A church is more than the sum of its parts. While to an outsider the
visible manifestation of a church may be the coming together of pastor
and members at a place of worship, churches involve themselves in a far
wider range of activities. House meetings and prayer groups, voluntary
work and fundraising events, recruiting new members and supporting
existing ones; all go on throughout the week. Such activities make the
church a vibrant community of individuals bound together by their faith,
rather than a building where people come to carry out religious
observances.
Effective
communication is vital to ensure that members are kept informed of
church news, events and activities and feel included within its faith
community. Twenty or thirty years ago, members would have been informed
of church activities via a printed magazine and a church notice board.
Churches today have a membership which is much less tied geographically
than in the past. Even established churches will find that their
congregation includes a significant number of members from outside the
parish, while evangelical churches often draw their members from a very
wide area. In such circumstances, the word of mouth cannot be relied on
as an effective means of communication with church members.
It may
sound like a clash of the old and the new, but increasingly churches
are turning to bulk SMS Nigeria, also known as text messaging, as a means of
communicating with their members. Bulk SMS Nigeria allows short messages of up to 140
characters to be sent between compatible mobile phones and has grown
rapidly to become an incredibly popular means of personal communication;
globally 193,000 bulk SMS messages per second were sent in 2010.
Underpinning the growth of bulk SMS Nigeria has been the development by bulk SMS Nigeria system
providers which allow bulk SMS Nigeria messages to be sent from email or web
applications, or for third parties to develop custom solutions using the
provider's bulk SMS Nigeria API.
The bulk SMS Nigeria systems open up a wealth of
possibilities for churches to manage their communications, segmenting
their membership lists so that individuals receive only the information
which is relevant to their involvement with the church. Even for a large
church, a web or email based communication system can be managed by a
church administrator or member without any specialist technical
knowledge.
One common concern is that members who don't use mobile
phones will be left out if bulk SMS Nigeria communication is introduced. However,
there are Voice SMS systems which allow a text message sent to a
landline to be converted into a spoken message which is played to the
recipient. This ensures that older or less technologically advanced
church members need not be disenfranchised by a move to bulk SMS Nigeria messaging.
Some
popular uses to which churches have put bulk SMS Nigeria communications include
programme and activity reminders, event rescheduling or cancellation and
community announcements.
Bulk SMS Nigeria is a remarkably cost effective way
for a church to communicate with its members and provides an immediacy
that is lacking in email or postal communications. By including Voice
SMS as an option, bulk SMS Nigeria really can reach the entire church community and
promote a feeling
