Do you Txt Blast? My review of two youth ministry txt message services
If your too young to vote, email is a thing of the past. Actually, today’s teens would probably never have an email account at all if it wasn’t necessary to create a facebook page… So how do you stay connected with your students? How do you notify kids, parents, and volunteers of this and that? For example: North Texas is in the throws of a winter storm which has canceled life as we know it for two days, and it’s Wednesday, so although it’s not been decided yet the question on many minds is “Will we have church tonight?” As soon as the powers that be make a call I can send one text message to all my students and leaders and everyone is on the same page instantly.
Some people are using resources like facebook or twitter to accomplish this task. While I can see the benefit, I find that both have a few shortfalls, at least for this purpose. Everyone is on facebook it seems, but people must log in to check your update. I know, I know, the iPhone app supports push notifications and facebook will send txt updates if enabled, but that will probably not include the majority of your involved people. I love twitter, but I seems to be a social experience embraced by the older crowd. Maybe your experience is different, but at least in my student ministry, almost none of our students use twitter. For us, text messaging has been a fantastic solution. We have used a couple different services to accomplish this, and I’ll share the pros and cons of each.
Simply Txt from Doug Fields' Simply Youth Ministry
The first text messaging service we used was Simply Txt from Doug Fields’ Simply Youth Ministry. I first became aware of Simply Txt at a Simply Youth Ministry Conference a couple years ago, and was excited to give it a try. I was not disappointed. In fact, it really improved the way we notified students, parents, and leaders of what was going on. Registration for an event due soon? Text blast to everyone. Guest speaker or worship leader tomorrow night? Everyone gets a text. Want to just send everyone a quick little encouragement? Well, you get it. Here is a screen cast from the guys at Simply Txt showing off their product.
Ok there are some great features there. After using Simply Txt for almost two years though I can tell you, having first hand experience how much of this is true. Simply Txt is a overall great product. I did have some reliability issues however, primarily in exactly when a message or blast would be delivered. The way Simply Txt works is they are actually sending an email to your carrier which is being delivered to your mobile device via SMS. You can actually do the same thing with your mail client of choice, such as Outlook or in my case Apple’s Mail.app, but it’s slightly too involved to be practical in my opinion. You probably would never care how it’s delivered, and your students certainly won’t, to them it’s just a text. The significance is however that delivering this way is sometimes, not always, unpredictable. I have seen it take hours, or in extreme cases even days for messages to arrive. More than once a message sent the previous day has shown up on everyone’s device in the wee hours of the morning, which doesn’t always bode well, especially with parents. Also if you are trying to communicate time-sensitive information you might be very disappointed. Let me be clear, the service worked as designed much of the time. I would estimate, and this is only an estimation, that in my experience message delivery was significantly delayed 15-20% of the time.
Another very mild complaint I could voice is that Simply Txt always shows as coming from a different number. Let’s be honest, this is probably not a deal breaker for most, but it can be an inconvenience. I’ve found many students want to add the number in their contacts so that it clearly displays who it from, this would also help with devices which log message conversations. If the number is always the same, it shows up as coming from your student ministry (I do this on my own device with texts from Twitter). Simply Txt always shows up as something different, which I assume has to do with the email delivery discussed above.
Now some of the really cool features of Simply Txt:
1. When you send a txt blast, you can have it go to a linked facebook or twitter account as well.
This is an amazing feature. In my case, my twitter updates go directly to my facebook, so I can have a blast go to my twitter which then goes to my facebook. Txt blast, twitter update, facebook status all with one click. This was not available when we first started using Simply Txt, but when they added it, I was very impressed. This is not available on Duffled.com, which will be discussed later.
2. Student replies sent to your device as a text.
Another incredible feature. You send a message and a kid has a question or comment. He/she can simply reply to your text, and it goes straight to your mobile device. This is great because your usually not logged into Simply Txt and staring at your screen waiting to see if any replies pour in. Another great feature. I have often used this with giveaways and contest, “the 4th person to reply to this wins such and such.” Also a great way to have students sign up for the text service.
3. Cost.
With plans starting at just $10 per month, Simply txt is simply the most affordable product I’ve found.
Duffled.com
We are currently using Duffled.com. I first heard of this service over at Saddleback High School Pastor Josh Griffin’s MORETHANDODGEBALL.COM . Duffled is a very cool service designed for anyone with a need for marketing, not specifically youth ministry. Below is a video from Duffled about what they “bring to the party.”
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Duffled-What will YOU do with it? from Duffled.com on Vimeo.
We have been using Duffled.com for around eight months, and like our experience with Simply Txt, we have been very happy. Some of the key improvements have been:
1. Reliability. Messages delivered instantly. Every time.
Text blasts sent via Duffled have arrived on time every time. Whether a message is scheduled for delivery sometime in the future or right now, I have never had a message delayed. I believe this is due to Duffled’s delivery method. Unlike Simply’s email system, Duffled actually sends via SMS, resulting in much greater reliability. This method is more expensive, however, which we will see soon.
2. Text to join.
A big selling point for us was students or other interested parties can simply send a text to enroll in your text service. It’s very easy to put up an announcement on a screen or on a poster saying “Text SUBMERGE to 33970 to receive txt updates.” Simply Txt requires you to log in and fill out a form for each member.
3. Birthdays
Duffled allows you to enter your students birthdays, and will automatically send them a happy birthday text, without waiting for you to forget. Even better, with one mouse click you can have Duffled send each of your students a message asking their birthday and/or name if you don’t already have it without you having to enter it all.
Duffled is great, and so is Simply Txt. I must warn you though, Duffled is much more expensive. Duffled begins at $35 a month, but if you go over your allotted messages (which can happen quite easily) your automatically bumped up an additional $35, whether you send one message over or up to the allotted number until you get to the next price bracket. In other words, you buy messages in blocks, and use what you will.
If we could take the great features of both these services and combine them into one product we would hardly be able to contain ourselves. Reality dictates, however, that you weight the pros and cons of each and see what works best for you. One thing I can say though is that a text blast service of any kind has vastly improved the way we communicate in our student ministry.
UPDATE: We are in a new church/new student ministry, and for budget reasons chose to go with Simply Txt this time. We are only a couple weeks into this user experience, but so far it has been flawless. The folks at Simply Txt seem to be constantly improving their product, and while I was certainly a fan before, we have not experienced any of the reliability concerns mentioned above. Well played Simply.
UPDATE 6/12/2011: Maybe I spoke too soon? After sending a sum total of 19 messages since we have been using Simply Txt this go around, we have experienced our first major failure. I sent a message at 3:15PM today to all involved in our student ministry reminding them about our outreach service tonight. All messages are sent to my device as well so I can monitor the delivery, which sadly in this case happened exactly 5 hours late. The message arrived shortly after 8Pm, a full 3 hours after the event it was intend to inform students and volunteers about. I am sorely disappointed in this, and this just might be a deal breaker, AGAIN. I plan on calling Simply tomorrow. NOTE: It seems the message that was delivered 5 hours to late was posted to Twitter on time…
delighted to share. 