The Clearstream Blog

In this series, we'll walk through the laws and guidelines for texting inside of your church. We'll also discuss the different numbers (long codes and short codes) you can use for texting in your church. We created this video series to help you understand the nuances of texting and the best practices for developing an effective strategy for your church.

In order to help you choose the best texting service for your church, we created this post to highlight the key features and functionalities crucial to churches interested in communicating with their volunteers, members, staff, and first-time guests via text message.

Our new automated workflows feature lets you set up an automated series of text messages to send new visitors who've given you their info over the course of a few days or weeks after their first visit.

Analytics are a vital piece of any software, which is why we provide important metrics throughout the Clearstream platform. And now, you can get weekly reports of your account performance automatically emailed to you and your team! Weekly Reports give you a quick summary of your account's performance over the past week, as well as a comparison to the week before.

Slack is one of the most popular web apps for team communication. Here at Clearstream our team uses and relies on Slack every day. After hearing that so many of our customers use it, we thought 'why not let our customers manage their Clearstream Inbox directly in Slack?'  Hence this powerful (we tend to overuse this word, but a sufficiently better adjective to describe this new feature could not be found in the English dictionary) new integration. If your church uses Slack for internal team communication, do read on...

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.