Generally, communications technology evolved pretty quickly, and the way churches connect with their congregation is changing rapidly.
Thus, if your church doesn’t have a mobile strategy yet, you’re missing out on an incredible opportunity.
With the exponential increase in smartphone usage, the decrease in email open rates, and general over-saturation of communication, your church sure needs to explore different ways to get someone’s attention. Most people in your church and community now use their smartphone or tablet to access the Internet, which has enormous ramifications for your church.
How do push notifications work?
Push notifications are not so different from text messages and mobile alerts. But for push notifications, you only receive notifications from apps you’ve downloaded, and can only send notifications to people who’ve downloaded your app. Straightforward enough, right? Now let’s see how push notifications can help your church.
1. Event Reminders / Promotions
Push notifications are the perfect tool to remind your members about the church’s upcoming events; Outreach meetings, thanksgiving services, picnics, etc. You can send out a few push notifications to remind your congregation about the occasion both a week beforehand and the day prior. You will possibly see an increase in attendance and participation in your events.
Also, you can use push notifications to promote an event coming up in your church. You can send push notifications to encourage members to get involved and register for a Bible class, for instance. You can even include a link for them to learn more information if you have it available on your church’s website.
2. Volunteer Requests
Volunteers are essential in a smooth-running church, and you can never have enough of them! An easy way to get more people to participate in church activities is to utilize push notifications on your ChMS app.
You can send out a notification informing them of where the church needs help and link them to an easy-to-fill signup form on your website. Going this route would lessen the stress, and it won’t be so much of a challenge getting more volunteers in your church.
3. Daily or Weekly Pastor Encouragement/Word
Members always want to hear from their pastors and leaders in other ways than just from the pulpit. One way to stay connected with your members during the week is to send out daily or weekly encouragement words. Depending on how many meetings you have in a week, daily might be too often, but every other day is fair enough.
As a Pastor, you can send words of encouragement from the scriptures, or perhaps what God has placed on your heart that week, to your members. It allows your congregation to feel more connected with you, as a leader or pastor, which is essential, especially in larger churches.
4. Important / Urgent Announcements
A push notification comes in handy when you need to send out important or urgent information that every member of your congregation needs to be viewed. And of course, this means you must have ensured that virtually all members of your congregation already have the app downloaded on their mobile devices. That’s only how this will be effective.
5. Follow on Social Media / Email Channels
In today’s technology-filled world, church members are prone to so many distractions. Thus, it would indeed be helpful to communicate with them on multiple channels like social media, email, and, of course, your ChMS app. Make use of push notifications to inform them of your presence on these channels and include a link so they can ‘like,’ follow, or signup to hear from you.
Conclusion
Utilizing push notifications is one of the easiest methods to get more participation from your congregation. However, to send push notifications to your church, you need to be already using a ChMS software, which also has a mobile app.
ChurchPad provides you with a user-friendly app that you can utilize to send push notifications to your church. You’ll also need to tell your members to download the ChMS app. It isn’t something you can achieve once, anyway. You may need to keep repeating it repeatedly until a large number of people do.
