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Boost Engagement With Location-Based Push Notifications

push notifications

Do you struggle to keep your church community engaged? It turns out you’re not alone. In the average church, anywhere from half to less than 20 percent of churchgoers are actively engaged.

When you research strategies for church engagement, you’ll come across all kinds of tips and tricks — some that can be effective and others that are much less so.

We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and creating more ways to help you increase engagement and make more and better disciples. We are excited to share that we will soon be releasing a new feature enhancement that we believe will help solve this problem!

Introducing GeoEngage™ – Coming Soon!

We are on a mission to help bridge the divide between digital and real-life communication. And that’s why we’re thrilled to announce Push Notifications with GeoEngage! This new feature will allow churches to engage with location-based push notifications as well as complement person-to-person interactions that help connect your community right where they are.

Maybe you’re already utilizing the power of push notifications to drive engagement, that’s great! Push notifications are a feature that is available to all current Subsplash clients within the Subsplash Dashboard. What makes GeoEngage so unique is that you can take those notifications one step further by creating geographic fences around a set location, which triggers the notifications when app users enter, exit, are currently within or are outside that set location.

That sounds like a lot of tech talk, right? For the user-friendly version, this basically means that GeoEngage will allow churches to send notifications to a user based on a set geographic location in addition to the app users action of entering, exiting, already being within or being outside the predetermined location. For example, you could send a notification to those who enter your main church building, when people leave the children’s building on the other side of your campus, or even send event information to users at a location within your community.

Research shows that location-based push notifications get higher click-through rates than other kinds of notifications — as high as 45 percent in many cases (that’s an enormous number)!

To keep people actively engaged, both normal and location-based push notifications turn your app into a communications center where users can find the most recent updates and announcements.

Ok, but how would my church use it?

At first glance, you may be thinking, “My community is already at church. Why would I need to send out a notification?”

If you’re like many churches, around 20 percent of your community is highly engaged while the other 80 percent is lightly engaged or only spectates. Push Notifications with GeoEngage helps you reach out to them when they enter your building or campus to drive more meaningful engagement.

We’re going to deep dive into use cases in a later post, but for starters, GeoEngage is going to allow you to engage your community the minute they walk in the door.

It won’t take the place of your welcome team, but it means that each and every app user who walks through your doors can receive a personalized greeting, a reminder about small group studies, and any resources relevant to the day’s worship service.

You can also schedule a time and date for a location-based notification to send. For instance, you may only want to send greeting messages for 30 minutes before the service starts to 10 minutes after it begins. Or perhaps you want to send out an event reminder to everyone in the service 5 minutes after it’s been announced. With GeoEngage, your app can now do all of this and more!

Here are a few use cases to get your creative wheels churning

Like we said before, we’ve got plenty more use cases coming your way soon, but for now, here are a few ideas of the types of messages you can send with GeoEngage.

Welcome, we’re so glad you’re here! Don’t forget to get your coffee before worship.

  • Don’t forget, all children 5+ will be joining their parents for worship in the main service today!
  • Check out these resources that go along with this morning’s message.
  • Happy Father’s Day! All dads, head to the welcome center to get a special gift.
  • Interested in our upcoming trip to Kenya? Come learn more at our informational meeting right after the service.
  • Keep the Gospel front and center all week long! Read these devotionals each morning in preparation for next week’s worship.

Are you excited yet? Because we are and we can’t wait to see how you will use GeoEngage to drive engagement in your community!

Not currently a Subsplash Client? Let’s chat! 

If you’re already a Subsplash Client, reach out to your Client Success Manager to find out if your account is ready for GeoEngage.

The original article appeared here.