Wednesday, October 29th, 2008...5:34 pm

Interactive Preaching: Take Questions via Txt Message During Church

by Aaron Marshall
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Because of new technology that exists this is actually an easy and inexpensive task.

Step #1 Sign-Up and Create a “TextMark“

Choose a keyword that will be easy for people to type in. If availble, choose short words or an acronym for your church.

Step #2 Create a PowerPoint slide that shows people VISUALLY how to ask a question using their phone

Send a text message to 41411 that starts with ASKSOJOURN followed by your question.

Example:
cellphone

Step #3 Have a team Sift through the questions and forward them to your cell phone

This screen will be very valuable and make it easier to manage a big surge of questions. They will need to refresh the page occasionally to see new questions as they roll in.

screen

There are several settings that need to be tweeked within TextMarks. Pay attention to the great option that allows you to respond with something like this when they ask a question…

Custom Response:
cell2

As always, I am curious to hear how others are using this kind of tool. Is there a better way?

9 Comments

Filed under Evangelism, How To, Mobile Web, SMS, Social Media, Text Messaging

9 Comments

  • Matthew Rathbun
    October 30th, 2008 at 7:54 am

    That is a an awesome idea! That would have worked great in our church of 1500, but the church plant I’m in now, only has about 50-60 of us, so we just raise our hands :) Now, I want us to grow so that I can take questions by text!

    Thanks for sharing.

  • phill
    October 30th, 2008 at 2:53 pm

    thank you so much…this is really cool and i will start using it…

    join our group at…thechurch

  • phill
    October 30th, 2008 at 3:03 pm

    just wondering if you know any web page developers who focus on social networking for churches?

  • Kyle
    October 31st, 2008 at 3:22 pm

    Thanks for the find. We had been using another service which wasn’t as intuitive of a UI and also wasn’t free. The free service here will do just fine.

  • Nathan Ketsdever
    October 31st, 2008 at 4:52 pm

    It would be great if it had a feature to allow approval for the pastor to post the content to his blog (or perhaps some other mechanism or notification) that way he could leverage the time invested a lot more effectively.

  • Steve Gwilt
    November 3rd, 2008 at 12:17 pm

    I agree with your Twitter (which you should post here, BTW) that going to a cell phone isn’t the best. Maybe you could give the pastor a screen and push them all up to an Ajax-enabled website for him to see all of them at once. Then he can sort & group them as he goes along; prioritize for any time-crunch, etc..

    One of those free whiteboard collaboration sites would do the trick.

  • crossn81
    December 4th, 2008 at 7:59 pm

    I’m not sure of their back-end but I know I’ve been to at least 2 churches that use the text a question stuff.

    I’m going to try live-tweeting the message this weekend on a church account I just setup.

  • Justathought08
    December 4th, 2008 at 7:59 pm

    I think thats a great idea!

  • Craig Gilman
    August 25th, 2009 at 10:18 am

    At the Christianity in the Digital Space symposium : http://digitalsymp.blogspot.com/2009/07/digisymp-programme.html

    we used twitterfall.com projected onto a secondary screen for delegates to send their comments - it was great - just need to choose a suitable hashtag for the event

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