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.
- Can we send short links without having to integrate them with the keywords which creates more than one other activity that our members have to undertake to get access to whatever information we want to share with them? The carriers see short links like bit.ly and owl.ly as spam and don't let them through. This is an industry norm. That's why you see so many of our links as full links. But, you can send regular links to your website or other pages with no problems. Check with your website provider for their suggestions on minimizing your URLs. There are some new domain name options that might be helpful. A few years ago we got CTinfo.us and use it for all our conference registrations now.
- Can we integrate our website with Churchteams so that registrations for our events are seamless? Absolutely!! Most website design companies have a registration form feature that they obviously want to promote. However, this data is captured and stored in a siloed database. It is more important to have your data in your database where you can access and use it for far more. Every time you create / design a registration in CT, the system gives you the link you need to put on your website. My favorite approach is to use a pop-up so that your webpage is still visible behind the registration form.
- What more can Churchteams provide us versus Text in Church or Flock note (another alternative) in the area of Texting? The fact that we are fully integrated with your database is monumental. For instance, you can see a full history of texting with an individual and text them directly right from inside CT. You don't have to try to keep data synched between systems. Also, you have all the filtering functionality of your database to help you target messages based on any attribute or group in your database. I've not done a deep dive into these other systems, but from looking at their websites, you have all the same functionality as either of these and we are far less expensive. Finally, neither of these would allow you to text a keyword to Check-in, or see their database information including updating their information, groups they lead, volunteer responsibilities, or follow-up assignments.
When telling our story to prospective customers, I often share that our journey as a company has been in three stages. First, innovating software for groups that had never been done before. Second, catching up to ChMS expectations. Third, innovating again with texting as a full ChMS interface. We are grateful to be walking that path with you.