1. Start Here Please begin by scanning the QR code…
or, search Holy Word Lutheran on your app store.

2. How One Church Went Mobile
I want to start by saying I am not an expert at developing church apps, or any kind of technology or communication expert, but over the last year I’ve been down the path of researching church mobile apps, and comparing the many services and providers. After recommending a provider to our Church Council and getting approval I went through the process of using their platform to make our app, which mostly consisted of customizing the UI, identifying and feeding content into the mobile platform. Possibly most importantly I was part of a comprehensive communication process to introduce our members to the app and how we would be using it as a tool in our mission at Holy Word. Our example is not a perfect one, but, hindsight is 20/20. If you are considering making this journey at your church, I’m here today in the hopes that our hindsight can be your foresight.

3. Where it all started
For the last few years Holy Word has been much more organized in its approach to stewardship. One reason for this was that we knew we were going to see the transfer out of some members who had always been strong supporters of our mission and these losses where going to force painful choices on us. To the credit of our leaders they approached the challenge thoughtfully and early, and developed a plan that included a big picture focus on developing our members understanding of what stewardship is and how it plays an integral roll in growing as a disciple of Christ. An early step in this mission was the creation of a standing stewardship committee.
So your wondering why am I talking about the recent history of stewardship at Holy Word. I want to give you the context that led us to choose the tool we did an how that context fed into our roll out. 3

4. Where it all started
When we started down this road, for two and a half years there had been an ongoing conversation at Holy Word surrounding some basic biblical truths; ideas like that stewardship is an essential component of discipleship, and that when God asks for your treasure, its because He wants your heart. What I am describing is mature conversation that had at its core the faith that financial challenges that we faced were not the problem, they were a symptom, they were even an opportunity, and that our real challenge was leading our members on a path to more mature discipleship that included purposefully dedicating hearts, time, treasure and talents to God. 4

5. A Daunting Challenge
As the stewardship committee met regularly the conversation also turned to practical challenges of stewardship, like the fact that millennials are attending church less, and that surveys show that church attendance is dropping across the board. How do you even start growing a disciple that isn’t there? Do you them, or hope they will answer a phone call? Do you train your elders on how to reach out to them and expect them to make regular visits? Maybe just ask the pastor to drop all of his other priorities and visit any member that misses a couple services himself. These aren’t easy questions. 5

6. Going for a Quick Win
We also made some simple practical observations like, that many younger members rarely write checks, and that a lot of people don’t even carry cash anymore. When a committee is facing a daunting task, sometimes it is best to shoot for a quick win to build morale and some momentum. So that’s what we aimed for. 6

7. Text to Give
Our quick win was going to be giving the congregation the ability to use text messages from their phone to give offerings to Holy Word. We thought it would be something that most people would be comfortable with since it had been used widely by groups like the Red Cross. Another advantage is something that I’ve learned from my personal experience. There are some things I will walk out the door with and some things I won’t. I can’t tell you the number of times I forget to bring a my bible to bible study, or to bring a pen, but I always have my phone. Knowing this was probably true for most of our members we decided to use it to our advantage. 7

8. Choosing a Service
From this point on I’ll be talking a lot about the company we chose to work with. If I wasn’t happy with my experience with them I don’t think I would have volunteered to stand up here today, but, that said, this is not intended to be commercial for the service we went with. I’ll be talking about them because they are the only service I have experience with. It is completely possible there is a better service out there for your church. I can tell you from my experience that it is definitely worth taking some time to research. These are just a few of the services I came across. They come in every level of functionality, support, and of course, price. 8

9. Choosing a Service
At the end of the day, making the decision on who and what to go with was pretty daunting. It was really an exercise in comparing apples to oranges…to steak. OK, honestly it really was lunch time when I made this slide, but my point is, I didn’t feel like there was a great way for me to comprehensively compare all the potential providers. With their different arrays of services, reputations, costs, and other considerations like ease of implementation and continuing development and support. As I went further down the rabbit hole with all this stuff, it honestly occurred to me at the time that there is probably a pretty good market out there for a consultant willing to deal with guiding a church through all the options. But the upshot is, you’ve got options. 9

