How Texting Helps This Church Reaches Its Rural Congregation
Many churches have had to transition to livestreams. Here’s how one managed to increase attendance at online attendance, despite having a rural audience.
Many churches have had to transition to livestreams. Here’s how one managed to increase attendance at online attendance, despite having a rural audience.
Church on The Hill is a small-town Texas ministry built on the core tenants of outreach, counseling, and worship.
Reach a rural audience whose geographic location and ranching lifestyles can make it tough to contact with information.
Their team has text-enabled and retained close to 50% of their parish despite the COVID crisis taking away their ability to hold in-person services.
Located in Pipe Creek Texas, Church on The Hill is a lot like any other rural ministry. Full of heart, charm, and tight-knit community.
As a smaller church of around 150 parishioners, Church on The Hill is unique in that most of its staff and ministry come from large churches across the state. Many of those churches use SMS to get in touch with the community, and its efficacy didn’t go unnoticed by COTH staff.
So for Nathan, an administrative volunteer for the church, it was something he wanted to bring into their church to improve the way they share information.
Sometimes simple solutions exist for simple problems. For Nathan, his church’s communication challenge wasn’t about reinventing the wheel.
He had information to share and a group of people who were interested in hearing it. The missing variable was one way to share it across all areas, ages, and demographics.
“For us SimpleTexting’s church texting service just made sense. It’s easy to access and get our church the information they need 2-3 times a week.”
For the instances where Nathan needs to reach his audience quickly with requests for help or volunteers, he’s found the response from the group overwhelmingly positive.
From trucks stuck in the mud to prayer requests, if you send it they will come!
Nathan had only begun with SimpleTexting about a month before COVID-19 sent shutdowns across the country. This put a halt on their in-person sign-up station in the front of the church where parishioners wrote down their cellphone number to sign-up to receive text messages.
Thanks to digital tools like our web sign-up form, however, they were still able to connect folks to their messages even with in-person mass temporarily shut down.
But in addition to their sign-up options, Nathan noticed how word of mouth about their messages worked just as effectively.
“Whenever someone hears about our texts they want to join,” notes Nathan. A ringing endorsement for the types of informative material they share with their community.
Are you a church, small or large, that wants to share information that actually gets read? We invite you to sign up for a 14-day free trial with SimpleTexting to give it a go. If you like it, we offer 15% off monthly plans for churches.
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