If you have a church app for your congregation and church staff’s iOS and Android devices, you are ahead of the game. With your mobile application, you have the ability to connect with your congregation at a very intimate and efficient way.
For those that do not have an application yet, your best bet is to go with ROARapp.com that has the best customer service and is geared towards a church model mobile application.
While you may have already constructed your app and have it live, there is no time like today to make some improvement so it becomes more widely adopted and used. The hope is that with an effective app, your brand will grow, ministry will improve, and attendance will flourish.
We have five ideas to add to your mobile application to do just that.
1. Prayer Requests
A prayer request feature is something that you can not only let people explore while on their own time, but also encourage people to post to during the Sunday service, at your youth group, in your volunteer training sessions, and other interactive times. Giving people 3-5 minutes during the meeting will ensure that people at least explore the application, but also share some heart-felt prayer requests that desperately need prayed for.
2. Live Streaming
If you have a Live streaming is good for your church, but what if you were able to have live streaming on your mobile device. Think mobile is not important? “Mobile makes up more than 25% of YouTube’s global watch time, more than one billion views a day.” (YouTube.com) That means you are seriously missing out on many people watching your service from their smartphones and tablets.
3. YouVersion Integration
Millions use YouVersion every day to read their Bible, so if you reference Scripture anywhere on your mobile app (church blogs, church life verses, topics of sermons), why not link it to the YouVersion app? This will foster better readings of the Bible.
4. Social Integration
How amazing would it be if you on your Sunday bulletin section of your application you had social sharing buttons to tweet out Bible verses, share Facebook posts of upcoming church events, and allow people to tell their friends and followers about your church? Even better, you can construct what the tweet or status would say with a direct link to your church’s social media account so that friends can also like or follow your church’s social network page.
5. Check-In Application
Whether this part of the application is designed exclusively for church leadership or for everyone to check-in (Foursquare integration?), this is the perfect way to keep a digital record of who attends different events. If it is for the leadership, consider setting up an email system that will email people who have not come to a youth group or MOPS meeting in several weeks. If you use a check-in service, consider having special promotionals like “come get coffee with the pastor on him” days of the week for only those that check-in.
Bonus: Sunday Bulletin Replacement
Currently our church is getting rid of our Sunday paper bulletin that we handout to congregation members. Instead, we will email a PDF file to those that ask for it or they can get the announcements and sermon notes on the church application. This will be saving our church over $30,000 this next fiscal year so that we can be better stewards of the money given to us.
It does not matter what you use your mobile application for, as long as you have very intentional purposes with it and are constantly asking people to use it.
How do you plan to use your mobile application and what feature is a must-have for your church?
[Image via Alejandro Escamilla]
Curtis says
I find all of this really interesting Jeremy, but the part that stood out the most to me was the switch to a Digital Bulletin / Pamphlet saving so much money (variable upon church size obviously).
Incentivising checkin’s is an interesting concept…using it kind of like a loyalty card. Neat idea.
Good read, keep it up!
PS. – Love the podcast you guys do!
Jeremy Smith says
Isn’t that amazing! We do still have physical copies for those that are first time visitors, but are ready to save the money!
Antoine RJ Wright says
I mildly disagree with some of the items noted. I’ll give my 5 w/bonus and my reasons why:
1. Prayer Requests
2. Personal Journal w/Reminders
3. Donation Portal (Tithes, Offerings, Missions, etc.)
4. Integration to any Bible app
5. Announcements (as notification service only)
Bonus: social networking
While it seems that going social makes sense as a necessity, its more important to local churches that folks are plugged into what makes those communities most necessary. Prayer, Journaling, and Financial support top that list.
Going to any bible app is good, but only if the church promotes consistent reading and studying.
Announcements would be nice, but better if done as a service outside of the app where folks can opt into whatever. Now, if the app can control that opt in/out status, that’s what works.
Check-ins make more sense with children’s ministry efforts; common structured events don’t need that. And as such, the device and its user need to be validated when you do that right. Using just another web service for this could be a potential huge legal issue.
If folks don’t connect to the things that don’t need infrastructure, then they are going to need to be compelled more to connect to the things that do need it.
Jeremy Smith says
I guess I assumed that your church would have all of those. They are basic aspects of a church app that should be foundational. Everything that I put on it is extra and outside of the box. (Hence why I said improves on your app)
I completely disagree with check-ins as you are trying to recreate your own FourSquare and unless you are Saddleback, it doesn’t make sense to do so. Not sure how using it would be a legal risk?
Richard Jones says
By check in, do you mean checking in on Facebook, etc? Or attendance tracking check in? If it is attendance tracking, how do you do that? And the bulletin replacement, how do you do that? Thanks.
Jeremy Smith says
Richard, check-in could be Facebook integrated or simply have a geolocation for that specific app to your church campus. All phones have that feature. As for bulletin replacement, simply have the app be your bulletin moving forward, that would be a simple feature to have on the app.