10. Choosing a Paradigm
One thing did become clear very quickly. We were thinking way too small. A smart phone is an amazing tool. I’m sure you don’t need to hear that from me. Unless you are like my 7 year old who has grown up to expect that a phone can literally do anything, you’ve probably had that moment where you just stop for a minute and say, I can’t believe I just used my phone for that. Right off the bat as I researched I found out that some really smart people have been working for years to taking advantage of all the things our phones can do to help churches with the challenges that they face. I have to tell you, after a while, I was honestly a little embarrassed for myself, and for my church. I don’t think twice about ordering lunch or dinner on my phone. When I need to protect my sanity I use it to put cartoons on t.v. for my kids. My phone literally tells me what I have to do each day, where to go, and how to get there, but we never really put much thought into how it could be used as a tool for church engagement! 10

11. And The Winner is…
Ultimately we went with a full featured service provided by Pushpay. They were not the cheapest, but they offered us the ability to give offerings via our website, an onSite kiosk, by text, and by a customized, honest to goodness, Holy Word Mobile app. At the end of the day there were a few deciding factors in their favor. First, they guaranteed a 5% increase in our offerings or they refund us every bit of what we paid them. A 5% increase in offerings at Holy Word is many times the cost of their service, so the way I saw it, pretty much the only thing left at risk is my time. Another factor, is that they were an established company. That was something that, again, pointed to them being low risk. The final factor was the clincher. 11

12. The One and Only
It was the one and only Pastor Ski that put them over the top. I found out that Pushpay was being used successfully right up the road at Christ the Rock and so I gave him a call to get his impression. While they were only using them as a mobile giving solution and not for the mobile app, their experience with Pushpay was positive. That was enough for me to recommend we go forward with them. 12

13. Step 1
Yep, that’s the right slide, we’re back here at Text to Give again.
It turns out the first step of implementation that pushpay suggests is introducing the congregation to the ability to use text to give.
Remember that guarantee that pushpay gave us? Well it turns out that makes them highly motivated to see that we succeed. They have learned that there are some key things that are part of a successful implementation. They told us their experience is that it is really important to start building momentum and excitement right way. So the text to give functionality rolls out while work is in progress on getting the app up and running and while we work on getting the giving functionality set up on our Holy Word website. Ease of implementation was one of the deciding factors on using this platform. A rocky start could really risk our members not buying into the app.
We were given some implementation tools to help get us started. We are going to take a look a quick video that is an example of some of their implementation support.
Pretty neat right? So on the day we rolled out the text to give functionality our pastor very briefly mentioned that we would be introducing it that day, and that we’d be showing a short video clip on how it worked. Then, when it was time for the offering, as the ushers came forward, we played the clip. It was defiantly a big enough change from the routine that it caught peoples attention, but at 37 seconds, and no narration, it wasn’t too disruptive either. I thought it worked well to build some recognition that a new tool was coming. So that was step 1. 13

14. Step 𝑥+𝑎 𝑛 = 𝑘=0 𝑛 𝑛 𝑘 𝑥 𝑘 𝑎 𝑛−𝑘
So remember when I said one of the features Pushpay offered was a custom, honest to goodness, Holy Word app? It was TRUE! You know what makes a custom church app custom? YOU!
The thing that makes an app YOUR app is your content! This is definitely something to think about before you go down this road. If you don’t have online content to push out via your app, you really won’t have much of an app. The good news is that all the content that makes a engaging app is the same stuff that gives your church a good online presence outside the app. Every church should have at least some of this stuff already. 14

15. Engage with Content
All of these online platforms were pre-existing sources of content for the Holy Word app. Sermon audio on SoundCloud, sermon videos on YouTube, our events via facebook, church directory and calendar via CCB. Some content, like a pastor’s blog and twitter, we are still working out how to best use strategically within the app. Its not a question of how to get it in the app, but how best to present and update it to make a great first impression and then use it to continue to drive engagement.
So I want to stop there for a second so we can take a look at the platform that the app is built in. I don’t write code or anything like that. When people have asked me what kind of tech experience it took to build this or the level of difficulty, I’ve compared it to tweaking all the back end settings of a google account. It’s not anything technically difficult, but there are going to be some things that are completely unfamiliar to you at first. Its not something that would be a lot of fun to tweak extensively once its live and in a lot of peoples hands, but given some time and freedom to do some trial and error it was not too difficult to set up. I only got stuck a couple times and in each case I put in a ticket with pushpay and they ed me a solution with in 24 hours. 15

