The Clearstream Blog

It just so happens that a lot of our customers use Planning Center as their church management software. That's probably because we make it almost laughably easy to send texts to your People Lists in Planning Center.

Mailchimp has slowly become the world's leading email marketing platform, and also has one of the most inspirational startup stories ever. More importantly, since most of our customers use Mailchimp, it made sense to directly integrate with them in a way that helps our customer's communication efforts beyond sending texts.

We wanted to introduce a major new feature in Clearstream: subaccounts. If you have ministries that are large enough to need their own account, or if your church has multiple locations, subaccounts are a great option. You can create separate accounts under your main (we'll call it master) account, but still have one monthly plan with Clearstream. New subaccounts can be created within a few seconds right from your master account.

You can now download the Clearstream Android App in the Google Play store. As with our iOS app, it’s free to download and use if you have a Clearstream account. If you don’t yet have a Clearstream account, but are looking for the best SMS software available (no, really), you can quickly create an account here. Our Android and iOS apps let you manage your organization's SMS communications on the go.

If you use a texting software, you're sending messages from a short code, long code, or both. So, which texting number is best? The answer is conditional, and unique to each church's particular use cases and budget.

Need to push new mobile subscribers from your other apps into your Clearstream account? Now you can with our Zapier integration. Simply choose which apps you want to connect to your Clearstream account in Zapier.

A common challenge many churches face is getting first-time visitors plugged in. Even with a welcome team or a next steps area, a new family drops in one Sunday, never to be seen again. Sure, a connections pastor may have gotten info and uploaded it to your church management software. But often, this is as far as it gets. Coming up with and implementing some type of automated connection process is a daunting task. There’s no magic bullet, but texting is one of the best tools you can use. Texting has the highest open rates (text open rate is about 97%, email is only 25%), and it’s the fastest medium you can use. So if you're looking for some some strategy inspo, we’ve got a few ideas.

Is your church using Planning Center and looking for a robust texting solution? Clearstream seamlessly integrates with Planning Center. Send texts to your People lists, have 2-way conversations, create new profiles in People (while preventing duplicates), add people to your Planning Center Workflows, retrieve names from Planning Center when people text in, send automated texts based on Planning Center campus ID.