The United Reformed Church

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The United Reformed Church has produced a series of free guides with advice for churches and church organisations to help them stay in contact with and support their local community during and after lockdown.

The guides include advice for post-lockdown recovery plans and help with setting up and running social media accounts and using technology to communicate with the outside world.

You can download all the guides as PDFs here or scroll down the page to get the information online in a more accessible format.

Setting up an Instagram account

A free guide to help you set up an Instagram account for your church or church organisation.

What is Instagram?

Instagram is a photo and video-sharing social networking service owned by Facebook.

The app allows users to upload photos, graphics and videos, which can be edited with filters and organised with hashtags and location information and posted to your account. You can also choose to allow your posts to be shared publicly or with pre-approved followers.

Instagram users can search for content using hashtags, locations or by seeing what’s trending on the platform. You can follow different accounts and like or comment on their content if you wish.

How to use WhatsApp for your church

A free guide to help you set up a WhatsApp account for your church or church organisation.

What is WhatsApp?

WhatsApp is a free tool, owned by Facebook, that allows people to message individuals, small or large groups of people with the app on their mobile phone or on a computer.

If you don’t have WhatsApp, visit the App Store on your iPhone or iPad, or Google Play on an Android phone, tablet or device, and download the app.

The icon is a white speech bubble with a white phone symbol in a green square or circle. WhatsApp is used by more than 1 billion people, is free, is encrypted, which means it is secure, and offers video and audio calls using the internet.

You can also use it to share images and forward messages from others.

Getting to grips with copyright

Getting to grips copyright image

A free guide to help churches and church organisations understand copyright.

Why is copyright important?

Copyright is complicated and not following it can result in you breaking the law! We hope this free guide, which, whilst not claiming to be a definitive guide, will help you navigate your way through the potential minefield of copyright law and how it affects churches.

How to record a podcast for your church

Recording a podcast cover

A free guide to recording a podcast for your church or church organisation.

What's a podcast?

A podcast is a digital recording file that you can download to your computer or mobile phone and listen to.

Recording audio for a podcast isn’t as hard as you might think. With the right equipment and know how, anybody can do it. In this guide, you’ll find everything you need to know about producing high quality audio.

How to set up public wi-fi for your church

Setting up Public WiFi cover

A free guide to setting up public wi-fi for your church or church organisation.

Why offer public wi-fi?

Offering free wi-fi inside your church can be a really good way of opening up your building for more uses and could potentially bring more people inside. There are lots of considerations to make when deciding to offer wi-fi. Below are a couple of different options to think about.

The overall cost will vary hugely depending on how advanced the system is, how strong it is, how much space you’re looking to cover, how you plan on using it and what internet speeds you are looking to offer. It’s important to do your own research and speak to experts to find the best option for you.