Keywords
Communicate faster
Keywords allow your audience to quickly communicate their interests to you.
Option 1: Invite people to text your unique, local, 10-digit long code number, e.g. (987)-654-3210, with a keyword that you designate. No need to get creative as you can choose from virtually unlimited keywords.
Option 2 (coming soon in July/August): Ask people to text to the PastorsLine dedicated, 5-digit, short code number, e.g. “Text WELCOME to 77411”. Communication is quicker, so suits larger audiences.
In either case, you can use different keywords to identify people responding to different campaigns and offers.
"For only a little more than what we were currently paying for SMS service, we received a ton of other features like voice messaging, campaigns, and unlimited keywords [from PastorsLine]."
Benjamin Curfman
Family Pastor, Barberville Baptist Church
What are keywords?
Keywords are powerful because they can trigger any campaign or automation within PastorsLine. Even better, your users can use these keywords independently from their mobile phones, whether you are there or not.
PastorsLine offers two types of keywords: long code keywords and short code keywords. Read more about them here.
Trigger the process,
so you don’t have to.
Capture Data
Collect information from members or visitors who express an interest in your church or ministry directly from their phones. You can use a series of automated texts (autoresponder) or give a link to an online form.
Our Smart Syncing feature minimizes duplicates in your external apps.
Click to learn more about Smart Syncing.
Categorize Contacts
By setting up different keywords for the same campaign, you can group responders. For example, for menu-planning purposes, the keywords “AllFood”, “Veggie”, “Vegan”, “GlutenFree”, “NonDairy”, “AnotherNeed” will group young people eating during your VBS event.
Disseminate Information
You can send one-time announcements about
upcoming events. You can also send information over a period of time such as ‘homework’ links for a Bible study series.
Trigger Campaigns and Automations
PastorsLine has many keyword-triggered features which help keep your contacts engaged. Campaigns such as polls to provide feedback on how you’re doing and what people need for the future. Automations such as live questions during an evangelical event.
Ministry has always been about building relationships. Jesus made it his business to go where the people were. Today, the people are on their phones...texting.
Why it's needed?
90%
read within 3 min. of receipt
90-second
avg. response rate
Keywords are the simplest way to connect with people via their most accessible point of contact...their phone numbers.
Keywords are scalable: 10s to 100s to 1000s of people can keyword-in simultaneously.
And, you don’t have to wrack your brain thinking of creative keywords. Since you are using a local number, you have a ‘dictionary-full amount’ of keywords on offer (save the roughly 20 set aside for admin purposes).
Plus, since you can use multiple keywords, you can take into account spelling errors. For example, “PRAY” and “PREY” for prayer requests.
How it Works ?
More features
You get this feature and so much more...
(All features are included.)
direct, automated data capture via phone from those interested
mobile keywords to opt in to different church campaigns
automatically create and manage groups
gather information via online forms
polls and surveys
personalized, bulk text messaging
personalized birthday wishes
contests
create and schedule a series of automated messages
2-way integrations with CCB and Planning Center (MailChimp is next)
Dozens of churches are already using
PastorsLine and seeing success.
The PastorsLine platform is a church-driven, bulk texting platform developed and managed by church ‘insiders’. We know churches intimately. We’ve attended them, been part of their management teams and worked with them for many years. Our goal is to serve you by helping you spread the Good News of Jesus Christ. We’ve positioned ourselves to be your in-house, IT team for solutions to your communication issues. In addition to everything our platform can do, our partners love our responsiveness to their needs and fast tech support.
It’s honestly the best feature that we have utilized. Being able to give one phone number for voice and text simplified our process.
J.W. Dunbar
Pastor Gateway Church, Ashland, KY
At first, the landline feature seemed like it would overload the church secretary since everyone would have the church phone number saved in their phones. This has not happened! People are simply interacting with our events better than ever before! We love the landline feature.
