I’d like for our small group staff to be able to text congregants to let them know of small group opportunities that they’ve requested. Normally, our team would email people who need help and don’t want to use our website, but some congregants really don’t want to use computers at all, including email.
Our staff don’t feel comfortable giving out their personal mobile numbers (and they shouldn’t) and I don’t feel comfortable with congregants and staff chatting over text in a way that can’t be filtered, monitored, or have at least some form of reporting for accountability and engagement.
I feel like there’s a chance grow method might help, but I also know that is more for onboarding people rather than regular day to day chatting…
Do any of you use some form of text messaging that has some level of accountability and manageability so if someone leaves staff we can easily move conversations over to their replacement?
Honestly, this need is best filled by your ChMS. I don’t know enough about MP to know what is possible, but other platforms that support SMS can feed those into their normal messaging/interactions/workflow processes allowing all communications to be tracked/logged completely while also providing accountability in the sense that important things are not dropped. I would definitely look for something that can interact with MP if you can’t do it natively.
I agree with Chris that tying this to your ChMS is ideal. I also know this is a sorely lacking feature in many of the current ChMS implementations. My immediately go-to for this functionality is pastorsline.com
It was specifically designed for what you’re asking to do. There are some other tools as well, but this one was built for churches to solve this exact pain point. I’m not aware of an MP integration for it, but the team behind it is open to conversations like that.
We use Twilio and our ChMS can send out through the twilio service. Be careful though, there are legal things you must be concerned about. For example, I believe your messages always need to include something about opting out and if you ask people to text a number you have to declare messaging and data rates may apply. It doesn’t necessarily become simpler for the staff to do it that way. We even had one staff member simply buy a phone for their ministry specifically for sending texts because it was easier than doing what they wanted through ChMS.
Agreed. We use Elexio ChMS for group text messages. We also GroupMe for certain groups. It can go straight to text and the group admin can sign people up with them having to do anything. This is probably better suited for smaller groups and those that need two way communication.