Text messaging needs to be a key part of your church's communications
95% of text message are opened and read within 3 minutes.
That's an astounding stat. Especially when you compare that with the average email open rates of around 20-25%.
That means that for every 100 people you message, 70 more people will open your message if it's sent via text message rather than email.
That doesn't necessarily mean you should abandon email altogether. Email still has it's place and it's useful for certain use cases. But if you're emailing and not texting, you're missing out!
We've been using text messaging at my local church for several years now - maybe even a decade already. We had been using it long before I started serving as Digital Team Leader.
We had used various software over the years, there were some solutions that did the job okay, but as I watched how we used them I noticed that there were certain use-cases that we often returned to that would end up being far more difficult that they ought to be. No one was making a solution for what churches actually needed.
We often would message people regarding events, and if there were events that required registration, that meant we needed to maintain separate lists because our events registration software didn't play nice with our texting software.
And then there was just the ease of subscribing. All the previous solutions we used had way too many obstacles to simply subscribe to our church's text communications. Users had to submit a form on our website which then notified an admin person to go into the texting software and add that person to the software. Hopefully they entered their details correctly because there was no immediate feedback of a confirmation or anything like that. Very delayed and not, error-prone and very inefficient.
These are just a couple of the reasons we created Engage Spot for Church. Engage Spot for Church is an engagement platform made specifically for churches.
Considering how intertwined events are with our need of communication, it was a no-brainer to create Engage Spot which these features built-in.
Engage Spot allows your church admins to create events from the admin dashboard, which show up on a great looking event feed for your church. From here, your congregation can see what's coming up, or they can even register for upcoming events.
Your congregation can also subscribe for text and email communications from your church easily from a dedicated subscription page. Create groups for "Church-wide" communications, "Men", "Women", "Youth", etc. This way people can pick the specific thing they want to stay informed about while not being bombarding by messages that are relevant to them.
These groups are what allow your church admins to send out "broadcast" text messages to your church. "Broadcast" text messages are just mass text messages sent out to your people. You can schedule them ahead of time or you can send them out immediately.
Engage Spot for Church give you the ability to create custom signups for things like Baptisms, Child Dedications or whatever you need a custom signup for. This makes it easy to capture custom details from individuals based on the specific needs of a signup. And it's super easy to set up with the Engage Spot form builder.
My wife is an Executive Assistant at our church, and with myself being the Digital Team Leader, we had a very behind the scenes view of how things worked. This allowed us to build Engage Spot specifically for what our local church needed. And it's helped us a ton. We've seen more signups than we had ever seen.
We're not that unique. If it helped us, there's a good chance it might just help you at your church too. Get started with Engage Spot for Church for free.