Best Practices Part 3: Push Notifications

Push Notifications have earned the third slot in our series of Best Practices for outreach and engagement. Why are they so lucky? Well, they can guarantee your audience will see your message directly on their devices.

Push Notifications

Sometimes all we need is that final "push" to take the next step. From a newly uploaded sermon series, a new blog post, or a reminder of the community BBQ, push notifications provide an effective way of updating your community immediately anytime, anywhere. By updating users on resources, events, services, and more, push notifications allow users to take advantage of opportunities to help them grow in both their faith and community.

One way we've seen churches and ministries use push notifications is for the purpose of sending reminders for upcoming events. Both The Gospel Coalition and Harvest Ministries have sent out reminders of their upcoming conferences, while others have sent out reminders of gathering times and places. Whatever the event, resource, or opportunity, push notifications enable you to get more people involved with a direct and visible message on their device.

Happy notifying, and stay tuned for part 4! 

Best Practices Part 2: Connect Tab

Here's part 2 of our series we’ve put together to highlight best practices for maximizing outreach and engagement. We want to shed light on how some of our clients are using their apps to deepen engagement, foster community, and get people connected within the body of Christ. 

Connect Tab 

A unique way to get your audience plugged in is through having a connect tab. Similar to the Sunday tab, the connect tab easily provides your audience ways to get involved. In Elevate Life’s connect tab, users can fill out a connect card, learn more about their mission, join a ministry team, and get involved in outreach projects directly from the app. Let’s say a member is listening to a sermon and gets inspired to join a small group–they can then navigate easily from the media tab over to the connect tab and sign up in mere seconds. Whatever avenues your ministry provides for people to get involved, creating a connect tab is a great way to sync those efforts into one place, and engage people beyond the Sunday service. Get Elevate Life’s app here to see more!

Stay tuned for Part 3! 

Best Practices Part 1: Sunday Tab

Best Practices: Outreach and Engagement

Engage:  to occupy, attract, or involve someone's interest or attention.

That’s the hope right? Reaching people through technology is truly effective when outreach turns into response. Whether it’s inspiring deeper relationships with Christ through a sermon series, increasing attendance from event reminder push notifications, or getting newcomers connected through a connection card tab, creating a healthy and connected church community is the ultimate goal. That is why we’ve put together a collection of best practices for maximizing outreach and engagement. We want to shed light on how some of our clients are using their apps to deepen engagement, foster community, and get people connected within the body of Christ. Here are a few examples of ways our clients have used their apps to better engage their audience.

Sunday Tab 

We love the way Ecclesia Hollywood put together their Sunday tab! Being the first tab users see when opening the app, their Sunday tab creates a great space for users to easily engage with their content and take action during Sunday services. Within this tab are resources and opportunities geared toward newcomers, regulars, and people who want to get more involved. By putting their weekly scripture, connect card, and bulletin resources directly within the tab, Ecclesia not only saves money on printing costs, but are also making it easier for attendees to engage directly from their devices. A Sunday tab can also provide immediate access to giving links, announcements, small group sign ups, and much more. Get Ecclesia’s app here to see it in action and stay tuned for part 2! 

"We point people to the Sunday tab to follow along with the morning's scripture and announcements, and also direct newcomers to the tab for information specifically for them." - Michele McCreary, Director of Information and events, Ecclesia Hollywood

Stories from the Church: Web Player

The Subsplash Web Player is the perfect compliment to your app to reach your audience in new ways! Whether your content is consumed on a mobile device or a desktop, we’ve got you covered. The content uploaded to your app is encoded and maximized for playback across every medium. This means there is no dual entry–upload in one place and your media is instantly delivered to your app, web player, and podcast feed. We’ve seen great adoption rates of the Web Player so far, but want to encourage everyone to check it out and see how it fits the need of your organization. Simply check out the ‘Web Player’ settings page in the Subsplash Dashboard to turn on this channel–it’s as easy as that, and it comes fully loaded with your content.

I had the opportunity to chat with a few of our lovely clients to hear how they’re liking the Web Player. Here are their stories:

ALL SAINTS CHURCH, SEATTLE WA

All Saints is a small church of 100 people in the heart of Seattle. By the grace of God, their app has had over 3,000 downloads! They cut their time uploading media to different sources in half by adding the Web Player as their media page on their website. Not only does the Web Player satisfy the functional requirements for them, but they are thrilled with the design of the page and how seamlessly it works with their current website. They love that it is 'easy to share and easy to update!'

