Feature Updates for August 2017 - Week 34 of 52
New Giving Look & Feel (User Interface) Now Live for All Churches
We are pleased to announce our new giving look and feel is now live for all churches. First released 2-3 weeks ago the new giving user interface is a vast improvement for both usability and simplicity. A great deal of research and designed has been placed into our new donation form. The new donation form is more compact, straightforward and simple. It's designed to allow the donor to focus more on bits of information allowing the entire donation process to be more natural and easy for all ages.
Text Marketing Platform in Beta
You asked and we listened. We are pleased to announce our new text marketing platform is now live in Beta. Churches may now use their text giving phone number for both text giving and text marketing purposes. Using our new text marketing platform churches can setup keyword based auto responders and sign-ups. Churches may now create one or more phone number lists for various purposes such as having groups, event sign-ups, reading plans, general notifications and much more.
Administrators can create lists and import phone numbers directly or setup an keyword based Auto Responder to automatically add a phone number to a list when a keyword is matched. Our advanced new Text Message Scheduler feature allows churches to easily send out text messages to phone number lists. Administrators may send out one-time or recurring text messages to phone number lists. Setup scheduled one-time or recurring text messages with ease directly in the control panel. Send a one-time or recurring message at a certain date/time or based on the user phone number date/time of list sign-up.
There are many different reasons for sending bulk text messages to uses such as event notifications, service time updates, reading plans and much more. For this reason churches have extremely flexibility in creating scheduled messages based either on a specific calendar date/time or the individual phone number sign-up time. Using the individual phone number sign-up time, churches can setup advanced text messages such as reading plans based on the user's sign-up date/time and not a fixed calendar date/time. e.g. 7 days after sign-up, 14 days after sign-up, etc.
Online Giving didn't stop there. Per your request we have taken it a step further and now allow text marketing messages to be optionally sent from a secondary text phone number. That's right you may now (optionally) have your church send out marketing text messages from a secondary phone number. Having a secondary phone number for outbound text marketing messages allows users to opt-out of a text marketing number without opting out of the primary text giving number. When enabled all outbound text marketing (not text giving) are sent on the secondary phone line. The goal is to still have the church promote a single primary text number in media but to safe guard text opt-outs on a secondary number. It's an optional feature that some of our larger churches using a great deal of text marketing will enjoy.
Our Text Marketing Platform will be free to try while in Beta. We expect Beta to continue over the next 1-2 weeks. After 1-2 weeks the feature will no longer be in Beta and will be included with $50 monthly plan accounts. Please feel free to give it a try. Then if needed contact us after Beta to upgrade your monthly plan to keep access to Text marketing. As always Online Giving is here to serve The Church.
Text Marketing User Role Added for Administrators
An update is now live that adds "Text Marketing Administrator" as a privilege option for administrators in the control panel. Administrators may now restrict or allow access to the Text Marketing features in the control panel. Additionally users can be created with access solely to administer Text Marketing in the control panel. Prior to the update access to Text Marketing was granted baed on donor administrative privilege.
Hit Counter & List Sign-ups Added to Text Marketing Auto Responders
An update is now live that adds a simple hit counter and the ability to sign-up numbers to a list to text marketing Auto Responders. In the event an Auto Responder text message keyword is matched for a message the hit counter will be incremented allowing simple tracking of matching inbound messages. Additionally administrators may create new phone number lists and update their Auto Responders to add numbers to the list when the inbound messages matches the Auto Responder keyword(s). Administrators can then review the list at any time to review inbound numbers auto added.
If you have any questions about the updates above please drop us a line at support@onlinegiving.org