A mobile app can bring a great range of benefits for the church and the community that it serves. A Church App Builder helps you to create a church app that helps the church to extend beyond the Sunday mornings and the four walls to communicate with the community it serves irrespective of the timeline and the geographical location. As the congregation engages with the app more and more, and begin sharing their favourite sermons, blog posts, videos, or any other element of the app, it is not surprising to see that the number of app installs might exceed the number of members in the congregation.
If you are interested in reading this post, chances are you have already weighed in on everything else and are sold on the idea of building the app, and we need not remind you of the various advantages that the church app can bring to you. Most churches realize they need an app, but have trouble figuring out how to start—this is where a reliable Church App Maker can simplify the process significantly.
With Appy Pie's App Builder, you can create an app in minutes. Its drag-and-drop editor allows you to build a church app without coding. It also provides advanced features and customizable templates to enhance your app's appearance.
We have brought together a checklist of top features your church app must have, to help you finally realize your intent to create an app for your church.
Top Features that your Church App Must Have
- Prayer Requests
- Mobile Live Streaming
- Integrating YouVersion
- Integrating The Social Media
- Check-In Application
- Sunday Bulletin Replacement
- Mobile Giving
- Push Notifications
- Daily Devotionals
- Calendar/Events
- Home Groups
- The Bible
- Contact Us
- Public Social Walls
- Church Blog
- Sharing The App
- Polls, Surveys, RSVPs
- . Usage & Engagement Analytics
The prayer request feature is quite an asset to have and lets the people explore the app on their own time. Implementing this feature using a trusted Church App Maker encourages congregation members to submit prayer requests during Sunday services, youth group meetings, volunteer training sessions, or other interactive events. When given the opportunity to engage with the app during these gatherings, members not only become familiar with the app but also share prayers for those in need.
“Mobile makes up more than 25% of YouTube’s global watch time, equating to more than one billion views per day.” If your church isn't streaming services to mobile devices, you're potentially missing out on reaching a significant number of viewers who prefer accessing content via smartphones and tablets. By integrating mobile live streaming using a reliable Church App Builder, you ensure your services are accessible to congregation members wherever they may be.
Millions of people are using YouVersion to read their Bible. Hence, within your mobile app, wherever you mention the Scripture, whether it is the church blog, church life verses, sermon topics, or anywhere else, make sure that you link it to the YouVersion app. Incorporating this feature would allow your congregation members to read the Bible a lot better and deeply.
Whenever we come across something we enjoy, it’s natural to want to share it with friends and family. Providing congregation members with the option to easily share content from your app on their social media accounts is beneficial. Whether they’re reading the Sunday bulletin and tweeting their favorite sections, or sharing upcoming church events and fundraisers, effective social media integration provided by a robust church app builder makes it simple for members to effortlessly share sermons, announcements, and church-related activities with others.
This feature may be exclusively designed for the key members of the church or for everyone. Implementing a check-in feature via a Church App Maker is great way to keep a digital record of the members who were in attendance on a particular day or special event. In case you decide to incorporate this feature only for the key members, then an email system may be set up to reach out to those who have not been attending the more critical events in succession. The “Check-Ins” may even be rewarded by triggering a push notification to all those who have used it and offering them, maybe a “Coffee On The Pastor” or other such rewards.
Replace or bring down the number or size of your Sunday bulletin that you were handing out to all the members of the congregation. You can alternatively offer to notify the members through the app and send out announcements, sermon notes, and event lists through it. A PDF copy may even be sent out to those who ask for it. Using a digital bulletin via your app reduces printed materials, offering instant updates and notifications. A reliable Church App Builder simplifies this transition.
This is an absolute necessity as it has been established time and again that the giving or donations increase manifold when a mobile option is offered. The idea is to time the request for donations in the right way, based on their in-app activities. The members do not have to wait for Sunday to donate and mobile giving offers a safe, secure, and fast method of mobile giving through a professional Church App Maker. This, when combined with a well-designed push notification can go a long way in helping raise funds for a cause, an event, or for the aid of the Church itself. This is a great feature for congregation members who have moved away or are temporarily away but would like to contribute to the church or any other cause.
Push notifications or messages have a 97% read rate, which makes this an absolute must! This feature comes in handy especially when there is a need to send out any kind of an alert. Any change of schedule, a service that was cancelled, an impromptu event, sending out reminders can all prove to be a great opportunity to employ a push notification. To employ it in an effective manner, it is important that you send out only segmented notifications as not every information is relevant to the whole congregation.
