Text In Church 12+

I love TIC. We use it not only for guest follow up, but also frequent communication and relationship building for our attendees. We are a church of 125, on a good day. Most people are on our weekly list and we have quite a few guests come through each month and sign up. Ways we use this include: checking in on people (Hey Joe, how are you?), sending out the service information (Zoom links, parking lot dial in number), targeted announcements (women events, men’s bible study), guest follow up (join our FB page, how can I connect you to others), community events (VBS), and for community outreach (currently, we are housing the produce boxes for a farm and help them ensure delivery to their clients).

The templates were hugely helpful and over time we have tweaked them to better fit our guest needs.

The main thing is that people reach out to us and get answers. We have fewer people slipping through the cracks. We have groups set up and can target specific people. We have people asking to be on the list and letting us know if they didn’t get a text they expected. We use this to show the love and grace of Jesus and help everyone feel more connected to the church and each other.

—Elisabeth Jacobson
Bethel Evangelical Covenant Church

Text in Church has been great for us. Love the automation and it’s the connect cards and smart connect cards all the time. On the desktop, it’s great! On the phone… not as much.

The biggest issue is that when I click on a notification to reply to a text, the app starts to open and then crashes before I get to the text I am trying to respond to. This is not an isolated incident, but an ongoing problem basically every time I click a notification.

There are other ease of use things that I would love to see improved… the ability to copy paste contact info from the app into a phone or text message when I am trying to quickly send info to another team member or the ability to quickly see what step of a follow up workflow someone is on. But the biggest issue for me is the crashing. I hate having to open the app twice to reply to a text, with the second time having me click through to the conversation instead of going right there. If this was fixed it would be 5 star.

TIC makes followup easy! During each of our Sunday morning services, we ask our guests to get their phones out and text “New” to our TIC number. Once this is done, the follow-up is so easy because it happens automatically. They immediately receive and thank you text that includes a link to a digital connect card where we are able to capture their information that will be needed to email, make phone calls, and send cards through the mail. And - we didn’t have to figure out the steps ourselves - TIC provided suggestions that were easy to customize for our church!

I am new in this role as Adult Ministry Pastor, and TIC has made it easy to equip our teams for effective follow-up!