mass texting

[churchtech007]

We are looking into send out mass text to our congregation. It would be used for updates/cancellations etc.

Is anyone doing this?
Does anyone know of a service that does this?

Thanks!

[[Admin] osborn4]

You could use twitter in conjunction with something like GroupTweet.

[churchtech007]

I'm not very familiar with twitter.

Do you have to have a twitter account to receive updates?
It looks like anyone can send a message to the group?

Thanks for the info.

[[Admin] danroth]

Originally Posted by churchtech007

I'm not very familiar with twitter.

Do you have to have a twitter account to receive updates?

Yes.

It looks like anyone can send a message to the group?

Only if you follow their advice to have the group's Twitter account follow everyone else.

[prochlea]

check out http://www.textmarks.com... I think it will do exactly what you want.

[JHVideoGuy]

Here's Twitter in plain english: http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter

It does take more effort by the end user but if done properly it can help you stay connected with your church members and open up ministry doors.

Textmarks.com does do mass text messaging but they tag ads on the end of each message. But you have to hope for decent ads. One ministry at our church uses it, most ads tend to revolve around movies that are opening.

I have some friends who are using http://www.mozes.com/. They used to be free for student organizations but I haven't checked their prices lately.

The creme de la creme right now is http://jarbyco.com/. They will do mass text messaging, polling and text to screen. Granger used them a few weeks ago to do text to screen. Tim Stevens wrote about it. I first heard about them from Tim Schrader. But they are not cheap.

[Josh0311]

I've been using mass texting for a certain ministry group over the last few months. It's worked great and isn't terribly expensive. The site I use is clubtexting.com - interface is smooth and contacts can be imported via CSV.

[[Admin] osborn4]

Most text services have a way to send a text via email. Perhaps you could just collect email addresses for text or plain old email users.

[TMcKellar]

I think osborn4's suggestion would be easiest. You would need to get what cell provider people to use to be able to text them from an email. I have done this before kind of with getting myself the ringtones I want without having to pay. To email myself a text message it would be my number @vtext.com. Free and easy.

[DrowningnHim17]

We use mozes and it's free. At least as far as I know. We don't pay anything for it, so I consider that free. lol

[riafekim]

I'll second textmarks.com. I am going to implement that for our church as a way to communicate with people when we need to get a meesage out fast (service cancellations, etc). I am also going to bring it up as an option at my regular job as well. We were hit pretty bad by the recent ice storms and communicating with others was an issue.

[dlcjonathan]

thanks everyone for the input. i think ive narrowed my search down to textmarks.com