And it is estimated that by 2050 over 900 million people will have disabling hearing loss.” These are staggering numbers, and a large number of the population your sermons cannot reach because you don’t have sermon transcripts on your website or blog.
By adding subtitles to your videos or posting sermon transcripts on your website or blog, you’re helping these people to understand your message. Remember that they cannot translate subtitles. But they can translate sermon transcripts or a page on your website that you’ve published the transcript on.
Best part is sermon transcription doesn’t cost as much as you would think. For example, take a look at these transcription rates.
4. Most People Watch Videos on Mute
While it’s true that sermons aren’t really meant for visual consumption and work better when you simply listen to them. This research from the American Press Institute shows that 85% of Facebook videos are watched on mute. Again, a staggering number of people that can be helped to choose your sermon videos over others by simply adding subtitles to your sermon videos.
Whether it’s people who are bored at work, in a meeting or at a seminar, everyone may need quick wisdom or inspiration. Which is why apps like Blinkist and Audible are becoming popular. Sermon transcripts or sermon videos with subtitles can serve as a quick fix in the same way.
5. Most People Prefer Subtitles on Videos
Studies have shown that if viewers are given a choice to watch a video with or without subtitles, almost 90% of them prefer to watch them with subtitles. I am a native English speaker, and can understand international English accents just fine. But if I’m watching a movie on Netflix, I’ll keep the subtitles on almost 100% of the time. There are some that prefer no subtitles to avoid distraction, but most people still prefer subtitles.
Non-native English speakers may struggle with comprehension and will keep subtitles on almost 100% of the time. Especially if you’re watching a movie where the narrative is very interesting and you don’t want to miss a thing. Or the actors are barely audible during an action scene where the sound effects take over.
No sound effects problem with sermons, but it’s still nice to give your viewers the option of subtitles or sermon transcripts.
6. Readymade Content for Your Website and Social Media
This one is a no-brainer. Your sermon is chock-full of great verses from the Bible. Which can serve as inspiration for many people around the world. And if you’re an entertaining and thought provoking speaker, your quotes can be shared on social media and go viral. Accurate sermon transcripts serve as a great resource for readymade content to be shared on social media. Think of it as a digital library from which you can copy paste quotes on Facebook or Twitter any time you want.
Best part is sermon transcripts are proofread and analyzed for quality and accuracy, so you can share to your heart’s content without worrying about spelling or grammatical errors.
Furthermore, on top of being a sermon transcription service, we also provide digital marketing services. So, we can either manage your whole digital media portfolio or work with your digital marketing team to develop a marketing strategy reach as many people globally as possible.
How to Choose the Best Sermon Transcription Service?
Reviews
Read our reviews on Trustpilot
Over the last decade we’ve worked with several churches and pastors around the globe, mostly English speaking countries. Two of whom we’ve had long term, fruitful working relationships with.
Know The Truth – Philip De Courcy is the senior pastor of Kindred Community Church in Anaheim Hills, California, and speaker on the daily radio program, Know The Truth. We’ve worked with KTT over the last 2 years.
Christ’s Church of Oronogo – Mark from CCO Church has been an amazing client for as long as we can remember. ScriptoSphere are the exclusive providers of sermon transcripts for their weekly sermon series or any specials.
Expertise
Unlike other transcription services on the internet, whose main focus is medical or legal transcription, our team at ScriptoSphere have cut our teeth mostly on general, academic and sermon transcription. This gives us vast experience in, and access to, all the best Bible and Christianity related resources on the internet. Our team has come across everything from words like Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 4:28) to Tilgathpilneser (Chronicles 1 5:6, 5:20) to Gethsemane etc.
These may sound completely alien to someone without comparable experience. They wouldn’t know where to begin and what to search for on Google, unless you provide them with a glossary of terms beforehand.
Background
Furthermore, we have Christian transcribers and quality analysts on our team, some with even youth ministry experience! All this means you can rest assured that the sermon transcripts you receive will be of the highest quality and top-notch accuracy. We guarantee 99.9% accuracy on all sermon transcripts.
Rarely there may be words which we can’t discern due to audio issues or background noise or crosstalk, which we’ll time stamp (like this 23:40) in the transcript so you can review them at your convenience before publishing.
And as aforementioned, with our digital marketing and SEO experience your sermon transcripts can be optimized for online search if need be.
Leave A Comment