EZ Texting Messaging for Churches
December 15, 2018
EZ Texting Messaging for Churches
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.
- 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.
- 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.
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
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
- Implemented in-house
Not sure - I'm not sure that change management applies to our specific situation.
- No issues whatsoever
EZ Texting Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
None | None |
I never had to contact support thankfully!
Using EZ Texting
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
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.