Responsiveness and Reliability As any regular reader of my columns will know, one of my significant beliefs is critical to any relationship between a manufacturer and consultants/specifiers. It’s about two things: responsiveness and reliability. Therefore, I present the following story as an illustration of precisely what NOT to do if you are a manufacturer. Take […]
During our live LAVNCH WEEK Tech Talk, Paul Richards of PTZOptics shared that, these last few months, “connected churches” are discovering just how large their communities really are. And once social distancing is relaxed, many houses of worship won’t be going back to the way things were in their AV systems. For bigger houses of […]
In several recent columns, I have pointed out the enormous and consistently expanding size of the online sales channel servicing the demand for pro audio, production, management information and numerous other categories of AV gear that the 230,000+ small houses of worship are generating. The best available estimates of the overall sales for the three […]
Disclaimer: This is one of those topics that seems to require periodic reminders and refreshers. Why this is the case is one of the great mysteries of the AV life, but we seem to lose sight of the core principals reasonably regularly, and thus — the following is your scheduled reminder that the foundational rules […]
Help me! How do I ? Where do I? These and a lot of similar questions were the core of the responses we gathered during and after the seminar session on “How to Source and Purchase Equipment for a HOW AV System,” presented during the WFX Conference & Expo in September 2019, held in Orlando, […]
Understanding the complex relationships between the inside perceptions of your organization and its culture and the equally vital external perceptions of those same elements is the key to empowering long-term strategic growth and expansion. If you do not have a good reference for both aspects of this crucial data, it’s impossible to develop a plan […]
Anyone who has ever sat in on a project meeting with end users, purchasers, IT, corporate, architects (and all the other professionals likely to be at the table) knows that perspectives are often significantly distorted. How? They’re distorted by either too much or too little understanding of the technologies involved. In this hypothetical project meeting, […]
If you are working in the house of worship (HOW) market providing advice, guidance and expertise, you should be offering a clearly defined set of options and services to any customer or congregation. Given the enormous number of small HOWs in North America (well over 250,000 locations across all denominations), the need for clarity, flexibility […]
One of the things a consultant is often asked to do, especially for a repeat client, is to evaluate the work presented by others. Unfortunately, this is usually requested AFTER the proposal or submission has been generated and presented. If you’re asked to undertake such an analysis, what you’re really being asked is to determine […]
Recently our rAVe colleague Jacob Blount wrote, in the rAVe HOW [House of Worship] newsletter, about a video of the Angel City Chorale showcasing very poor choir miking, and how this seriously detracted from the value and presentation intended — hardly a clean choir sound. I’m probably dating myself, but I couldn’t help but think […]
“It’s all going to be in the cloud” — that’s what researchers seem to be saying to the whole AV/IT world. Let’s dive into the hardware vs. software debate, for things are not always what they seem. Indeed, technologies like digital signage storage/retrieval and security archives are already on or are migrating to some conglomeration […]
Knowing not only the type of leadership structure each of the different church organization types has, but also who within the congregation actually holds and wields that leadership power, is a critical element in guiding any HOW technical project from concept to completion. In a recent webinar created for the WFX Expo audience (available online […]
In the first two parts of this series (part one, part two) we broke down the information regarding who is involved in the decision tree, who should be what did the congregation/facility/staff/leadership say they wanted? More importantly what did you hear and finally, what do they really need? As we strongly emphasized in part one, […]
What did they say they wanted? More importantly what did you hear and finally, what do they really need? The answers to these key questions are the roadmap to winning the job, but more often than not, just finding the map is a huge issue in and of itself. As was discussed in the first […]
The AV/IT industry has a problem, one of its own making and one that is getting worse by the micro-second. There are just too many conflicting and confusing “standards” and best practices. Between those created by trade groups, those developed by technical associations or technology consortia (worse yet as these tend to be proprietary) and […]
There are well in excess of a quarter of a million small houses of worship in North America, according to the latest data from the National Congregations Study, conducted through Duke University. (For additional information about the National Congregations Study, go here.) For reference, the generally accepted definition of a small congregation is characterized by […]
