• call everyone by telephone
• send an email to everyone
• send everyone a text message

Placing a voice call to everyone would be challenging, because of the time and organization required.  Additionally, many people wouldn’t answer their phones and possibly wouldn’t retrieve their voice mail until later.

Sending an email to everyone could be done easily, but studies have shown that, on average, people open their email within 24 hours.  So, it’s likely that many of the emails would remain unread and therefore would not alert them.

Sending everyone a text message seemed difficult at first because it appeared like it would need to be done individually, from another staff person’s private mobile phone.  Potential errors relating to phone numbers would be an issue.

Pulse Retail Systems (PRS) supplied its SMS/Pro technology, text-enabled their existing landline, and trained the church’s communications team on the effective use of SMS technology.

The church had consulted with Pulse Retail Systems about communicating with staff, so we’d already set up what we refer to as a ‘Broadcast Group’, where people would self-register … it literally takes a few seconds.

Since we had this broadcast group in place, it was a simple matter of SENDING ONE TEXT-MESSAGE to the group to alert them of the situation in the building.

People typically read their text messages within 3 minutes (compared to a 24-hour average for email) … so once the message was sent, the church had a great certainty that the alert was being read.

Problem solved.