Voice Messaging

For the members a text will never reach.

Every congregation has members who do not text, do not check email, and would not see a website notice. Often they are the members most worth reaching: older members living alone, members without a smartphone, members for whom the telephone is still the way news arrives.

Voice messaging calls them. You write the message, Congregate converts it to speech and places the calls, and every recipient hears the announcement on the phone they already answer. There is no app to install, no account to log into, and nothing for the member to learn.

Recipients are chosen the same way as everywhere else in Congregate: individual members, a member group, a mailing list, or any combination, assembled from live data at the moment you send.

One person, one evening, versus one message.

The alternative to this is a phone tree, and phone trees fail in predictable ways. Somebody is not home, somebody forgets the next name on the list, and half the congregation hears about a cancellation an hour after they left for the building.

A voice message goes to everyone at once and reaches the people a text never would. For a cancellation on a winter morning, a funeral announcement, or an urgent request for prayer, it is frequently the only channel that reaches the whole congregation in time.

Voice messaging also powers the optional voice reminders for job and volunteer assignments, so a member who does not use email can still be reminded that they are leading singing on Sunday.