Sterling Willborn
Associate Pastor, Journey Church
Thus far it’s worked perfectly!! When we wanna send out a text message we use the church office #.
When somebody calls this #, it just takes them to our office phone where a front desk agent can answer. This is perfect! Far better than our individual cell phones ringing when somebody calls our PastorsLine number. It’s only been a week but it’s working great!
Josiah Elias
Young Adults Pastor, Faith Chapel
I belong to a Church Communications group on Facebook, and you were highly recommended. We signed up with you over others because we are a multi-generational church and you have an ability to reach people on landlines.
Daniel Chambers
...the guest connection card...We had a great response -- people whose names and contact info we might not have captured otherwise. Our autoresponder directs them to our Welcome Center...where we have a gift...with their name on it.
Kristen Waddle
Church Communications
PastorsLine has been a fantastic tool which has enhanced communication with out church family. As with any tool, the secret is in learning how to use it effectively. I have been most excited when I see my church members telling their very own unchurched friends to text “PRAY” to our pastorsline number and have them join our prayer sessions.
Paolo Esposito
Pastors, RGF Church
I honestly never realized how many people must have been trying to text our landline all along! We never advertised our landline as a number you could text, but we have gotten multiple members of our congregation and even guests from some of our events to send us texts saying, ‘Thank you for this and that’, and it has been really great to see!
Heather Bredeman
Joy Christian, Center,
St. Cloud, MN
For us [a PastorsLine text-enabled church landline] has been huge for people to be able to text the number they already knew for our church. It means they don’t have to remember two different numbers when they are looking to try and get in touch with us. Most people don’t even realize its mostly an automated process.
Tyler Boles
Connections Pastor, The Exchange
By using the same phone number for texting and calling you get people to remember your phone number. When it comes the time that are ready to reach out to us they know the phone number.
Abraham Schwartz
“Our land line [SMS-enabled by PastorsLine] is more familiar to our congregation. When we texted from the other number, some would inquire about who was sending the text as the number was unfamiliar, and we did not use it frequently, so by the time we sent another text, some had forgotten the number.”
Myrna and Peter Rohdin
New Life Fellowship Church, Elmhurst, NY
The personal and almost immediate assistance at [PastorsLine] is so great! We feel valued and important! We love that it is church-based!!! … Jason and the team at [PastorsLine] are always ready to help, make things better, and they also welcome feedback.
Richie Halversen
Pastor @ College Drive Church
Baptism Worship Service Reminders - bulk texting—we were blown away by the number of people who showed up.
Cara Saliby
Director of Admin
Sending and receiving texts from our landline number is the #1 feature that ensures visitors and members can engage with us on the most relevant means of communication there is right now. Having one number to advertise, simplifies all graphics, ads, announcements, etc. for us, as well as for those we're trying to reach. I use PastorsLine EVERY DAY. It's changing the way we engage with our members - it's both easier and more effective.
Tara Freeman
We hired [PastorsLine] to assist us in a new “Small Group” initiative we were launching at our church. The tools they provided us with helped us monitor and take action on hundreds of responses. Our workflow was cut in half and our ability to track, monitor and follow through with the data gathered more than doubled.
Chris Elliott
Associate Pastor, New Believers
PastorsLine has totally changed not only my workflow, but it's taken our "personal" factor up 10x! Just with our welcome process, we have gone from a 40% READ rate to a 40% CONVERSATION rate. That's just crazy!
So thanks 🙂
Tommy Carreras
Group Director
[PastorsLine is] a huge answer to something we’ve been looking for. I was able to send a template with a field merge by scheduling it...
Dr. Matthew Robinson
Pastor
When we finished our evangelistic event in Houston, 70% of those who were baptized, communicated with me through PastorsLine...it had a big influence.
Wyatt Allen
Evangelist, End Time Hope
The text message bible study invites are working great. We saw a huge increase from 5-6 to 10-12 and the numbers stayed consistent.
