“So what it will do is, you type in a question like, ‘How should I pray?’” he explained. “If you’re in the congregation, what it’s going to do is—not answer that question—it’s going to point you to where the church, your pastor, actually answered that question in a sermon.”
“Maybe he didn’t directly answer that specific question but, you know…in 12, 24 months of sermons, you’ve probably talked about how to pray, right?” Alderin said. The platform will give users an answer in the form of three direct quotes from three different sermons, if there are that many sermons available relevant to the question.
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“We’re not trying to have AI summarize any of it in any way because we want to avoid AI answering that question,” he said. “We want the pastor to answer the question.”
The platform will divide the sermon into different chapters, and users will be able to click on the relevant chapter to watch the part of the sermon where the pastor explains the answer to the question. Users have the option to watch more of the sermon if they want to, and Alderin said the platform also provides a way for users to dive deeper into the topic should they wish to.
“Because it’s attached to Sermon Shots, what we hope is that people will want to then know more and understand more,” said Alderin. “And then you can read a five-day devotional on it” or learn more about it through some other resource.
“Because it’s tied into Sermon Shots,” he said, “we have information on all the thousands of churches that are on the platform.” Therefore, users can choose to include other churches similar to theirs in the answer results.
One reason people might want to do so is “if your church doesn’t have a great answer,” Alderin said, “because we score the answers, and so if there’s not a good answer, it can pull from other churches that are similar to your church…hopefully using the same denomination and that sort of thing to answer that question.”
On the final morning of the hackathon, ChurchLeaders spoke to Madison Hearn director of technology at Masterworks, a marketing and fundraising company that serves Christian nonprofits and ministries. Hearn said that she and her team “built a self-service analytics platform that allows our customers and prospect customers to upload their transaction history and CRM data and get insights within minutes.”
One of several ways the team used AI was to “enhance user experience,” Hearn said. “One thing that we have found is a big challenge for nonprofits is they often have a hard time managing their data because they don’t have time to do it.”
When it comes to fundraising, said Hearn, “a lot of these nonprofits and ministry companies, they don’t have time to spend digging into their data to figure out what strategies they need to implement.”
“And so what happens is, a lot of donors can go on uncontacted,” she said. “They don’t know how to engage with their donors, they don’t know what channel to engage with, and this clarifies some of that.”
