If You Want to Increase Engagement, Use a Church App

If engagement is down at your church, you could be facing a serious drop-off in attendance.

When people are unengaged, they tend to disconnect, give less, and eventually leave. Declining engagement is nothing to take lightly. 

Here’s the bad news:

If people are already disengaging at your church, this means that more people probably feel the same way.

Here’s the good news:

With the right tools, church engagement is very easy to cultivate.

Your church app is the essential church engagement tool. Many pastors don’t understand the value of their church app, or they use a church app company that doesn’t give them engagement features.

Want the truth?

Churches that take engagement seriously have church apps that enable full interactive functionality. For example, Tithe.ly Apps an ensemble of features that tie over 8 different independent apps into a single app. 

Consider these church app features, and follow their strategies for engaging your church. When you do, you will see a spike in engagement, a deepening of community, and a grateful satisfaction among your members that you have been wanting for a long time.

1. Your church app enables digital note-taking (Evernote replacement)

Digital note-taking sounds like a weird tool that no one would use. But if you really think that, you’re not paying attention.

Think of the apps that are dominating the marketplace right now. 

Google Docs. Evernote. Things. Daily Journal. 

People love writing notes on their phones. What if your church app became your church members’ new Evernote?

That’s what the Tithe.ly App does. Plus, it can email a beautifully formatted PDF of any note to their email.

With Apps like this, who needs Moleskine?

2. Your church app cultivates small group interaction (Email replacement)

Ever get caught in one of those small group email chains that starts friendly, but, by the end, feels like 20 Nigerian princes trying to scam each other with memes? 

• “Should I bring my award winning pie to small group?”
• “No, that’s okay! Jacob is bringing cake.”
• “You sure? It’s really good! How about next week?”
• “Next week we are out of town. What about the week after?”
• “The week after I’m gone, but…”
  

Don’t you just want to throw your computer out the window? 

At Tithe.ly, you can integrate your church app with our church management software to manage your small group and leave behind chain messages forever.. 

For instance, your small group leader can create an event, people can “sign up” for certain needs, and not a single email needs to be sent. Automated sign-up and participation means the small group community can spend less time going back and forth about the details of the meeting, and more time sharing life with one another.

3. Your church app creates higher event attendance (TicketHub Replacement)

Your church app can be an event registration and payment portal. 

Imagine having the power of TicketHub for your church within your app. Every membership class. Every pot luck. Every detail, automated through sign-ups, forms, and payment entry fields.

Once you create the event, you don’t have to coordinate with anyone for anything, or chase anyone down for any money.

Everything can be done through each member’s phone, with no added hassle.

When it’s easier to sign up for church events, more people will come to your events, which means that engagement will grow in your church.

4. Your church app increases giving (PayPal replacement)

Giving is native in Tithe.ly Apps. 

In fact, giving should be native in every church app.

But giving should be more than a feature. It should look sleek. It should be optimized for the latest iPhone so the App screen doesn’t look stretched. It should have recurring giving options, easy credit card integrations, and work with Apple Pay.

The more money you have, the easier it is to fund community and church events that draw people in the church together.

5. Your church app makes your sermons available (YouTube/iTunes replacement)

Your church app’s sermon player should look amazing. 

If it doesn’t, people will ask you to upload your sermon series to a podcast feed. Nobody likes using clunky-looking podcast or video software with glitchy features. 

Your members could just as easily go to YouTube to watch your sermons.

But what if your church members could watch your sermons from YouTube within your church app? That way, they will get used to using the app. More than that, if you remind your members of something in the sermon—to give, to register, to interact—your members will be able to do that directly in the app in which they are watching your sermon.

Can’t do that in YouTube or iTunes. 

The Tithe.ly Apps have this feature.

6. Your church app displays a dynamically updated calendar (iCal replacement)

iCal is notoriously difficult to sync with a multitude of calendars. 

Depending on your job, you might sync iCloud, Outlook, and GCal onto a single iCal calendar. When you do this, church events can get lost in the background.

In your church app, you should have a calendar that automatically updates from your website. The Tithe.ly App gives churches this ability. We’ve found that people often use the church app calendar more than iCal because it’s an easier interface. 

7. Your church app automatically updates from your website  

Most church apps require you to update everything twice. Upload your sermons twice. Type your summaries twice. Update your calendars twice.

You shouldn’t have to do this.

With Tithe.ly Apps, you only have to update your information once. When you do, that information will automatically populate your church app with the latest, correct information. Why make yourself work twice as hard when you’ve got ministry to do? 

More than that, when people know that the information on the church app is the latest information, they will be more likely to use it regularly.

8. Your church app frees up website real estate

Your church website is meant for first-time visitors. 

Your app is meant for member engagement. 

When your members start using your app, they no longer need your website. This means that you can optimize your website specifically for visitors. 

Your app will do all the work of equipping your members to engage. Then, you’ll be able to focus your website on acquiring new visitors. Getting new visitors is one great way of increasing engagement at your church.

Over to you

Every church suffers stagnant engagement at some point. 

The difference between the churches that die and the churches that grow is whether they do something about it.

In the 21st century, the thing to do is to get a church app and invest in making it the digital hub of your church community.

Refer to it constantly.

Make sure people are taking advantage of the feature-rich environment on the app.

And most importantly, make sure you get the best in class church app, Tithe.ly Apps.