Welcome to Altar Live! Our platform is designed to make online ministry engaging. We are excited about what Altar Live can do to help your church gather, connect meaningfully, deepen relationships, and welcome newcomers.
What you can expect:
The secret sauce to adopting ANY new kind of technology is good training & a clear timeline. And we’re here to make this the best technology experience you’ve ever had!
At a high level, here is what you can expect:
- Altar takes about 2-4 weeks to roll out.
- Your online host team can be as small as one person who can manage your event, greet people, and make sure the event is running smoothly!
- You can keep using the live stream setup you're already using. Altar is a destination platform - this can mean you are going to connect a live stream source and decide whether your service will be live, pre-recorded, or hybrid.
- You can replace all your Zoom subscriptions with one Altar Live account. We’ll help you move all your online small groups and staff meetings from Zoom or any other video conference tool you are using to Altar Live.
- Our marketing team can help you introduce Altar Live to your community. We’ll provide you with videos and graphics to help you introduce Altar to your congregation and get them excited!
- We're here to help you onboard! Book a time with any of our engagement consultants and we’ll help you decide on a timeline for launching your first meetings, mid-week events, or services on Altar Live! This will include making a plan for how to move people seamlessly to Altar from Facebook, YouTube, or any other platform that you might be streaming to currently.
Set up a time with our team for training and debrief and we'll work with you until you feel confident about every part of the platform!
Your First Meeting
Altar Meetings have all the same features as Zoom or Google Meet! Host your next staff meeting or online small group on an Altar Meeting to see how it looks and feels.
- Schedule your first meeting
- Send the link to everyone to join: All you have to do is copy the URL for the meeting with the Share Invitation button and send it to anyone you want to invite!
Your First Event
One of the best ways to see Altar in action is by running it in parallel to your regular service online. Invite a test group of people to experience a service on Altar Live while you still run your regular service on your other platforms!
- Set up your first event: First, create your first event.
- Choose a livestream feed to connect: To stream a video feed in Altar Live, you need to connect a video feed from another source. You can connect your video feed to Altar Live in three ways:
- Directly from a streaming provider via RTMP or HLS (.m3u8).
- Directly from a video player such as YouTube, Facebook, or Vimeo via the Stream URL.
- Upload a video file directly to Altar Live (maximum 5 GB)
- Share the event link: Once you've created your first event, share the event URL link with a few others and invite them to join!
Inviting People to Your Community
You can give everyone on your team access to your Altar account or invite your community members in three ways:
- Manually invite each person: If you'd like to have people create an account ahead of an event or add someone else to give them admin access, you can invite them to your community by sending them an invitation email.
- Self-registration link: If you want to send an invitation to join your community or a group of people, you can share the self-registration invitation link. You can find the self registration link by clicking on your community's profile.
- Allow people to create an account when they join an event or meeting: People don't have to create an account before joining your Altar Live event or meeting. Joining an event or meeting just takes one click on any laptop browser, or on a mobile device.
Setting Up Your Community Landing Page & Connecting Altar to your website
The Community Landing page is the “front door” of all your scheduled events and meetings on Altar Live. It can be connected to your website just with a button or embedded link and will feel and look like your own website.
Instead of having to share different links for services, mid-week events, or small groups - you have one main page where people can go to find out what is happening in your online community and easily join.
Follow this guide to set up your community landing page.
- Upload your logo
- Change the color scheme to your choice
- Create a custom URL (i.e. yourcommunityname.altarlive.com)
- Add backlinks to other places on your website, such as your Giving portal
- Connect the Landing page to your website
Introducing Altar Live to Your Congregation
Altar Live requires no more technical expertise than having watched a Facebook Live video or participated in a Zoom call. The learning curve is short and intuitive. Even so, communication is rarely 100% efficient, and some people in your church will not make the shift as quickly. It's important that no one is left behind.
Here's some resources to make the transition to Altar Live go smoothly:
Other useful materials:
Want to learn more? We wrote a post about How To Run a Church Conference Online!
