In the last few weeks we've seen some history and stats on texting, how businesses are using texting, and how churches are using texting.  In this final installment we are going to provide some best practices for using texting.

These may seem pretty basic, but I think if you read beyond the section headers, you will discover some interesting and helpful nuggets that will get you nominated for best church or non-profit use of personal  texting.

Text to give made its popular debut with United Way at the Super Bowl in 2008. A few years after that online payment processing companies began offering it to churches as a giving option.

We became convinced that this method of contributing to ministry was more than a passing fad and released it in 2016 as a part of our online giving services.

Industry enhancements to the texting infrastructure in recent years have opened up exciting new ways for churches to use texting beyond mass communication and giving. Here is a list of the ways that Churchteams clients are using it.

Last week we looked at three reasons why churches should be thinking about using text messaging: 1) texting has a history, 2) people have the app, and 3) people use the app. These mean it is the most widely used and most reliable channel for communication available to us.

When we were redoing the Text-to-Church page on our website last fall, I came up with the word "text-savvy" to include in the by-line.  Obviously, a twist of the word tech-savvy, it has forced me to think about and research a response to the question, "what does it mean to be knowledgeable about text messaging?"

I recently found an article on Mobile Vs. Desktop Usage worldwide.  It confirmed my suspicion that in recent years mobile usage has surpassed desktop usage overall.

Think about how many people spend their working day on a computer.  Then compare that to time spent on the phone.  According to the article, the U.S. population spends 50% of their time online on their desktop / laptop, 46% on their phone, and 4% on tablets.  This trend toward mobile will surely only increase.

In this short series on texting for churches, we've looked at the history of business texting (A2P) and compared free texting to Text-to-Church (10DLC).  In this third post, let's look at the budgeting features built in to T2C to help staff manage their communication budgets.

To start with, texts associated with the following features do NOT count toward your 500 allotted monthly texts or 2 cent overages.

In the last post we surveyed the history of business (A2P) texting. We learned that initially A2P texting was available either for thousands of dollars per month using short codes or free using email.  That left a wide gap for the innovation that rolled out in 2021 called 10 digit long code (10DLC) texting. 

Churchteams provides both free (through email) and paid (through 10DLC) texting that we branded Text-to-Church (T2C).  But, when should you use free texting and when should you use T2C?  Here are some things to consider. 

 As common as it is now, it wasn't until 2014 that texting surpassed calling as the go to method for Person to Person (P2P) tele-communication in the United States. 

But there is another type of texting called Application to Person (A2P) texting. This is commonly thought of as Business Texting.  There are companies that provide this service as a stand alone for businesses or churches.   As technology continues to aggregate, many relational databases like Churchteams have implemented the same A2P functionality in their product.  This is a big win for the end user.

While shopping online I recently found a table that I thought might look nice in our breakfast nook.  It was well after office hours, but there was a number to text.  I sent the text and got an automated message saying they would get back with me the following morning.  They did, and apologized about not responding more quickly.  It was 51 minutes after they opened!  I was impressed.

Last week I introduced the process one of our raving fan churches is going through as their team seriously evaluates our texting capabilities.  I shared three of their key questions and my responses to each one. 

Here are their final three questions and my responses.  They may be your questions too.  

I reached out to one of our top customers who had been on our beta version of Mass Texting (free) through Text-to-Church.  They know the potential of the service from the beta, and are currently doing a cost / benefit analysis of the service now that it is fully operational.

They sent me six insightful questions that everyone looking at the potential for texting in their church should ask.  Here are the first three.

Text-to-Chat is the new environment for exploring creative church communication possibilities.  Last time we we looked at the top three ways roundtable participants thought they would use it.

This week, we'll look at four other ideas we came up with.  These are not as tried and true, but they are a bit more creative and have pretty significant potential.