Monday, July 21, 2014

How To Reach Your Congregation In 60 Seconds... for Free

Pastors, can you reach your congregation during an emergency?  (Remember, voice-phone service is often down or jammed during an emergency.)

ReadyIndy is helping area congregations to think through their readiness capabilities.  Just about 'emergencies' and 'disasters'?  No, daily readiness.  And team readiness.  For prayer, care & share(ing the Good News).  That is, for daily effectiveness in carrying out the Great Commission in our city's neighborhoods.

Why?  The readiness that comes from the gospel of peace!  (Eph.6)




Ok, so how DO we reach our congregations in 60-seconds... for free?


  • Does your church have an official church Twitter account?  (Btw, these 100 Indy churches do.)  Get one.  In the following example, let me use @ReadyIndy's account-name for instance...


  • But btw, your people do NOT have to get an account to accomplish the following step.


  • Encourage your congregation to simply text the following phrase to (short-code) 40404...

    ON  READYINDY


  • Ok, that's it.  Now they will get your tweet(s) within 60-seconds as a TEXT-MSG on their phone.  They don't even have to have a smartphone.
It could not be simpler.

But of course, to maintain your congregation's trust and attention, you'll want to develop a reasonable rhythm of communicating with them in this manner.

Caveat:  If your main church Twitter account is used so frequently that your people do not want to have all those tweets come to them as text-messages, they can just as easily text the following phrase to 40404...

          OFF  READYINDY


  • In this case, you'd want to set up a special Twitter account for ONLY NOTIFICATION PURPOSES... eg, @ReadyIndy_notify ... and ask your congregation to turn that account on, instead.