16. …and More Content
So there is some content that comes standard in the app, the top thee widgets, find us, the bible, and Give, all come preloaded from pushpay. With find us I just had to enter the addresses for our two sites and it shows each of our locations on a map and will give you a rout from your current location to the campus if you tap it. That is particularly handy when we are at a community event and can use different incentives to have visitors download our app at the event. They walk away with a map right to our door right in their pocket. 16

17. …and More Content
So everyone has heard of bible gateway or other online bibles so its no surprise that there is a bible on our app. That said, the content and functionality in this bible widget is really pretty mindblowing. First of all just navigating to a specific passages is really quick and easy. I’m going to let you pastors in on a secret we lay people have. Every time you ask your members to turn to a verse in bible study, it kicks off a wave of anxiety among a lot of your members as they think,
“please don’t let me be the last one to get there, everyone will know I’m not reading my bible everyday!” Getting to any passage in the app is three touches away.
This bible widget is actually something you have to see, so lets jump to that for a minute. Habakkuk 2:2
There are 12 English translations of the bible alone not counting commentary. There are no less than 28 non-English translations including everything from Greek and Hebrew to Western Apache. There are sign language videos, and there is a full audio bible all in the app. There is even a map that gives all the locations mentioned in the bible. Click on a location and it will show all the verses that reference it. There are media files, like art and illustrations that are perfect for use in a bible study. There is the ability to do a side by side direct textual comparison of different translations. 17

18. …and Services
Two words, push notifications. Ever wish you could just make a bell go off or just tap all your members mid-afternoon before a Wednesday night lent service to remind them to come to church tonight? We can pretty much do exactly that. Push notification are those messages from your apps that make you phone ding or vibrate at you and say things like, share Candy Crush with a friend and get 10,000 points! Only our notifications say things like come to Holy Word at 7:00 tonight for a message from Pastor Dan on God’s gift of grace and peace. But it gets better, when you tap on that notification it will open up the app and send you to any content we select, for example we’ve directed members to a short video teaser on the sermon theme when we pushed out a reminder of an upcoming service. We even have the ability to set the notifications to be sent a specific times, and even to only go to phones in certain places. For example I could theoretically send a push notification only to members that are in North Houston right now saying we are meeting in the lobby for dinner at 7:00. We’ve talked about using that for targeting messages at members at events like neighborhood clean ups or other community events. 18

19. …and More Services
The baked in giving functionality in the app is pretty nice. It enables giving by card, on a one time or reoccurring basis. Different funds can be set up in a drop down menu, such as Weekly Offering, Teen Mission Trip, for members to choose from. The first time someone gives, they are prompted to set up an account to make giving easier going forward. Account set up is simple as well, to the point that you can just point your phone’s camera at your credit card to add it to your account.
This mobile giving functionality is a game changer. It allows our members to support their church’s mission, even if they are not there, on vacation, where ever they are. And remember the context under which Holy Word rolled all this out. We didn’t just say hey, look, here is a fancy new way to give us your money. We were able to introduce this tool in a spiritually mature context, as part of a larger, ongoing conversation on our journey to grow as disciples, together, and the roll stewardship plays in that. 19

20. Roll Out
Context is everything when it comes to roll out because at the end of the day this is also technically a roll out.
Speaking of train wrecks there are some things not to do when introducing your app to your congregation. Like let the guy that put the app together volunteer to take over the projector controls in the sound booth in back of the sanctuary and demo the app on a mac when he is a pc guy on a wonky screen sharing set up he’s never used…and then because we are a multi site church, let him run off to do it all over again at the other site. Yeah, don’t do that.
In Christ there is forgiveness, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t learn from our mistakes. Take time to think through the best way to show the power and ease of use of your app to all your members. Technology is intimidating enough to some people, so don’t set yourself up to make it look harder than it is with technical glitches on the big day. A trial run using all the systems you will present with is a great idea. 20

21. Context is Everything
Make every effort to communicate that an app is a tool to help work towards the mission they are already pursuing. Our roll out was not a total train wreck because my presentation was not done in a vacuum. We had been communicating over multiple channels for sometime what the purpose, and features of the app were, and six months later, we still are. We used everything from our e-Newsletter to after service slides, bulletin announcements, and every member visits In fact I just sent off my latest article on the app to the editor of This Holy Word on Tuesday before heading down here. 21

22. Data
Last but not least our app gives us some data. Not this Data. 22

23. Data
Lets take a quick look. 23

24. Questions? 24