Drive Community Engagement With These 4 New Pushpay Features

Engagement is a buzzword in the tech industry, but it’s been a mainstay among church leaders for years. In fact, almost everything done in a typical church week is done to help people engage with the church, the scriptures, or each other.  

That’s why we design technology that helps churches like yours connect in more meaningful ways with the people they serve.

Here are the tracking and engagement tools we recently launched in your custom church app and your administrative portal. Now your Pushpay tech tools do more to help your church drive engagement and participation with your community.

App Profiles Help With Engagement

Forward-thinking ministries are engaging with people where they’re at—on mobile devices. And that means churches need apps as functional, intuitive, and well-designed as the ones people are already using, like Instagram and Amazon. But having a great app isn’t enough if users are unidentifiable and get all the same content. That’s why we designed App Profiles.

Now, your app users can create a custom profile within the app.

Here’s why that matters: App Profiles not only create a more user-friendly experience, but they also reflect positively on the church and increases app engagement. People can open the app and sync it with their existing Pushpay account (or create a new one) and experience the same seamless, 10-second giving process they are accustomed to—no matter what device they’re logged in from. With a customized profile, people can also be shown information about groups, news, and events that best match their profile, adding an additional layer of personability and relevance to the app.

So if a person fills in their profile and identifies as a single male under 35, his church can send him a push notification about an upcoming men’s small group without spamming the entire congregation with that information. Not only do personalized engagement opportunities like that make people feel seen and understood, but it helps increase engagement between a member and the app, and, by extension, a member and the church.

Campaigns & Pledging for Fundraising

For years, missions trips and other fundraising campaigns were launched with very little visibility into real-time fundraising. While this sounds like mainly a problem for the executive pastor or finance person, it’s a problem that affects congregants as well as the success of those campaigns.

People want to know where their donations are going and where there are opportunities for them to be more generous. But if church staff have poor visibility into how campaigns are progressing, then they’re less likely to update congregants about the campaign. For many churches, this means fundraising drives start and end with members knowing little about progress to the goal and how much additional help is needed.

Not only that, but dozens of staff hours are wasted as admins struggle to track down donations made through their multiple giving platforms.

That’s why the campaigns and pledging feature was built into the Pushpay giving platform. It allows church staff to set a defined fundraising goal and date, and track donations against the goal in real time. Not only is it now easier for staff to report on campaigns, but they’re able to quickly let congregants know about progress to the fundraising goal. Maybe a campaign is near its end but $10,000 are still needed. A church using the campaigns and pledging feature can check the campaign report and send an email to congregants updating them about the campaign status and ask for additional funding.

Better still, with this new feature, church admins can simply send customized messages to individual people about a campaign or their pledge. These messages are excellent tools for creating more excitement about a campaign to raise more funds, or simply to thank those who gave.

With the campaigns and pledging feature, churches spend less administrative time on campaign monitoring and reporting. They can also raise more money by building more transparency and efficiency into their fundraising process.

Push Notifications Just Got Better

Push notifications are an excellent tool for churches that want to reach their communities with great content, even outside of normal weekend services. They’re perfect for keeping the church top of mind and reminding people to take specific, important action steps. Previously in our custom church app, churches could send out push notifications to do a number of things, from reminding people to register for events to recruiting volunteers, to raising funds. However, for demographic-specific events, push notifications weren’t able to target specific app users—until now.

With the push notification upgrade, churches can now select groups of app users to send notifications to. App users are no longer automatically subscribed to all notifications, they can now control which types of push notification categories they’re subscribed to. This ensures that people only get the information that’s most useful and relevant to them and positions the church’s app as a reliable and relevant source of information. Over time, this helps improve engagement. 

Audio Enhancements For The Win

When it comes to sermons, church apps are the ultimate resource. People love sermons (obviously) and they love being able to recap a message on the go. In fact, listening to sermons is one of the top three activities users engage in while in their church app. People are listening and they’re expecting the same audio quality they get from other apps like Spotify and Apple Music. And that makes the audio component of your church app absolutely essential.

We want your congregants to be able to connect with your messages on a regular basis—and we’re determined to make it easier for them to do so.

That’s why the new audio enhancements feature will have an Audio Control Center, which offers an external audio player from the phone lock screen and notification overlay. Previously, users had to remain on one page to play audio files. Now they can navigate to any point within an audio file and see the duration of the sermon.

Your app users can now enjoy a more convenient and user-friendly media consumption experience allowing them to more deeply engage with content. With this new feature, your church may see increased app usage, which will increase church engagement via content consumption.

Talk To An Expert

Ready to learn more about these amazing new features? Reach out to care@pushpay.com to discover how your church can use these features to encourage more meaningful engagement with your community.

Don’t have a custom church app with Pushpay yet? Let’s get you plugged in—talk to an expert today to get started.