Using church text messaging for giving is especially helpful for one-time short campaigns and special causes. If we’re supporting a local nonprofit one weekend, we can ask people to designate $5 or $10 or more for that particular ministry by simply sending a text.
3. Being interactive during the message.
Our church doesn’t have a physical office. Therefore we don’t need a landline phone system. We just use a free Google Voice number instead. During the service, we can ask people to take an immediate action by sending us a text message via our Google number.
During a message, this might include texting us with follow-up questions. When making announcements, it might mean that people can register for an event or sign up to volunteer via text message.
4. Communicating with subgroups and ministry teams.
We use Facebook groups excessively within our church. Every volunteer team and almost every small group has a Facebook group. The problem is, not everyone is on Facebook and not everyone who is on Facebook pays attention to it. This is especially true of a bunch of men in our church.
So we use group texts to communicate about special Bible studies, volunteer opportunities, and events as well as weather cancellations and other important notices.
For this purpose, we use Text In Church, created by my friend, Tyler Smith.
Text In Church lets us create groups and use keywords to manage those groups. People can opt in, and opt out, and manage their messages.
5. Creating text message sequences (automatically-sending messages).
When someone uses our Plan Your Visit button, we can add their number into Text In Church and send them a series of text messages designed to introduce them to our church. The same is true when someone visits for the first time – they can send a text to a number with a keyword and we can follow up automatically.
We can also create discipleship-oriented message sequences. If we do a 40-day spiritual growth campaign or a 6-week message series on a particular topic and want to include daily reminders to pray or daily devotional messages, we can create all of that within Text In Church.
Obviously, we need to respect the privacy of everyone and avoid spamming people with unwanted or uninvited messages. But when we have permission, text messaging can become one of the most personal and individual ways to follow up with people and reach more of our community.
This article about church text messaging originally appeared here, and is used by permission.
