Improve Communication at Church Conferences with Text Messaging

speaker at conference and presentation

A church conference can be a great gathering of people, but even though you’ve gathered all those people in one place it’s not always easy to communicate with them. Whether you are organizing a church leadership or youth conference, seminars or workshops, mass text messaging can be a way to ensure connection.

That big crowd will stretch your WiFi, and not everyone has web-enabled devices. So email and social media will be hit and miss. Plus text messaging has much better open and click thru rates.

You’re more likely to connect with people on the go by using text messaging.

Here’s how to make texting work for your church conference:

Promotion & Registration

First, you should create a general list of people interested in your event and use it to promote conference registration and send updates before the event. This can be a good way to stay top of mind and use those superior open and click thru rates to get people to your event.

Timely Updates

Getting timely updates to your wandering crowd of event attendees can be a challenge. If you’ve got lunch recommendations, parking tips, workshop changes or other timely and helpful updates to send, quick text messages can be more effective and efficient than laborious platform announcements that everybody tunes out anyway.

Presentation Distribution

Speakers often have detailed presentations or outlines up on the screen they’re more than willing to share with the audience. Sharing presentation links via text message can be a great way to deliver exactly what people are looking for. Audience members could simply text a keyword like PRESENTER5 to an easy-to-remember short code like 72345 and get back an automatic text with link to the presentation directly on their phones.

Volunteer Coordination

Sending texts can also be a way to stay in recruit volunteers and stay in touch during the event. Send them quick reminders of how to serve attendees or helpful updates to keep your event running smoothly. Texting is especially useful if registration tables get swamped and you need to call in reinforcements.

Childcare Check-in and Parent Notification

If your event has childcare, you can use texting as a quick way to reach parents and keep them informed. No need for pagers or special equipment. You can even use text messaging to check in a child and keep an online spreadsheet of attendance.

Prayer Prompts

Help reinforce the topic of your conference with relevant prayer prompts or a prayer guide sent via text.

Attendee Surveys

When your event is over and people are heading home, it’s a good time to collect some feedback. They’ve probably been ignoring their inbox while traveling, so email is likely to be lost. Conference leaders can send a mass text with a survey link to get immediate feedback from attendees. Or, set up a quick poll by text to gather ratings after each presenter.

Make the most of your next church conference by using text messaging to truly connect.

Interested in learning more about text messaging for church conferences? Call TextMarks at 800-696-1393 or email tmsales@textmarks.com. 

Kevin D. Hendricks

Kevin D. Hendricks is an avid reader, a former yo-yo man and a freelance writer living in St. Paul, Minn.

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