We love data, especially data about mobile. Check out this awesome resource published by Sitecore.
Here are the basics:
Increasing efficiency, promoting campaigns, and making great content incredibly accessible are only a few of the benefits of using push notifications. Your audience has dozens, even hundreds of distractions demanding their attention each day. There is a barrage of media and messaging to constantly compete with, which is why the immediacy, accessibility, and brevity of push notifications makes them one of the best tools for reaching your audience.
Just like with any mobile tool, coming up with a strategy, no matter how simple, will help you maximize this important feature in your app. We've come up with a few ideas on how to do just that!
Don't forget about the inbox
Even though push notifications are short and simple, your users might want want to review it at a later time, which is why the push notification inbox is very important so that no one misses your message.
To get the most out of this storage feature, occasionally draw your community's attention to it so that they are reminded to check it and see what they might've missed!
Send your message at the perfect moment
To reach your audience at exactly the right moment all you have to do is schedule a push notification ahead of time. Are you planning a worship night and need to remind your community the night before? No problem, just select a date and time and schedule your notification in advance so that your congregation can get a friendly reminder.
Scheduled push notifications allow you to be as efficient as possible by scheduling content when it will be most useful to your audience. If you're wanting to send an encouraging quote or bible verse during lunch time when your community is most likely to see it, scheduling ahead of time is a breeze.
3. Make great content a click away
Push notifications with attachments makes promoting great content easier than ever. Whether you need to send a sign-up form straight to your community, or just want to share a great article out, try this helpful feature to increase engagement in your app!
4. Target a specific audience
You might have specific communication needs for specific groups, with Group Push Notifications you can eliminate any barriers to sending relevant content to the right group of people.
Creating a group is simple and targeted. If you need to let your worship team know that practice has been rescheduled, group notifications are your simple solution: just create a group with your worship team members and send your message without inconveniencing the rest of your community with a notification that's not relevant to them.
If you have any questions about signing up for an app or how to use push notifications, get in touch with us! We're happy to help.
In Part 1 of this short series, we talked about how to present the facts and the benefits to your church leaders when trying to convince them to create a mobile app for your church. Last time we looked at a less hands-on approach, but for the technically inclined, here are a couple of ideas that might remove any barriers to getting your pastor on board!
Offer to help with the setup
Often times the only thing holding someone back from starting something new is the fear of the unknown, especially when it comes to a time commitment. Creating an app with Subsplash is easy to set up and maintain, and our app specialists will walk with you every step of the way!
Our team of mobile experts are dedicated to your success. If your church is hesitant to get started on an app because of the time commitment, and you are excited by the idea of setting it up, why not offer to get things started? Once you become a mobile expert yourself, you can teach someone else to hand it off later. And fortunately for you, you've got a secret weapon: us!
Offer to maintain the app
You may not be employed by your church, but if you have some extra time in your schedule to volunteer to be on-point for maintaining your church's app, you might be removing the last barrier to your church having an app.
Whether you are just informing your pastor about all of the ways an app can benefit your church, or diving into the creation and maintenance of an app on behalf of your organization, the best engagement with your community is yet to come with a customized mobile app!
Whether you're just an attendee or a staff member, it can be challenging to push for new ideas and initiatives at your church when time and resources are limited. And let's face it, change is scary!
While churches are increasingly embracing technology and influential church leaders are inviting pastors to consider how they can utilize technology to reach their congregation, it can still take some convincing for church leaders to get on board with the switch from more traditional methods, to adopting newer ones.
To help you out, we've put together a list of a few tips on how to convince your pastor that it's time to go mobile!
Show them the facts
With 2.2 million mobile device users globally, developing a mobile app strategy is the most effective way to reach people with the good news of the Gospel. Not only that, but mobile users spend nearly 3 hours every day on their smartphones, and a staggering 89% of time spent by users on mobile is in an app.
These numbers speak loud and clear: if you want to reach people, the best way to do it is on their mobile devices. With all of the great content your church creates, developing a mobile strategy will get your sermons, music, and blog posts in the hands of more people.
Share the benefits
We like to talk about five main benefits of creating a customized mobile app:
We have some other tips for you that will involve your active participation in setting up an app for your church or ministry. Stay tuned for part two of this series!
Creating an app with Subsplash has allowed RTS to deliver their professor’s lectures to online students, house all of their chapel messages, and share audio content from lecturers all over the country. After exhausting several different ideas, Jason Garvey, the Instructional Designer at Reformed Theological Seminary, was excited to find the optimal solution for delivering content to their online students.
The Subsplash Platform stood out to Jason because of its multi-faceted ability to meet their organization’s needs. Not only were they excited to have all of their media hosted in one place, they could easily stream lectures and add blog content in the Subsplash Dashboard that could be instantly accessed by anyone, on any device! With over 75,000 downloads and 3.5 million impressions, the app continues to be widely adopted by the Reformed Theological Seminary community.
Besides benefiting from the high-quality media experience, the team at RTS loves to take advantage of push notifications, especially when they’ve needed to send out school-wide urgent alerts.
At first the team behind the RTS app had a "if we build it they will come" mentality, but after a while they realized the classroom was the perfect platform for students to be redirected to the app, and professors realized that pointing their students towards their own content was a great way to reinforce the learning process. Some professors have even promoted the app by putting app info on the bulletin boards in their classrooms.
Students in the classroom benefit greatly from the app, but for remote students, the value is unprecedented. Having professor's lectures at their disposal, almost immediately after it is given, is a luxury that sets many remote students up for success.
Reformed Theological Seminary has leveraged mobile technology to enhance their online student's education experience, giving other educators and teaching institutions a great example of how to fuel their mission with a customized mobile app!
Download the app here!