ELEVATE LIFE CHURCH,  ORANGE PARK FL

Elevate Life Church in Florida implemented the Web Player onto their website immediately after release. Elevate Life fully utilizes the Web Player, Apps, and Podcasting. They promote the App and Web Player to their congregation often, and consider it a key part of their communication strategy. Because they only have to upload their media in one place now, they have seen significant time savings from what used to be hours updating across multiple services. They ‘love the streamlining capabilities’ and even based the look and feel of their website redesign on the Web Player. Elevate Life just launched their second campus and is a congregation of roughly 1,900 with over 4,500 app downloads!

LIFEGATE CHURCH, ATLANTA GA

Lifegate Church in Atlanta is a 1,000 member church. They use their App and Web Player as the resource for their congregation. By streamlining their processes, they’ve noticed that the Web Player saves several days worth of work per week. The adoption by their congregation of a centralized location for video, audio, and podcasting has ‘been awesome’. All ages have responded well to the app and Web Player from teens to members in their eighties. “The amount of people listening is over and above what we could have ever thought”.

Want to hear more about how this tool can be customized to fit your needs? We'd love to chat with you! 

The Results are in! Apps vs. Mobile Websites

We all know the importance and prevalence of mobile in today’s age. With half the people in the world now engaging with content on a mobile device, the question is no longer if people are engaging with mobile, but how are people are engaging with mobile? Well, we’re glad you asked.

According to Nielsen's latest report, over 89% of time spent on mobile devices is in apps. This means out of the 2 hours and 19 minutes people are spending on their mobile devices each day, 2 of those hours are spent engaging with apps.

Not only are people spending more time using apps, but they are spending more time in apps per session than mobile websites. Here’s what Adobe found:

• Smartphone users spend almost 3 times as long in mobile app sessions as they do on mobile website sessions

• Tablet users spend 4 times as long in mobile app sessions as they do on mobile website sessions

But moving beyond statistics, let’s get into the why. Why are people engaging longer and more frequently with apps? The good news, for both your content and your audience, is that apps provide a unique way of connecting with people through their attractive interface, instant accessibility, and convenience to people’s lifestyle.

Take the Facebook app for instance. People use the Facebook app over the mobile website because of its more frequent and accessible content. It allows people to engage with updates and notifications in a more efficient and enjoyable way that fits into their on-the-go daily lifestyle. On the other hand, accessing the mobile site requires you to open a browser, then type in the website address, then type in your login information, and then… are you asleep yet? Apps allow users to get the instant access they need with just the tap of a screen, giving you the opportunity to catch the attention of your audience in ways you never could before.

Congratulations! You’ve now caught your audiences attention, but what about keeping it? Because apps are natively built to function across specific mobile devices and operating systems, the overall experience is more enjoyable as it's tailored to that specific device’s interface design. This includes the navigation throughout the app, media presentation, the ability to access content offline, and integration with other built-in capabilities of a mobile device such as social sharing and syncing calendar events. To put it simply, when it comes to spending time on a mobile device, people will keep engaging with something that’s enjoyable, easy, and fits in with their overall lifestyle.

And let’s not forget about direct communication. Because an app is present on a device’s interface, organizations can use features such as push notifications to communicate messages directly to their audience’s devices. Whereas mobile websites require a user to intentionally conduct a one-way search in a browser to access content, apps allow you and your audience to engage in more two-way communication.

Having a mobile website and mobile app presence are both incredibly valuable, but when it comes to engaging with content, apps have the majority vote. While a mobile website has its value in giving an organization an upper hand in search-ability, apps deliver an interface that gives end-users a more enjoyable experience of media, text, navigation, and ultimately an organization's brand. This makes the small time investment of downloading an app worthwhile, as it produces more frequent and extended engagement from your audience.

In the end, it all comes down to how your audience currently interacts and expects to interact with content on a mobile device. We believe (as do the statistics), that apps give you the unique opportunity to create a deeper connection between your content and your audience. By creating an app for your organization, your content can receive the visibility and engagement it deserves.