With lockdowns in place all over, connecting with people can be a little bit challenging. We need to keep in touch with our family, friends, and especially our fellow church leaders and members. Luckily, we can now do this digitally by text, Facebook, or sending out emails to your congregation. We could encounter inconveniences as the hassle of sending newsletters or emails to many people. It is hard to select people’s email addresses one by one manually. But don’t worry, we are here to help. Here are a few recommended CHMS (Church Managing Softwares) and tools that you could use to integrate your church database, making sending out emails to your congregation easy.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is curated for businesses, but it can also be used in managing your church too! It is an all-in-one integrated marketing platform. It helps with everything–from social ads, emails, newsletters, landing pages, and more. Mailchimp has many more features like app integration, a directory from the experts for professional help, and 24/7 online support when problems arise. It also integrates with Text in Church, a popular text and email software for churches.
Breeze
Another ChMS, Breeze, is a web-based management software designed to help you quickly look up people and communicate with them. It allows unlimited storage of information and fields for contacts. You can also group them, categorize contracts, and communicate with them via email or chat. Since it’s a managing software, it also offers more features like ‘Contribute,’ an in-app feature that you can give and create statements about your church’s financial status. What’s good about Breeze is that they can import your files if you’re transferring from other software, or you can do it manually on your own.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is an ESP or Email Service Provider and business management software. It helps you create custom emails, newsletters, ads, event invites, and many more. It also keeps track of your contacts and subscribers with an easy way to import data from excel and spreadsheets. Constant contact also helps you market your church to reach more people and provides easy ways to spread your posts from emails to Facebook and Instagram.
Planning Center
As the name implies, Planning Center is basically a planning center or management center for your church. It has many management features, from Master and group calendars, accepting and tracking donations, monitoring the church’s financial status, publishing events, scheduling and managing volunteers, sharing sermons, creating worship plans, checking in with families, and more. Planning Center has a mobile app called Church Center, in which you could customize your landing page for your members, like a very own social hub focused on your church. What’s good about it is when you subscribe to the Planning Center, the mobile app is free of charge.
Realm
“Church doesn’t always happen at church.” Keep in touch with your fellow churchmates, members, staff, and everybody else with the Realm. The realm is basically a mobile app capable of both management and communication services. Think of Realm as a Facebook or a social media app for your church. Share posts, updates, email, text or call everyone, organize events, get RSVP details, keep track of members’ pledge statuses, and more. All of this in one app! Another impressive feature of the Realm is that members could manage their own profiles and set their privacy and contact information based on their own preferences. This is a good way to encourage people to use the app, plus it is a hassle-free way of listing down everyone’s contacts and names.
Conclusion:
When it comes to emailing and staying in contact with your congregation, it could be a bit challenging at times. Sure, there are a lot of ways to do so, like using Facebook and email. Yet, there are better ways to keep everything organized and hassle-free, like using the above apps. Each one of these apps provides a tutorial and a start-up video for easy transitioning. Now, you won’t have to go through the hassle of copy-pasting everyone’s names from spreadsheets to the mailing list! So you can enjoy a stress-free task when it comes to sending out emails to your congregation.
