Mar
3
Written by:
host
3/3/2009 7:00 AM
In my community, a large billboard for a new church features the church's website (a .tv address!), a tag line ("never church as usual") and an invitation to send a text message to a certain number to receive more information. This new congregation is clearly targeting younger generations, and while little on the church's website made me really believe their core message wasn't "church as usual," their approach for reaching out is instructive. Text messaging is becoming more and more popular every day, and for many youth it has entirely replaced email as the preferred way of communicating.
So, if you'd like to get the word out to your youth group, teachers, team members, or whole congregation, many group text/SMS services are ready to help you do just that. Whichever one you use, some features you may wish to look for are:
- Ability to export your data. If a company goes out of business or you decide to move your list elsewhere, you're going to want to export your groups.
- Ability to create multiple groups. You may want one group for parents, another for teens, and a third for general church information, for example.
- Ad-free option. Do you really want your church messages to simultaneously be hawking somebody else's products?
- Message scheduling. If you'd like your message to arrive at a particular time (e.g. just as school is letting out) but can't always send the message at that time of day, this can be a handy feature.
- One-way and two-way conversations. Messages broadcast by your church are more likely to be one-way texts, meaning there is no conversation capability built-in. Youth groups may wish to have two-way texting capability so that youth can respond to one another's texts.
Buzz411.com - Start your search with Buzz411 , a service created specifically for non-profits. It's free, allows the creation of multiple groups, and is kind of the Goldilocks of text services--not too little, not too much, but just right for many.
Joopz.com - If you need something more than Buzz411, then Joopz will likely be the service for you. At $19.95 a year for a service that offers 2-way communications, it's within the range of practically every budget.
Tatango.com - Free, but limited to one group of unlimited size, and messages are ad supported in the free version. Finding their pricing on their site is not especially easy without signing up first, so click here for more details.
ChurchTextingManager.com - all of these services pretty much operate the same way, and this company has simply decided to target the church niche. In fact, that's not even their main website, this is. (I included this one simply as a reminder that many "ministry-related" services are really just rebrandings of other websites.)
SimplyTxt is a service of Simply Youth Ministry, a popular (but fairly conservative) youth ministry resources company. This service is pretty full-featured and reasonably priced for most needs.
Other free options - There are many other routes you can take. This blog post describes two options you can explore which are more technical, as they do require you to do a lot more of the setup of a website or a listserv. Additionally, Twitter is becoming an extremely popular service for this purpose. (Look for more on Twitter and a review of a Twitter resource next Tuesday!)
~ Tim Gossett