Chris Day of SerialYouthPastor.com responded to one of my ideas in 130 Youth Ministry Tips & Ideas ebook about using a Skype-in phone number as an information hotline for parents and students to call. During our discussion I mentioned that I’m also thinking about using Skype as a mass text messaging service for sending quick updates and cancellation notices to my students, but at $0.12 per message, that’s too pricey for me. Chris referred me to TxtSignal.com, which is just what I was looking for!
Txt Signal lets me have multiple groups of cell phone contacts. So, I have one group for Jr. High, one for Sr. High and another for cancellation notices for a weekly event we’re doing this summer. The best part is that I don’t have to manually enter all the kids cell phone numbers and accidentally risk accumulating text charges for those who don’t have text messaging plans. The service provides me a link I can easily post on our youth group’s website or send out via email for people to click and sign themselves up. Plus, they can also easily unsubscribe from the service later if they want, so there’s little maintenance on my part.
The downside to the service is that I can’t personalize the callback number as my own cell number. Messages come from [pickaname]@txtsig.us, which cannot be replied to by recipients.
Service plans start $7/month, but I’m using the $14/month plan with 100 contacts and 60 group messages. That’s 6,000 text messages for $14 as opposed to 116 messages for the same price if I used Skype’s SMS service.
Of course, if you have a smaller group you can follow Matt’s instructions for sending mass text messages for free, but it requires a lot more footwork and I’ve found it isn’t as clean or reliable.
Thanks, Chris, for pointing me to this resource. It’s gonna be a life saver!
[UPDATE: Matt, from TxtSignal, informed me of a promo code they have for ministries or any organization that works toward ministry efforts. The promo code is good for a minimum of 10% off and even slightly more depending on the plan (for example, the $14/month plan becomes $12/month, or, 14% off). When signing up for service, use this promotional code: EH7DH]
[tags]Text Signal, SMS, Skype[/tags]
About me: I am married to my beautiful wife, 
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:18 am
hey tim.
were you going to try and use twitter for an sms announcement service? that would be free wouldn’t it?
i’ve looked into it a bit.
i’m interested hear why you haven’t pursued twitter (if that’s the case)
peaceout
dave
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:37 am
I thought about using Twitter, but wouldn’t that require that everyone has a Twitter account and enables their account to receive text messages? That might be an intimidating amount of configuration for low-tech parents.
Plus, some people like me already use Twitter but have text message updates disabled. If I were to sign up to a text message update service through Twitter, I’d either have to create a new account just for those text updates (is that possible if I’ve already linked my cell number to a different account?) or turn on text updates for all my friends. I don’t want to do either.
Also, I won’t be the only person sending out these text message updates. A volunteer of mine who heads up our on-going event this summer will be sending text updates, too. With TxtSignal.com, we can both have our own logins to send messages and manage users.
We can also manually sign up user’s cell numbers for our updates with TxtSignal, something we can’t do with Twitter. And we can create multiple groups under one account and even separate teams under each group.
So, it seemed to me that the cost of TxtSignal.com is worth the simplicity and easy of use. I really don’t like it that recipients can’t reply, though. That just doesn’t make sense to me.
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:48 am
Tim no problem. I am looking forward to using TxtSignal in our student ministry this upcoming school year. I will have to wait to get it into our new budget to start it though…however I think it is going to be a VERY valuable resource to have. I am glad I could help you out.
May 23rd, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Just make sure that they support all the cell phone services carriers in your area. They don’t currently support Unicell, which accounts for several of my kids. I wrote them asking them to add it. Dunno how easy that is for them. Guess I’ll find out.
May 23rd, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Matt, from TxtSignal, just replied to my email and said they added Unicell support. Woo hoo! That was fast.
May 23rd, 2007 at 12:58 pm
have you used pinger or jott? i’ve heard good things about those. (and i’m pretty sure they’re both free).
May 23rd, 2007 at 1:27 pm
I haven’t actually used Pinger or Jott, but I’ve heard about them. The downside to Pinger is that everyone else needs to be a Pinger user, too, and I would have to say everyone’s name I want to send the voicemail to. With 100 students or so on a list, that doesn’t work too well. Plus, what if I forget someone? Jott is cool, but I’m not sure how well it’s voice-to-text recognition works. Has anyone tried it? Does everyone else have to be Jott users, too?
May 23rd, 2007 at 2:43 pm
some posts on pinger and jott from pastorhacks.net:
http://bobhyatt.typepad.com/pastorhacks/2007/04/pinger.html
http://bobhyatt.typepad.com/pastorhacks/2007/04/questions_about.html
May 23rd, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Matt, from TxtSignal, informed me of a promo code they have for ministries or any organization that works toward ministry efforts. Check my original post for the promo code.
May 23rd, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Hey Tim,
I just started using broadtexter.com — This was designed for bands to promote their concerts and stuff but it works with church activities as well.
May 23rd, 2007 at 4:23 pm
Jason…just checked out broadtexter and it seems pretty cool. Signed myself up and sent a message to my phone. Works pretty quick and simple. So I sent the link to our students and we will see how well it works for us.
May 23rd, 2007 at 4:29 pm
I haven’t heard of broadtexter.com. I’ll have to check it out. Someone planning to post a review on it related to youth ministry?
May 23rd, 2007 at 4:39 pm
Tim I just posted on it on my blog. I’m going to wait a week or so before I make an official judgment on it but honestly it seems pretty sweet. The recipient cannot text you back from the message unless they text straight to your phone. It is pretty quick though. We will see if the students sign up for it and how it works.
May 23rd, 2007 at 9:24 pm
Thanks, Chris. Are you planning to post an “official judgment” next week?
May 24th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
yeah as long as our kids sign up for it.
May 25th, 2007 at 9:31 am
TXTLaunchPad is ideally suited for this as well, especially if you are doing large volumes of messages.
May 30th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
I was looking for this for a while and I found Zemble.com It is amazing and free. You can add all the numbers manually into groups or you can create a community and only send it out to people who register and want to be a part of that community. Check it out.
May 30th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Thanks for the resource, Phil. I’ll have to check it out. Have you written a review about it anywhere from a youth ministry perspective?
May 30th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
no, it is pretty self explanatory on thier website. I was looking for this exact thing for awhile and could only find expensive options… until I came across Zemble. They are really trying to be a “myspace” of cell phones. You will have to check it out to see what I mean, but it has done the job for me. A little work imputing all the numbers, but now I can communicate with staff and students instantly! I love it.
July 10th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Has anyone taken a look at Club Texting for this kind of service? They provide text messaging solutions to many churches.
July 10th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
No, I haven’t seen that one, Josh. Thanks for the heads up on it. I’ll check it out.
November 13th, 2007 at 10:24 pm
Here’s another website that caters to Youth Group text messages: http://www.jabbertext.com.
matt