Multi-site sermon transcription: one library, every campus

Multi-site churches generally land on one of three arrangements. Option A: each campus media director transcribes their own service in whatever tool they prefer (Otter, Descript, a paid Rev order), creating five different file formats and zero searchable archive. Option B: the central media team transcribes only the broadcast service, and satellite-campus services are simply not archived. Option C: a junior team member at central manually copy-pastes between tools every Monday morning. None of these scale past three campuses, and none produce a searchable archive across the network.

The clean pattern is: every campus uploads its weekend audio file to a shared folder (Drive, Dropbox, or directly to your central CMS) by Sunday evening. A single Sermon Transcription account ingests all of them overnight. Monday morning, the central media director reviews, tags by campus and series, and publishes. One library, one search index, one set of tags. Each campus then pulls captions, transcripts, and clips for its own social and website needs from the same source of truth.

Yes — the simplest pattern is one shared account run by the central media team. Campus media leads drop their audio into a shared Drive or Dropbox folder, and whoever runs the account uploads and organizes everything in one place. Because the $19/month Church Plan is unlimited, adding campuses never changes the bill.

Use a consistent file-naming convention before upload: campus (Downtown / North / South / Online / Espanol), service (8am / 10am / 11:30am / Saturday), plus series and preacher — e.g. 'downtown_10am_romans8_mike_2026-08-02.mp3'. The transcript keeps the name, so a plain folder search answers questions like 'show me every sermon by Pastor Mike from the Downtown campus on Romans 8.'

Yes — that's one of the biggest wins for multi-site networks. When the broadcast campus airs the same teaching at every site, satellite campus media teams skip transcription entirely. They pull the central transcript, swap in their campus-specific intro and announcements, and publish on their site. We've seen this save 8-12 hours per week of duplicated work across a five-campus network.

Many multi-site networks let campus pastors preach their own message a few weekends per quarter (or every week, for the more decentralized models). Those campuses upload their own audio under their campus tag. The central library now has both broadcast and campus-original sermons, fully indexed and discoverable network-wide. Campus pastors love this because it makes their teaching visible to the rest of the network.

Sermon Transcription exports clean SRT, VTT, TXT, JSON, and DOCX. Every modern church CMS — Subsplash, Tithely, Aware3, Pushpay Resi, Brushfire, Ministry Pass, and custom WordPress setups — accepts at least two of those formats, so attaching a transcript to a sermon entry is a copy-paste or file upload away.

A flat $19/month, same as a single-campus church. A typical five-campus network with one 35-minute broadcast message plus two unique campus sermons per weekend processes roughly 175 minutes per week, or 9,100 minutes per year — all covered by the unlimited Church Plan on one shared account. For context: hiring out the same volume from Rev.com (human transcription) costs roughly $1,090 per month.

Yes. Many networks add their podcast episodes, leadership team meetings, staff training, and special services (Christmas Eve, Easter, Good Friday) to the same library. As long as it's an audio or video file, it can live in the central transcript library. This becomes especially powerful as an internal search index — 'where did our lead pastor talk about generosity at the all-staff meeting?'

About 90 minutes of setup work from central media, all self-serve. Step one: create the account and set up a shared folder structure with a tag convention (campus, service, series). Step two: walk the campus media leads through the first weekend's upload-and-publish cycle — a 5-minute screen recording is usually enough. Most networks are fully running by their second weekend.