Features | PastorsLine

Here are the main ways our text messaging system helps your ministry
to achieve its mission.

Capture

Collect information from members or visitors who express an interest in your church or ministry directly from their phones.

No need for your audience to be in front of a computer to connect with you.
Quickly build a database of contacts that you can engage with.
Build deeper relationships with them, both now and in the future.
Send messages with a 97% open rate.

Mobile Keywords

Keywords allow your audience to quickly communicate their interest to you. Just have people text to your unique number, e.g. (987)-654-3210, with a keyword that you designate. Use different keywords, to identify people responding to different campaigns and offers. No need to get creative as you can create unlimited keywords.

Automatically Group People

You might ask people to text the phrase “NEXT”
in order to opt-in to text updates or you could offer people a number of options.

For example, people who want to be in a specific small
group could text “NEXT1”, while people who want to be in a second small group could text “NEXT2”. Our software can manage those responses and create lists of people who are interested in each group.

You can display this keyword on a screen at your church service or conference, placed on printed material or shared verbally. You don't need to be there in person to build your database of cell numbers.

Gathering more detailed information

If you want to capture information beyond cell numbers, you can have an automated response to your mobile keyword that asks the recipient for additional information, like their name or email address. This way, you can build a more robust database with complete information.

Online Forms

Online forms can collect more detailed contact information, household data and even interests.

For example, you can have a list of your church’s active ministries and ask people to check the ones they are interested in. A school could have a list of volunteer opportunities, for parents to check off the ones they would like to participate in.

2 ways to share your forms

Mobile Phones
Online forms on your website

Online forms are designed to collect even more information from your audience. The forms are mobile-friendly, so they are easy to use on a phone.

Import Information

You can also integrate information from your ministry’s existing databases into your PastorsLine account. Just create a spreadsheet with the information from your existing database and import it into your PastorsLine account. This way, you can use all the contact information that you have already collected, to get started with text digital strategy right away.

Explore other features that help you capture data

Multiusers

Multicampus

texts

PastorsLine Voice Forwarding and Broadcasting

Calls and Voice Broadcasts

Analytics: Logs and Reporting

Automation

Security

Critical Alerts

Texting (2-way)

Keywords

Communication

Text messaging makes it easy to communicate with your audience, even though they are on the go. It puts your message at their fingertips, by using their phone as a communication channel. Text messages have a 97% open rate, so it is nearly certain that everyone on your list will see your message. This is far better than social media or email alone.

Mass Text Messages

With PastorsLine, you can send text messages to many people at one time. You can’t do this with your normal phone service. Group texts are possible, but if you want to tell 500 people that your weekend service has been canceled due to weather, this is not going to be practical with just a group message. You need a complete system to keep track of your contact list and to send out your message. With our system, your contacts can also opt-out from receiving messages if they change church membership, due to school enrollment or just loss of interest in that specific communication.

In addition, you can create sub-lists of contacts with specific interests. You can let everyone participating in one of your ministry's small groups know about an upcoming event via text. If you have a school, you can set up a list of people whose children are high school juniors or seniors and use a text message to invite them to an evening meeting, discussing the college admissions process.

Voice Messages

You can also set up an automated voice message. Just record the message and the system will play it for all the contacts you request. It will automatically call your contacts and either play for a live person or deposit the message on that person’s voice mail.

This is a good way to reach everyone in your congregation with a phone, whether or not they have a text service. Older people may not use text messaging and will want to hear a recording or voice mail about updates.

Explore other features that helps you communicate effectively

Polls

Contests

Multicampus

Contacts

Smart Syncing

PL Sandbox (LAA)

Automation

Automated, Personalized Birthday Wishes

texts

Groups

Engage

With PastorsLine, your audience can respond to you, providing valuable feedback and input. Using text messaging, you can engage with your audience in a back and forth dialogue, to find out how they are responding to your messages. When you send a text, your subscriber can reply back, and you will receive it in your inbox. In addition, you will have a rich array of features at your disposal, to collect information from your subscribers.

Polls and Surveys

If you have more options than “yes” or “no,” you can use the polling feature. This allows you to create questions with up to 10 possible responses.

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For example, if you have three possible themes for your next sermon series, you can ask your contacts which one they prefer. You can assign keywords to each series topic and ask your audience to text in the keyword for the topic they prefer. A musician could ask their audience what songs they would like to hear in the upcoming concert and provide a list of ten different song options.

Contests: Shuffle Responder

This is a fun way to interact and engage with your users. You ask your audience to text you a specific keyword. You then program a number of responses that people receive in a random fashion. When people text you, the system automatically collects their information.

You could use this feature to create a contest. People text in the keyword and the system chooses the winner of a free gift. This is a great evangelistic tool. Many churches have contests at ministry picnics or social events, with a lot of visitors in attendance. They offer a chance at a gift, in exchange for contact information.

The shuffle responder makes this easy to execute. People use their phones to enter and the system chooses the winner. Best of all, the contact information for each person is automatically collected by PastorsLine.

Manage
account
settings

Control
notifications

Set up
your team

Multiuser, Multicampus, and Multinumbers

You can now invite your entire team to use PastorsLine.

Our multiuser option gives you lots of choices, including the ‘role-based user’ profile: users see only the groups which they have been assigned and perform only those actions for which they have been given permission.

You can…
Share one, single telephone number among several team members who are working with the same groups, on the same event/project, etc. … Everyone sees everything for the full picture.

Give each team member his or her own, unique telephone number so that each person sees only the messages that are connected to him or her ... Saves time sifting through unneeded messages and makes sure texts don’t fall through the cracks.

Changes can be made at any time by the admin: number of monthly messaging credits, permissions, groups which can be accessed, etc. … Means that your setup flows with and adapts to your church’s needs, not the needs of the platform.

See how this works!