Introduction

Wave Church is a vibrant and growing faith community known for its dynamic worship experiences, strong outreach, and emphasis on creativity in ministry. Headquartered in Virginia Beach, Virginia, Wave Church serves a growing in-person and multi-site congregation spread across several campuses, it also maintains an expanding online presence. To support these multi-located media-rich services and events, Wave Church blends traditional values with modern technology, always seeking innovative tools to support its production values and growing archive of video content.

Background

Since 1999, Pastors Steve and Sharon Kelly have focused on building Wave Church into a beacon of influence with a passion to help people from all walks of life live well and flourish. Under their leadership the church has experienced consistent growth, expanding to serve multiple congregations across the region with a reach that continues to advance across the nation and the world.

With this growth came a multi-platform communications effort that now includes online content, conferences, sermons and even a TV show in addition to traditional in-person services, which all added to a tremendous amount of content needing to be managed and stored. 

Nearly 10 years ago, Wave Church began transferring all its content stored in rooms full of videotapes dating back to 1999, on DVDs, in Dropbox as well as other forms of storage, to a studio-quality storage area network (SAN). The result was a setup consisting of four workstations that provided access to every file a team member might need with a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to share files; however, it was slow. 

According to Production/Communications Director Steve Tignor. “For the things we were doing — producing a lot of content, and a TV show — speed is everything. This solution was more like file-browsing, not necessarily being able to work on a project, and it included a lot of what we didn’t need; it probably added more headaches.”

Challenge

The VPN solution was better than its predecessor, but the production team was still settling for a workflow that didn't match their goals. As the church grew with congregants in different locations and the team found its members working in different cities it became apparent that they needed a platform that enabled them to collaborate remotely and access and edit content - including full length videos - from anywhere.

Solution

Tignor traveled to NAB in 2023 on a mission to find a storage solution that met Wave Church’s needs and didn’t add unnecessary and costly bells and whistles – features they didn’t need or want. At the show he found himself drawn to the DigitalGlue booth that was highlighting RED Digital Cinema cameras, his camera of choice and the brand used by Wave Church. It was there he first saw creative.space, the industry’s first on-premise comprehensive shared storage service that comes complete with 24/7 proactive support. Product Manager Nick Anderson walked Tignor and the Wave Church team through the workflow and it started ticking all the boxes.

“For them to show that creative.space can handle RED content was huge. That’s a high level of content; it demands a lot of data. Our guys loved it, and then he told me the price. It was so much cheaper than any other solution we’d found. I was like, Wow, that’s crazy. I don’t even know how you're doing that."

Steve Tignor
Production/Communications Director at Wave Church

“For them to show that creative.space can handle RED content was huge,” Tignor says. “That’s a high level of content; it demands a lot of data. Our guys loved it, and then he told me the price. It was so much cheaper than any other solution we’d found. I was like, Wow, that’s crazy. I don’t even know how you're doing that.” 

After a few more demos Tignor ordered creative.space. 

Accustomed to a complex installation process, Wave Church engaged a third-party IT company to set up creative.space, but installation and onboarding was much smoother than anticipated. Any issues that arose originated with the contractor, not on the creative.space side, but DigitalGlue always sent someone to help.  And, Tignor says, “Instead of us reaching out, they were always checking in.”

Results

creative.space provides Wave Church with four times more storage capacity than before, plus they now enjoy an appropriate feature-set with tools they actually use including user management, templates, tagging and much more. 

“In my world, prior to creative.space, my team said it took a lot of time to find certain content,” Tignor explains. “This was because content was previously stored using a folder system. When we recorded something or took a photo, it wouldn’t instantly add, ‘Here's Pastor Steve’ to the data; this information had to be manually input. So, being able to create these tagging systems within creative.space really speeds up the search process.” 

This advanced search functionality has been especially helpful as Wave Church hosts a variety of preachers at multiple campuses. “We have all different types of testimonies, conferences, and events, so it just allows for structure,” Tignor explains. “We can still use the folder system, but the search parameters are much more targeted. Once we got it laid out, it made everything so much smoother and faster.” Overall, Tignor’s team estimates that rendering times have improved by at least 30%.

Tignor also says that creative.space’s remote connectivity and VPN system is “super user-friendly.” With creative.space the server is housed in the main campus and users connect through a VPN. User profiles make it simple to manage all the different contributors.

“With creative.space it’s super simple to add, remove, change permissions for people, give them whatever access they want. That means all the relevant volunteers can have access to the server, and we don’t have to worry about it crashing."

Steve Tignor
Production/Communications Director at Wave Church

“We have lots of volunteers, so there are photographers at all of our campuses,” he explains. “With other content management and storage solutions, it could get unorganized, cluttered, and become overwhelming really quickly if lots of people were gaining access to it. With creative.space it’s super simple to add, remove, change permissions for people, give them whatever access they want. That means all the relevant volunteers can have access to the server, and we don’t have to worry about it crashing.”

And when teams are required to produce legacy pieces, creative.space empowers them with the ability to access video files dating back to the beginning, 1999. Tignor says, “Instead of having to scroll through hours and hours of tape looking for snippets of things in the past, we’re able to just type in a few notes and find it so much faster.” 

Tignor credits DigitalGlue’s proactive customer service as a major factor for its success with churches. 

“A lot of times, they’ll fix the issue before you get into the office or even know about it,” Tignor says. “I think a lot of that is because of their business model; technically, it’s still their server and we're leasing it.

“Another thing I love about their customer service is, they want open feedback about how to make this an even better product. They’re always asking, ‘How can we improve X feature?’ As a customer, I just feel like their openness to that type of feedback is pretty awesome. And they understand churches.”

Looking Forward

“In the world of servers, I was often frustrated by having to pay extra: for licensing, for updates — we just paid for everything, constantly,” Tignor explains. “And if we wanted the customer service side, we had to pay for that, too.

“The price for creative.space was amazing, and I wanted it locked in,” he added. “At first, I was a little nervous that we were getting entry-level pricing and that it would eventually double. I mean, we were saving $15,000 annually through creative.space compared to our other options!”

Wave Church chose a 5-year service-based agreement with creative.space and there has yet to be a price increase. “These savings have opened up our budget to be able to do a lot more — to invest in camera equipment and so on,” Tignor says. “In that regard, it has been phenomenal.”

Scalability was another selling point. 

“I knew instantly that if we needed more storage at some point, it would be easy to do,” Tignor says. “It’s pretty simple; when we get to a certain point, we can just re-evaluate our plan. Then, DigitalGlue will send out a whole new server or more hard drives. We’ll add it to our annual cost — which should be easy, since we’re saving about $60,000 over five years.”