In a previous column, “Signal to Noise,” I discussed the ever-increasing amount of marketing communications besieging our end-users/customers. And while that trend in and of itself has a multifaceted impact on the industry, there is an underlying issue that has a much, much, much larger potential impact and is truly the dark side of the […]
In two previous columns on the regular rAVe Blogsquad feed, I explored the issues surrounding both manufacturer communications and the increasing perceived problem of direct sales by manufacturers and suppliers to end users, essentially going around the establish dealer/integrator/retail distribution structure. However, there is another side to this story, one that is often being treated […]
Of all the various issues that generate the most questions from potential and current clients in the HOW markets, creating and managing the musical aspects of a service are definitely at the top of the list. It matters not whether it’s a simple guitar and piano accompaniment to a traditional service or a full-on praise-band […]
Once again my rAVe blogsquad colleague Anthony Coppedge took out his 40-ounce framing hammer and hit the nail right on the head in his recent post about email noise in brand marketing for the house of worship market-space. Almost simultaneously with that post another group of articles appeared in several publications focused on dealing with […]
At the heart of every faith-based organization are two core ideas. To achieve their goals, any such group needs one, a clear vision of what it wants to achieve and two, a specific methodology or mission, which will allow them to reach that goal. Unfortunately, not every group does an equally solid job of putting […]
In his annual year end post this past December, my rAVe HOW colleague Anthony Coppedge presented his analysis of the advertising to the HOW market he though represented the best and worst of the numerous marketing messages he reviewed. His column is well worth your time whether you’re a buyer, seller or just curious. The […]
Although you are reading this in February 2019, it was written in December of 2018 due to the weird schedules needed for online publishing. December of 2018 was a personally momentous month because it represented a major milestone — my 50th year as a member of the Audio Engineering Society and the professional audio community […]
One of the most prevalent themes in any AV/IT industry discussion is the continually increasing globalization of the sourcing for product development and most specifically software. No longer is the underlying code for the majority of AV products written by the brand on the front panel. In fact, more often than not, that software is […]
Scott Brinker, editor at chiefmartec.com, better known as the Chief Marketing Technologist blogger, said in a recent post, “The funny and frustrating truth is that organizations change (far) more slowly than technology.” In fact, the speed of technology uptake (or change) is usually a fraction of the speed at which the technology is actually evolving. […]
Over the past few months, my esteemed rAVe HOW colleague, Anthony Coppedge, has written several columns that raised significant and critical issues regarding the supply of and sales of AV hardware and related products into the house of worship markets. His focus has been on the issues facing integrators and why many of them are […]
Have you noticed the dramatic rise over the last two-plus years in corporate AV/IT client demand for collaborative technology, huddle spaces and similar functionality? It’s a hot buzz word in the upper echelons of corporate management and HR departments. The thought process for most companies goes something like this: Senior management decides that: “We need […]
The most often ignored or forgotten problem in AV/IT systems can be summed up in this quote from Benjamin Franklin: “By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail.” Technically speaking, a failure is declared when the system does not meet its desired objectives. Therefore we can consider any system that cannot meet minimum performance […]
That great sage and commentator on the human condition Yogi Berra is credited with creating this commandment-like law of technology: In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is. Now, of course, Yogi didn’t realize or intend his statement to become one of the unwritten laws of the AV/IT universe […]
As a part of our regular business practice, we check back in with completed HOW projects to ensure everything is still working properly and that no new issues have arisen that might need attention. Over the decades, this approach has proven to be both helpful in maintaining relationships and also often provides new opportunities to […]
There are, within our space-time continuum, some immutable constants. For example, we can be assured that the earth will revolve on its axis every 24 or so hours and produce a sunrise and a sunset. In the sound system world, the number of absolutes is far more constrained by reality but there is one that, […]
