Texting Service
One of the best ways that I have found to communicate with our students is by sending out text messages. The hassle has become sending all these text messages from my phone. So, when I found out that there were services that could help me send out text messages I was very interested. There are many different text services that are out there that you can choose from such as: SimplyTxt, and TxtSignal.com, textmarks.com and a few others. These are all great services, but my problem is that we’re on a tight budget right now and even the small account is too much for us right now. Last month I ran across a blog that showed how we could send out free text messages to our students.
So, today I started sending text messages to our students through my google mail account. It is working great for our budget, our group, our parents, and leaders (right now a group of around 40 people). If you are like me and on a tight budget check out this blog post, and give it a try.
Posted on February 17, 2009, in Uncategorized and tagged Announcements, Communication, Student Ministry, Student Pastor, Text Messaging, Youth Ministry, Youth Pastor. Bookmark the permalink. 3 Comments.
Thanks Adam. I am going to try this. I think it’s much better than paying for it (which I do now). Are all your students getting these text messages? I tried to send one to myself, but I couldnt find the right extension, but I’ll keep trying. Thanks again. By the way, have you been on http://www.ministryquestions.com? It’s a great resource for youth pastors.
This method works fine they always get the messages, but there is one caveat. When they reply, the reply goes to the email account rather than your phone. It would be great if someone knew a way to spoof the from address as from your own phone.
Just a heads up
And of course you have to remember to keep it under 140 characters because that’s all sms allows. (I use the twitter box and its counter to keep me under my limit)
@Brandon all our students have been getting the text messages so far. it did take a while to figure out how to get the right extension, but it all fell in place once I got a few of our students numbers right.
The extensions that worked for us here:
verizon – vtext.com
att (cingular) – txt.att.net
@Jeremy – I agree the only down side is that all the reply’s go back to my email. I use this mostly for mass messaging announcements. If I’m going to send a personal text to a student I just do it the old fashioned way (from the phone).