Text Messages In Church

One of the interesting parts of what I do is that every now and then a challenge comes along where we need to try something completely new. I came up against the challenge of finding a way for our church to send questions by text message related to a series that we’re doing and found that there isn’t an obvious solution for cell phone customers on Canadian carriers like Rogers, Telus or Bell Mobility.

We are in the middle of an 8-week series called “Marriage Matters” and one of the key things we wanted to open up was the opportunity for people to submit their marriage-related questions. If you’re married, you’ve got questions! If you’re not married, you’ve got questions! We know that people have questions and we want to give them a chance to share them with us. We are planning on using the last Sunday of this series to take time and answer some of the questions which have been submitted.

We spent some time talking about how we’d like people to get questions to us and we came up with three options -

1. Connection Card – this is our communication piece that we ask people to fill in if they’re visiting or have prayer requests
2. Email – questions can be sent to an email address or through a form on our website
3. Text messaging – this one is new for us and turned out to be a little bit of an adventure.

The first two were fairly easy to implement but it’s the text messaging option that was the tough one to figure out. I asked for some help on Twitter, did some searching on Google and was able to find a handful of companies that would have done exactly what we needed but they were only available for cell phone customers in the US and didn’t service Canadian customers.

Not cool!

Eventually I was able to find my way to a company called WeTextIt that specializes in generating customer feedback via text messaging – sounds like exactly what we need! After a few emails and a couple of phone conversations our program was up and running and we came up with a very simple solution for people to send us their questions.

Basically it works like this – if someone has a question they simply type the word ‘ask’ followed by their question and send it to 889898. The question is put in a database which is sent to us weekly. So, for example, if your question about marriage is ‘Who should I marry?’ you would type ‘ask who should i marry?’ and send that text to 889898 and it would be delivered to us during the week.

Obviously, if you’re looking for instant communication between your crowd and the speaker, this isn’t a good option for you. BUT.. For us and what we are looking for, this is the perfect solution!