Where Has The Time Gone?

July already? Wow! Where has the time gone? We’re half way through with this year already. It’s been a busy year for Trinity already and it doesn’t look to slow down.  So what has your Radio Club been up to this year? Let’s take a quick look in this update.

We continue to get our services at 8:00 am on Sunday’s on the air and over the Internet. We had some issues this year that prevented us from getting on (one was a snow day!) but we worked through them. So far this year, we’ve been on 26 Sundays (missed that one snow day), 6 Wednesday Lent services, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and the 6:00 am Sunrise service for Easter. We also recorded and live-streamed the ordination of Pastor Reat. That’s 36 services we’ve covered so far this year!

Interesting Things We Do

At the end of March, we had our 4^th annual Wrestling fundraiser. This was a HUGE success again with us doubling the number of attendees we had. Nearly 200 people from all over southern Minnesota visited Trinity to watch 13 professional wrestlers grapple in the ring. It was so fun to watch the interaction between the wrestlers and the kids in the audience. The Radio Club made some money for our equipment fund, but even more importantly, MANY people came in to Trinity and saw a different side of ministry. It was an awesome time. Huge thank you to the Fuchs family and all of the helpers we had to make this a success! We’re already planning for our 5^th year next March!

If you drive Interstate 35, take a look at the “Adopt-a-Highway” sign just south of the County Road 1 exit (if you are heading north) and you’ll see the Radio Club has adopted that portion of 35 both north and south bound since 2013. So with Becky Spitzack leading, we had a successful cleanup of our section of the interstate in April. Thank you to all who volunteered to go out on a Saturday morning to help us keep our portion of the environment clean! The Radio Club is always looking for more help with this effort! We conduct the sweep twice per year (spring and fall).

Overall Update

Since January 1^st, we’ve had over 400 views of our videos on YouTube. That has equated to over 1,600 minutes of viewing time. We are up to nearly 40 subscribers on YouTube, who are notified of our videos when they are posted. Our live stream continues to see usage. We average 10 viewers each Sunday. Since the beginning of the year, our archive videos on our streaming site have been viewed over 250 times. We’ve had over 320 viewers on our live stream this year.

Financially, we’ve done okay. Thus far (as of the first of June), we’ve taken in over $10,000 in memorials and gifts. But as always, expenses are high. Broadcast fees with KDHL are nearly $11,000 per year. Our online streaming service and support costs us nearly $1,000 per year. Hardware maintenance on our computer systems runs us about $1,000 per year due to the age of our system. We also have software maintenance costs that run us about $600 per year. As we try to grow our online presence and get more people throughout the world watching our services, we have incurred advertising expenses on Facebook and YouTube over the past year that run nearly $2,000. This has helped increase our overall reach on social media. We try to be very frugal with the funds we receive, but definitely take our mission seriously which at times costs money.

Equipment Needs

We have one of our cameras up front that is on its last leg. This camera was purchased in 2004 and is having difficulty. It’ll need to be replaced very soon. The total cost of this new camera will be just under $2,000. We have the funds to do this and will be looking to get a new one in soon.  This is a much needed update.

We also need to update our video computer system. The current system was purchased in February of 2014. While 5 years doesn’t seem old, in video technology, it’s very old. We no longer get upgrades other than security patches just because we are 2 versions behind now. The new system we would upgrade to offers us a lot of new capabilities such as multi-streaming paths (instead of just to our current streaming partner, we could also stream to something like YouTube live as well), better video control and better high-definition capability. This upgrade will run us about $6,000.

Two other updates would be wonderful. Replacement of our last legacy camera (purchased in 2007) and an additional camera in the back of the church. That would be a total of about $4,000 to bring us completely up-to-date and fully capable.

Contract Time

Our contract with KDHL will come due the end of September. We will need to have about half of the total charge available at that time for our 2019-2020 contract. That will be about $5,500. As of today, we have that (as well as the cost of the replacement camera) in our account. Our streaming contract will also be coming due in July and we have that funding available as well.

But we would ask your help in getting our upgrades completed. Anything you could do to assist would be most appreciated.

People Needed

And finally, we need YOU! We need people helping us out. It’s not hard! We’d like to get people who would like to be announcers. Do you have writing ability? You’d be most welcome to help us out with our website! Can you move a mouse on a computer? Then you have the capability to be one of our video computer operators! Free training!

If you have any questions or suggestions for the Radio Club, please contact Todd Voge at 507-291-1306 or todd@trinityradioandvideo.org.

Thank you for continuing to pray for the Radio Club and our continued ministry here at Trinity. We are carrying on a legacy begun 71 years ago and want to see it continue to mature and grow as Trinity grows.