The Church App

5 Benefits of Going Mobile with The Church App: Reducing Costs (Part 3 of 5)

TCAscripture3
TCAscripture3

This is part 3 in a series that highlights the added value of doing an iPhone/Android/iPad app for your church or ministry.

3: Reducing Costs

Budgets are always difficult to deal with. Any opportunity for a church to cut expenses is a valuable one. Printing costs can be huge for churches, whether by printing out hundreds of bulletins, or the waste of brochures that may go unused. Being able to refer your congregation to your mobile application is not only a money saver, but much more convenient - and they can take it with them! ChangePoint church in Alaska has been able to experience this first hand. “The app has allowed us to communicate with the ChangePoint family in a way that has been cost effective and far more engaging than traditional printed communication. Since the launch of the app we have seen the number of people that listen to our messages online double while at the same time we were able to reduce our communications budget significantly and direct much of those saved resources to outreach.”

We're so encouraged to see ways that The Church App is able to make a real difference in the core components that make up a church. We want to help enable churches to be good stewards of their budgets and it's been truly encouraging for us to see ways in which technology (when done right) can add value to the Kingdom.

Skip to Part 4 here.

5 Benefits of Going Mobile with The Church App: Increasing Reach and Viewership (Part 2 of 5)

TCAscripture2
TCAscripture2

This is part 2 in a series that highlights the added value of doing an iPhone/Android/iPad app for your church or ministry. Here's a quick review of the most measurable and attainable benefits of using The Church App: serving your current audience and community by making your content incredibly accessible, increasing reach and viewership, reducing costs, increasing donations, and most importantly helping people meet and grow with Jesus. Below* are real examples of these benefits from ministries that have experienced them. 2: Increasing Reach and Viewership

Expanding your audience is ideal for any church. Serving your current members is incredibly important, but so is bringing in new believers to experience the truth of Jesus. Since mobile applications make content readily accessible, it is an incredibly effective way to expand this reach. When we created The Church App in 2009 to serve Mars Hill Church, we had no idea how powerful of a tool it would become. Not only has Mars Hill grown significantly since 2009 to a church with roughly 15,000 members, but their app has been downloaded several hundred thousand times. That’s 20x (2000% more) the amount of people attending Mars Hill Church on any given Sunday, and that’s just one example. Hundreds of other amazing churches have greatly increased their reach and audience by utilizing The Church App. In fact, millions of people are currently using apps on a regular basis via The Church App Platform.

"I wanted to just send a quick message and say THANK YOU for your help in getting our app going. You and your team have always been a real joy to work with! The app is now on almost 4,000 devices (more than our average Sunday attendance!) and has been used almost 28,000 times! We have seen the number of weekly listeners to our digital content more than double since the release of the app helping us reach more people with the message of Life in Christ!"

-Adam Legg, ChangePoint Alaska

 Skip to Part 3 here.

5 Benefits of Going Mobile with The Church App: Making Your Content Accessible (Part 1 of 5)

TCAscripture1
TCAscripture1

Qualifying reasons abound for why your church can benefit from The Church App, but we'd like to share with you some quantitative info as well. We have been blessed to have the opportunity to build apps for some of the most influential churches and ministries out there. It's exciting to see how God is using this technology for His Kingdom and we can't help but want to share!

The most measurable and attainable benefits of using The Church App include: serving your current audience and community by making your content incredibly accessible, increasing reach and viewership, reducing costs, increasing donations, and most importantly helping people meet and grow with Jesus. Below* are real examples of these benefits from ministries that have experienced them. 1: Making Your Content Incredibly Accessible

Adding value to your current audience is so important, and making your content easily accessible is one of the best ways to do just that. It truly is all about content and quality, and churches are creating incredible Gospel centered content every single week. We’ve seen several churches that have doubled and sometimes tripled their sermon download rate via The Church App. In fact, many ministries have had just as many visitors and hits in their app as on their website. It's easier than ever for people to access church media from anywhere - without having to download individual sermons or sit at their computer.The apps we've built have had millions of downloads, countless app launches and hours spent within the apps, as well as half-a-million page views daily on our platform. Success in that area is all about pairing great content with an equally refined system for presenting it . We work diligently to assure that the content created by churches and ministries is experienced in the best way possible — especially for extended-play media. Our Advanced Audio Player  has the capacity to download for offline listening, seek, fast-forward/rewind, continues to play in the background if multitasking with other apps, and remembers where you left if your busy day causes interruptions. We’ve also invested years of hard work into creating the Subsplash Encoder. Our Encoder creates mobile-optimized videos that are of the highest-quality possible while streaming over wifi and cell networks (all while conserving battery-life and data-transfer). The Subsplash Encoder is Apple-approved and is optimized for iPhone, iPad and Android. We care about making sure churches and ministries can present their gospel-centered content with excellence in order to give their audience the best experience possible!

