Add A Transcript & Sermon Notes
Recording, and uploading a sermon to your Sermon Hub is a great start to ensuring people can go back and access your church's archive of messages in the future. Adding a transcript and sermon notes to each one can take it to the next level.
Transcripts are beneficial to people who may be deaf or hard of hearing so they can read and follow along with what's being said in the audio or video version of the sermon. Transcripts are also helpful for when people want to quote a portion of a sermon. Instead of having to type out the quotation as they listen to it, they can simply find it in the transcript and copy it verbatim.
Sermon notes are a fantastic way to help people stay focused while listening/watching a sermon. Not only that, but taking notes is proven to help people retain information they've learned, and also provides the ability to reference their notes later down the road.
Adding both transcripts and sermon notes is super easy. To get started, while viewing your Sermons Panel, click the + Add New button and go through the steps of creating a new sermon (click here to learn more about this process), or edit a pre-existing sermon by clicking on one.
This will take you to the Create section, specifically to the Info & Media section (visible in the left sidebar).
In this guide, we'll cover the following topics. Click on any one to jump ahead.
Add A Transcript to Your Sermon
Though adding a transcript is super simple, it can be something that's easily missed when creating a sermon.
To add a transcript to your sermon, click Edit Basic Info.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page that opens. Here, you can type out your transcript, although that might take a few hours! So it might be easier to copy a transcript that already exists and paste it here instead 😁
Any changes here will be autosaved, so make sure you see the autosave message update before clicking Close.
At this point, you can click the Preview button to open a new tab in your browser to view the transcript on the frontend of your Sermon Hub.
If you're ready to publish your changes, click the Publish button in the top right corner.
As always, you can choose to publish right away, or schedule to publish (and/unpublish) your sermon and any changes you've just made.
The transcript will live beside the Info tab right below your sermon. Clicking Transcript will reveal a preview of the transcript. To view the entire transcript, click Show More. To collapse the text box, click Show Less.
Add Sermon Notes To Your Sermon
Adding sermon notes is just as easy as adding a transcript to a sermon. In fact, sermon notes are toggled on for every single sermon you create by default. This means, even if you don't manually add your own notes, Nucleus provides a text box for people to take their own notes while watching/listening to your sermon.
To manage sermon notes, select the Sermon you want to add this to, then click Sermon Notes in the left sidebar. As stated, you'll notice that sermon notes is already toggled on. If you'd prefer to not allow people to take notes directly on the page that hosts your sermon, click the toggle to remove this option. However, we recommend leaving the sermon notes option toggled on, even if you don't intend on adding your own custom notes.
You can also choose to customize the sermons notes. While this could be a copy of your sermon transcript; sermon notes are better suited for providing the main points of your message for people to be able to quickly reference and remember. So how can you do this?
Easy. Simply click Customize Now to reveal a text box for you to add your own notes/outline for the sermon.
From there, you can type or paste your own notes, using the text tools available to you:
- Bold
- Italicize
- Underline
- Strikethrough
- Hyperlink
- Emojis
Note: If you paste notes from another source, it's possible that some formatting may be incorrect when you preview the sermon notes section on the front end. (Most typically, this might appear as additional "return spaces" between paragraphs.) If this happens, delete the notes you pasted, and then use the following keyboard shortcuts to paste your notes:
On a PC: Ctrl + Shift + V
On a Mac: Cmd + Opt + Shift + V
You'll also notice another text tool on the very left of all your other tools. This is where the magic happens ✨ Wherever your cursor is in the text box, if you click "clipboard" icon, this will add a note-taking area in the midst of your own custom notes/outline.
To delete a note-taking area, hover your cursor over it and click the X that appears.
If you change your mind and you'd rather there be no custom notes/outline provided, you can click Delete Customizations.
Everything is autosaved here, so once you're settled on your changes, you can click the Preview button to open a new tab in your browser to view the transcript on the frontend of your Sermon Hub.
If you're ready to publish your changes, click the Publish button in the top right corner.
As always, you can choose to publish right away, or schedule to publish (and/unpublish) your sermon and any changes you've just made.
To learn what the experience is like for someone taking notes, continue below 👇
Take & Send Yourself Sermon Notes
By default, sermon notes are toggled on for anyone to have the ability to take notes while watching/listening to a sermon. This means, if you don't manually toggle this option off while creating a sermon, anyone watching/listening to a sermon will be able to take notes. (How wonderful! ☺️)
If you don't customize these notes, people will be able to add a title and take their own notes.
If you add your own custom notes, but choose not to add a note-taking area (see above for more info on that), people will still be able to add their own title and then add their own notes at the very bottom of the sermon notes section.
If you add note-taking areas throughout, people will be able to add their own notes in those designated areas, as well as add a title at the top.
When someone is finished taking notes, they can click Save My Notes.
This will open a dropdown list of options:
- Email To Myself: This will open whatever is the device's default email app, with the notes pasted in the body of the email.
- Download Notes: This will download a .txt file to the device.
- Copy All Note Text: This will copy all the notes to your device's virtual clipboard for you to manually paste elsewhere.
- Sharing Options: This will open up the device's default list of options to share various pieces of content.
Afterwards, you can click the X button to delete the notes you took. This can be helpful if you're using a public device and don't want others to potentially see what was written.
What Next?
Adding a transcript and sermon notes aren't the only additional features you can take advantage of for each of your sermons. Take a look below to learn some further advanced options, or for tips on how to manage your sermons and Sermon Hub.