Flexable and highly intuitive texting solution

We are solving the issue have having manual processes to intake 1st time visitor and salvation information and being able to get that person talking to a Pastor as quick as possible.

Pros

Some of the biggest reasons why we have stuck with PastorsLine is for its ability to use AI to make the conversation with a person on text seem like they are talking to a real person while collecting key information. We use this for our first time visitor process and many others to collect information such as names, emails, phone numbers. It then can take that information and put it into our existing ChMS platform. We can also love the fact that we can pull any group of people that are either are in a group or a process and send an automated text to them. This has streamlined several processes for us including 1st timers, salvation and interest in events.

Cons

The only downside to the software is that you have to use a full phone number to text inside of a shortcode.

Does more!

The interactive nature of texting has increased the personal touch we provide to our congregation and guests. It's the natural way to communicate today and done in a natural, native way.

Pros

PastorsLine does what other texting services don't or can't. The response by text feature is the best. Rather than sending a respondent to a form, PastorsLine can automate a conversation that happens by text to request and capture the info you want. You can also do surveys. You can use your own phone number. You can have unlimited keywords of your choosing. You can receive voicemail. You can use it to call numbers to broadcast voice messages. You can forward your main number to different numbers at any time. (Send the church calls to someone's cell phone.)

Cons

It's not as intuitive or simple to use at first as some other texting services geared towards churches. But it's a recognized weakness on their part and always improving; and once you get over the learning curve it's worth it. And the extra features make it an excellent value too.

Good software / needs tightening up on the UI

Pros

Ability to compose & schedule texts for other pastors / events / etc. Being able to give other users access to groups for management.

Cons

Navigation is confusing / not enough connecting elements to get from one place to another / there are times I have to go into specific text messages and individually mark as read in order to clear the "new messages" out of the inbox.

Fantastic Idea Working Out the Details

With email open rates growing lower and the need for quick church communication in a time of COVID increasing, we tried PastorsLine as a way to combine the best of SMS messaging with a phone number our community knew well.

Pros

Being able to text from our landline is an incredible feature as we bridge the gap between folks who grew up texting and those who learned to do it later in life. In addition, the automation features that allow on-boarding of new community members are fantastic and well thought out.

Cons

The backend interface is a little clunky and not intuitive, but their roadmap includes major updates in this area, so I am excited to see future design changes.

Mixed review

We've enjoyed the benefit of communicating with people in the way that people currently communicate, via text message. Overall, this just wasn't the product for us.

Pros

We mainly used Pastorsline for Guest Follow-up, weekly update texts to student ministry and church-wide polls. It was most useful for the weekly update texts.

Cons

We didn't like that every user received a notification for everything. Pastorline said their purpose for this was to help make sure people didn't "fall through the cracks" but we found it's only real purpose ended up being causing our team to feel spammed, it was a redundant nuisance. We also found it a bit of a beast to get started with, less overall user-friendly than we thought it would be.