If Your Church App Can't Do This, Get a New One

So, if your church app doesn't do these five things currently, or if the church app you're looking at doesn't do these five things, you need to move on.

1. Centralize content

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Number one, it should be able to centralize all your content, the sermons you produce every week, your Bible studies, your blog posts, your YouTube channel, your Vimeo channel, any other kind of content, your events calendar, your events registrations, all the content that you produce as a church. You want to make sure that your app is able to consume all that content and kind of a one B, is that your app should be so easy to update. In fact, your app should actually update itself most of the time, right? All that content that you're publishing on your website, on your YouTube channel, on iTunes, on SoundCloud, on all these other places that you're putting content, your app should just suck that stuff in automatically and not be something that you have to update and manually go into every single week. So number one, make sure it's a central hub for all your content, make sure it's easy to update.

2. Sermon notes

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The second thing you want to make sure you have in your church app is live sermon notes. The thing that will create the most engagement for you and for use of your church app is for every time a lesson is preached on Sunday, that the person up there teaching gets up and says, "Hey church, open up your church app. The live notes are in there and you can take notes and follow along with me." So, number two, make sure you have live sermon notes.

3. Push notifications

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Number three, you want to make sure you have a great, great opt-in focused push notification capability. So, make sure your church app lets you set up your different groups, men's ministry, women's ministry, kids' ministry, military ministry, any of the different kind of groups that you have within your church, so that people, when they download your church out, they can turn on, "Oh, I want to receive men's ministry, I want to receive kids' ministry and I want to receive feeding the homeless ministry." So, I'm opted into those as a member and now, every time you send a message, I'm going to get the ones that are relevant to me. I'm not going to get the message about women's ministry. I don't want those. I'm not going to get the message about, I don't know, the teen ministry or the high school ministry. I don't have kids in high school yet, those aren't relevant to me. So, you got to have great push notifications.

4. Digital giving

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The fourth thing you want to make sure you've got in a church app is integrated giving. Giving has got to be easy. It's got to be seamless. It's got to work with the church app. It's got to be something that's always on, people can give right away.

5. Church management integration

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The fifth thing that you want to have is something that we're actually really passionate about and making a ton of progress in, is you want to have integrated church management features. So, your church app isn't just a content play, right? It's a place where your members should be able to use this app for things that are really relevant to them. So, again, I'm a father, I've got three kids. When I go to church, I check them into kids' ministry. I should be able to use my church app to check my kids into kids' ministry. I should be able to use my church app to find my small group information. I should be able to use my church app to update my profile or my family information, right? So, the fifth thing you want to look for is a really well-integrated church management and church app system.

Conclusion

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Look for these five things in your church app.Ask these questions. What are the key features? Do you do push notifications? Do you do group push notifications? Do you do giving? Do you do easy to update content? Do you have integrated church management with things like child check in and things like that? If your church app provider does all those things, you're down a great path. If you don't have those things, you should move on and look for somebody else.

Show Notes

Read the full blog of this episode here: https://get.tithe.ly/blog/church-app-feature

Today on Modern Church Leader, Tithe.ly COO Frank Barry explains how to use your church app to grow your church.

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Today, I want to talk a little bit about church apps and really the focus of this episode is to help you evaluate your church app or evaluate a church app that you might be thinking about getting.