"The app is amazing...absolutely incredible! Any church that believes the Bible—taught well with Jesus as the hero—should attempt to do all they can to get the word out more broadly. If we love Jesus and people, we want to get his truth and love to them as cheaply, effectively, and responsibly as we can."

- Mark Driscoll, Pastor of Mars Hill Church

*This is part 1 in a 5 part series. Skip to Part 2

here

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Does Your Church Need an App?

churchnext
churchnext

Watch Interview

Our very own Chris Sharpe was recently interviewed by ChurchNext about the benefit of creating an app for your organization. Check out the full interview here.

The Church App: by Subsplash

What is The Church App? It’s an incredibly flexible platform that helps you develop mobile apps for your ministry!

Every single week, churches and ministries create incredible Gospel-centered content that needs to be shared with the world. Sadly, this content is often never published or is simply trapped within undesirable, clunky technology. So, the big question is; how do we get this incredible content into people’s hands? Here at Subsplash, we want to see the Gospel proclaimed to the ends of the earth. With that vision in mind, we brought our team of world class developers and UX designers together and created The Church App platform. This cutting edge platform allows churches and ministries to very easily create their own mobile applications (apps) for iPhone, Android, iPad, Windows Phone 7, and web. With rich features designed specifically for the presentation of the Gospel through an app, ministries can present full length audio and video messages, share blogs and articles, keep people connected with calendar events and social networks, integrate with online giving, and much more! With the growth of mobile technology, it only makes sense that the Church needs to be at the forefront of this tremendous tech revolution. Today, people actually consume as much data on their mobile device as they do on desktop computers. It’s an incredible cultural shift being led by mobile apps. We truly believe we can help churches and ministries get their Jesus-driven content into the palm of your hand. We’ve been blessed to work with some incredible ministries who are all about using technology to share the truth of Jesus Christ. We've worked with Billy Graham, Saddleback Church, Mars Hill Church, IHOP, Harvest: Greg Laurie, and many more. We’ve even worked with several churches that have less than 50 members who are using the apps as an outreach tool. How cool is that? The Church App is a tool built and designed for churches of all sizes who want to have their own custom app in the App Store and Android Marketplace to present the Gospel and keep people connected to their community.

Interesting facts about mobile and the Church

  1. People spend an average of 80 minutes per day using apps
  2. People spend an average of 30 minutes per launch of The Church App
  3. Nearly half of all Americans will use a smartphone by the end of 2011 (Nielsen)
  4. The Church App give people access to your video and audio sermons, news, blogs, calendars, and much more from anywhere, anytime

Things you can do inside of The Church App that you can’t do on your website

  1. Advanced Audio Player: Listen to audio in the background while multitasking, download audio to your app for offline listening, and have your audio sermon remember where you left off if interrupted
  2. Utilize your phones native features like Map and GPS
  3. Watch Apple approved high quality video that won’t drain your battery life, never buffers, and uses data efficiently
  4. Utilize a Music Player to sort by album and give users the ability to download songs

Other cool features of The Church App

  1. Calendar/Events: Create a custom calendar or integrate with your existing calendar
  2. ESV Bible: Include the entire ESV Bible, Audio Bible, and Life Journal Reading plan in your app
  3. Blog Reader: integrate with any RSS feed
  4. Social Networks/Sharing: Integrate with Facebook, Twitter and Email for social sharing of media
  5. Bulletins/News: Integrate your Sunday bulletin and any e-news
  6. Online Giving: Integrate with your online giving solution
  7. Short videos: Integrate with Youtube/Vimeo for short videos

We are excited to continue to dream and develop for the future of mobile technology and hope to see it used more and more for the advancement of God’s Kingdom. If you have any questions at all, we’d be happy to help!