EZ Texting Messaging for Churches
December 15, 2018

EZ Texting Messaging for Churches

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with EZ Texting

We're using EZ Texting to send out weekly texts to our church's congregation. We like sending texts as it's the most effective and modern way to communicate with young (and old!) people. The only department in our church using it is communications and marketing, and it's helped us keep in touch with our people throughout the week. Our main use is a weekly devotional text that correlates with a reading plan that we implemented, and the links that we send out allow us to track how effectively we are communicating with our people.

Pros

  • It's simple to use, simple to construct messages, and simple to create groups. All are helpful in sending out regularly scheduled texts!
  • It's easy to add and create keywords for your organization, which is important for making sure your brand is easy to connect with.
  • Managing groups and lists is easy, and you can filter keywords into groups, change groups, merge groups etc. This made things easy for us since we changed keywords a few times.

Cons

  • My biggest complaint is that scheduling messages can be cumbersome if you don't live on the east coast. We're on mountain time, so having to do math to schedule a text is frustrating.
  • It's a little difficult to find the responses and reports that you might want from texts. It took me multiple tries every time to find the report that shows who clicked the link and who didn't. Could be a little more obvious or easier to access.
  • Minor quibble, but sometimes we would paste in text that would contain characters that aren't able to be sent via text. Finding them was a hassle. Is there not a way to have the box remove those automatically?
  • Positive impact: it's helped us communicate easily with our people in an unobtrusive and simple way.
  • Positive impact: it's helped us communicate with people outside of our organization who found out about what we were doing from friends and family.
  • Negative impact: due to the cost, it was only feasible for us to send one message a week to our list size.
We also tried Clearstream.io for a while for our text messaging needs. It's actually quite similar, but it has various strengths and weaknesses over EZ Texting. The price is cheaper, and some reporting is easier, but the interface and messaging have some different issues. Their texting number is also less memorable than EZ Texting.
EZ Texting is great for churches that want to communicate with their people easily. It's simple to get your people connected. Their text number is easy to remember, and creating your own keyword is simple and helpful, as you can usually find some word that's close to what you need. Where it's less suited, in my opinion, is for back and forth communication. The inbox and messaging can get a bit cluttered. It's great that it's capable of that, but perhaps it could be organized a bit better.

Using EZ Texting

1 - I'm the sole user, and I am responsible for managing all communications and graphics for the church. I oversee all outgoing communication, all outgoing graphics, and make sure that everything we output aligns with the church's vision and branding. I also write and publish all texts sent through EZ Texting, as well as create any video links that are sent with the text.
1 - Not much is needed to support EZ Texting, as it's a text messaging system. The only issues we've had to manage in the past are setting up the text to send out, which is done by me, and create the content, which is also done by me. So I'm only having to support myself 😆
  • Communication with our congregation
  • Tracking how many people are clicking links in our texts
  • Managing different lists and different keywords
  • We used EZ Texting for an in-house reading plan that we created, sending texts to help people remember to follow along.
  • Instant sign ups for events. Once we have their phone number, we can follow up with details for the event
  • Inviting the congregation to send in prayer requests
  • Feedback information from guests
Right now, based on budget, it's something we had to put on hold. We're not finished for sure, just waiting for the funds to continue use. I love EZ Texting and what it's done for us, and how it's connected us to our people, but the budget took a marketing hit, and this was an early casualty.

Evaluating EZ Texting and Competitors

Yes - Not so much a product, but we were testing the texting waters by using a custom Google Voice number. That quickly became complicated in sending a mass amount of texts, so we looked into solutions and found out about EZ Texting. And EZ Texting was a wonderful replacement since many of the opt in tasks were done automatically vs manually.
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Third-party Reviews
Product features were the number one factor for our church. We were looking for something to send out a text to a list of 300+ people every week. Google Voice was not going to cut it! So thankfully we researched info online and came across EZ Texting, which made much of the difficulty significantly easier.
Thankfully, I wouldn't change anything except the timeline of when we selected EZ Texting. I only wish we had been using this earlier due to how successful it was for us. Normally when we send out emails, we have opt outs and bounce backs. With the texting opt ins, we NEVER got bounces, and rarely had any opt outs.

EZ Texting Implementation

The most important aspect of implementation was selecting a valuable keyword. When we first started using EZ Texting, we were able to grab a simple, easy word to use to connect people to our texts. That proved invaluable in our marketing and selling people on using the service. If we didn't have a good word, I would imagine it wouldn't have been as successful.
  • Implemented in-house
Not sure - I'm not sure that change management applies to our specific situation.
  • No issues whatsoever

EZ Texting Support

I've never had to contact support, so that deserves a high rating in my book 😬
ProsCons
None
None
I never had to contact support thankfully!

Using EZ Texting

It's very simple to use to send messages immediately, to create keywords, and to add credits. However, it gets difficult in scheduling, as well as finding the reporting info that you're looking for. Sometimes things aren't where you'd assume they would be, and managing group lists can be a bit cumbersome once you add too many.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Creating keywords
  • Managing users
  • Purchasing additional credits
  • Scheduling a text. Not difficult, but the time listed is only in EST, so you have to make sure you're figuring out the time correctly.

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