Everyone has their troubles in their life and are facing their own sets of challenges. The troubles do not wait till Sunday for some kind of respite. In these situations, a devotional message, or an inspiring quote does wonders. Send out a daily devotional to the congregation and reach out, connect with them on a deeper level. Though, you can do this manually, but in case you are short on time and resources, look for online tools to automate the process using a church app maker. There is no dearth of free services that provide messaging that may be automatically updated in the app every day. Find a service you are comfortable with and set it up to rum for you.
A Best Church App Builder allows easy synchronization of multiple calendars including one for each of the ministries or it might be so that you have just one all-inclusive calendar. In case you already maintain an online calendar, it would be a good idea to find a solution that allows the app calendars to update automatically from the existing online calendars. One important thing to remember in this case is to provide an option to the members to add the church event from the app to their personal calendars. These calendars should not just offer information regarding date and time, but also the location, (preferably GPS coordinates), or a map for navigation.
Once you integrate this kind of a solution, this should not only offer the congregation members a reminder, but also offer the driving directions, and an estimated time of departure to be able to reach in time. There is a good chance that this would increase the number of attendees in these events bringing the community closer and making the church events popular and successful.
Home groups or Bible study groups are an important part of the congregation as they not only help with sharing and receiving knowledge, church app maker includes location features to help members easily find nearby groups.. When you post the addresses of these group venues along with details like photographs, phone numbers, descriptions or anything else you might see fit to add, it becomes easy for the people to find home groups in their vicinity. The GPG function installed on your phone will show a map depicting the relative positioning of all these groups in context of where you are. The users can then click on the one they like to get directions or contact details and get in touch to enquire further.
This is quite obvious, isn’t it? Also, this is very easy to implement. Enabling, or incorporating this feature means offering your congregation access to the Bible at all times. There are a number of online portals that offer the digital version of Bible. All you have to do is pick one and make use of web-view to enable this on the mobile solution that you are building.
Quite similar to what we mentioned earlier about the home groups, you can also create a comprehensive listing of all the key persons in the church and the staff members organised or listed either by ministries, or in an alphabetical order. The list must include details like addresses, photographs, contact numbers, email addresses, and other such details. The mobile app can integrate with the integral features of the mobile or smart phone like GPS mapping. Location, driving directions, emails, calling etc with a mere click. For churches with large campuses, it is important that you have the capability to provide detailed mapping of the campus. The address alone may not suffice, when you are looking for the administrative block on the campus. It is a necessary to specifically identify a particular location on the Church campus.
Each of the ministries can have their individual chat walls where they can get together to discuss, share, post, and interact with relevant material. These public social walls have found different uses with different churches including prayer walls, a place where the congregation can post comments on the events they attended, share pictures, post reminders, express appreciation and encouragement etc. Many a times people have reached out to others by way of these public walls to receive an overwhelming response from the community. In case you incorporate this feature, make user registration compulsory before being able to post anything and incorporate a function to block any user who posts inappropriate comments anywhere.
If your church has a blog that you have been maintaining, then this feature makes a strong case. This feature is quite easy to integrate into your app and can be accomplished via RSS feed. The feeds would then come directly from the website into your app. The biggest advantage of doing this is that when it is a mobile blog the chances of people reading it are a lot higher than its web counterpart. You can employ push notification to let everyone know whenever you post a new piece so that people know that there is something new that they can engage with.
When you offer people an opportunity to share the app, you are banking on them to share their faith, and people will do so with great enthusiasm. You can even add a short, friendly message with the link to introduce others to what you are sharing.
Every establishment, or organization is always looking for ways to improve their working and the experience or services they provide. In doing so, feedback is one of the most important factors. There are a number of free services available online like PollDaddy where you can incorporate polls, surveys, or RSVPs. The biggest advantage of reaching out to the members through the mobile app is that people always carry them. Deploy a push notification asking for immediate or timed feedback.
There is an old saying that has stood the test of time – what gets measured, gets done! Just building an app and maintaining it is not enough. It is important to have measured insights into things that people are engaging with and the in-app activities that are being favoured the most. App analytics allow you to see which sections of your app are the most popular among the members of the congregation, which days of the week are they most active and what kind of time are the members spending on it.
When you have all this information at your disposal, it helps you make adjustments and changes in the app to enhance the overall user experience. You can work on the sections that are not getting enough popularity and either do away with them or make them more interesting so that the members of your congregation get only the best!
Conclusion
Change is the only constant and things that resist change, fade away. The way we eat, shop, learn, and do anything else has changed. We have an app for everything! This is why creating an app for your church is important today! There are certain basic features that your church app needs and this checklist of church app features will help you create one that will resonate with your entire congregation – young and old.
Now that you know what your perfect church app would look like, it's time to head over to Appy Pie’s church app builder and create a church app, now! Still wondering why does your church needs an app? With features like real-time updates, sermon streaming, donation integration, and event scheduling, having a dedicated app can transform how your congregation connects and engages.
