Valley Creek Church Engages Over 80% of Congregation Daily With SMS
Valley Creek Church is a non-denominational church with 2 campuses in Texas: Flower Mound and Denton. Founded in 1992, Valley Creek employs a staff of 40 and has almost 4000+ church family members in weekly attendance.
TextMarks has become part of how we communicate to our community — both to our Valley Creek Church family as well as to our staff.
Need to Engage Church Family
Due to the size of their church and its many different groups and activities, Valley Creek Church was looking for an additional way to communicate and engage with their 4000 church family members. Internally, they needed to communicate with other church staff on issues requiring immediate attention. With church family, they needed a way to not only keep everyone in the loop about the latest news and updates from various ministries, but also increase response and attendance to all the classes and events they offer. Finally, Valley Creek Church wanted to encourage their members to stay focused and engage with daily Scripture.
They had previously reached people by email and social media channels as well as via rotating plasma announcements in their atrium, but they wanted an additional solution that was more immediate and effective.
Relevant and Timely Church SMS Messages
TextMarks has provided a way for Valley Creek Church to get more responses from their church group communications and motivate and engage their members. Initially, they used TextMarks to provide guidance and encouragement by sending short, spiritually uplifting SMS messages to all of the individuals participating in their annual 21-day prayer and fast. Those who texted the keyword VCCFAST to 81411 opted in to Valley Creek Church’s daily text messages offering positive reinforcement and Scripture.
Valley Creek Church Communications Director Chris Pitt said, “We got great feedback on how valuable it was to receive those daily Scripture messages. In fact, some of the participants asked if we could continue to send daily Scripture to them every day, even after the fast was over!”
With the initial success of their Fasting group, Valley Creek was able to easily set up other SMS subscriber list groups, each identified by a keyword, which they used to send text-based news, updates and important reminders to their staff and church family. They created a group just for internal church leadership as well as one for their Student Ministry. Sending relevant, timely text messages pertaining only to their second campus in Denton was also easier by creating a keyword just for that location.
Over 80% of the Congregation Subscribed
Valley Creek Church’s decision to use TextMarks has allowed them to reach and engage more of their church family at the right place, at the right time. Their ability to easily manage keywords and control their budget has helped them communicate more effectively.
- The Church has had continued success using TextMarks to send daily Scripture and uplifting messages to Prayer & Fast participants. Over the course of several years, they have been able to get over 3300 people to subscribe – almost their entire Church family! The most effective means of getting new subscribers has been for the pastor to announce the keyword during weekend services. And each year that they do this, they get even more people signing up for these text messages. “It’s been very well-received,” Pitt said. “We get several hundred more sign-ups every time. Because the quantity of our texts jumps dramatically during special seasons, the flexibility of managing our costs by changing our plans dynamically is a valuable feature.”
- Their Student Ministry is also now better informed of the latest activities and events at the Church. Currently, they have 300 students who are subscribed and more engaged.
With a specific subscriber list for those attending their new campus in Denton, Valley Creek Church has been able to minimize the amount of information being sent to them that wasn’t relevant. As part of their launch communications, they were able to rally members to share news about the campus on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as well as encourage them to invite friends to meetings on the new campus.- And with so much success in their other uses of text messaging, the church is also starting to use a separate text message group to send reminders to members signed up for events and classes the day before each event. “Right now, we have a 20 to 30 percent no-show rate with just email reminders,” said Pitt. “We believe the text messages will help cut that down a lot.”
“TextMarks has become part of how we communicate to our community — both to our Valley Creek Church family as well as to our staff. And it’s definitely part of our administrative functions,” said Pitt.
“I would recommend TextMarks. I do share it as an idea to try. It provides flexibility in setting up keywords, and pricing flexibility too. I like how I can move it up or down, depending on the number of texts we send.”
