A large felt need for our staff team is the ability to text updates to various groups of students in our scope. Perhaps a broad message to all students involved, a timely reminder to Discipleship Group leaders or even an announcement to students from a specific campus. I wrote about Texthub a while ago…which has since moved to a freemium model that prices us out of service as well as Begrouped.com which has cut service for a while. After searching high and low we’ve discovered a Portland startup called Celly! It’s worthy of a look for all you ministry leaders. The founders assured me they’re going to be around for a while.
Here’s what it can do for free…
- Set up cells (groups) of unlimited size that you can text and receive responses from.
- Send multiple cells the same message by including a #hashtag
- Adjustable settings to require a username to be made when they’re invited to join (so you can see who is in the cell)
- Provides a keyword for each cell so that members can text in a request to join
- Provides easy manual entry of invitations to join via either phone number or email
- Adjustable settings to allow reply all, or have responses go only to administrator
We’re just getting our feet with it, but it looks great. Our goal is to have it all updated with various cells before we break for the summer so that we can send timely reminders when the Fall season rolls around.
Do you use a texting service in your ministry?
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Mission Hub ftw!
Seriously – do y’all use it at all?
It’s got group texting/email built in for free. Unlimited.
It’s been great for us this year (and I’m determined to help make it substantially better by August).
We’re getting ready to use it for contact management in the fall. What I want is more interactive features for groups…I want to be able to toggle between a announcement and a reply all feature…I don’t think Mission Hub can do that yet can it? I want to be able to have people respond via text too. I’ve got one of our staff playing with Mission Hub right now to see if it might be the best option.