“We’re a mission-minded and evangelistic church wanting to spread the word of God,” says Woody Davis, an elder of Adairsville Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) Church in Adairsville, Georgia, a city of under 5,000 residents, about 60 miles northwest of Atlanta.
Spreading God’s word, Davis adds, depends on effectively spreading news to the church’s 100 members about mission opportunities, ministries, church meetings, prayer requests, youth activities, fellowship meals and other events.
Good communication, he says, “helps the congregation come together and be more united to go out and evangelize and spread the word.”
But delivering notifications to Adairsville SDA members hasn’t always been as effective as Davis would like.
In addition to managing the church’s audio-visual and tech services, he directs youth ministries. In this role, he strives to keep parents in the loop about activities their kids will be involved in.
A Break in Communication
Email was a primary channel for keeping members up-to-date on church happenings. That often proved to be a problem.
Davis explains, “Some people don’t check their email for days, or it could be hours.”
Either way, some members didn’t learn about events until they were over—or they already had other plans by the time they found out.
“I was frustrated with the way we were doing it with email. It wasn’t effective,” Davis says. He wanted a way of “being able to get information out immediately to everybody.”
Having worked in public safety for 26 years, Davis knew that automated instant notification systems existed. But were they available for churches?
Seeking the Answer
For many of life’s issues, you go to the Bible for answers. For this, Davis looked to the Internet. His search led him to One Call Now, including video testimonials on YouTube.
The need for an instant notification system like One Call Now became very clear one weekend.
Davis says, “We had to cancel church because of bad weather. It was hard to get the information out, versus where I can now send it in seconds (with One Call Now), and the people have the information.”
And no one ventures out unnecessarily in unsafe conditions.
About 90 percent of Adairsville SDA members receive One Call Now notifications via text message. The rest, by phone call.
“Already today I’ve sent three different texts to my youth group parents who are on the alerts,” Davis said. “I was giving out information about what we’re doing tonight and what’s coming up this next weekend.”
One Call Now: The Right Call
He adds, “At first, I wasn’t sure what people would think about it, but now if I forget to send a message out, church members tell me, ‘I would have been there if I’d have known about it or remembered it.’ One Call Now just helps people remember things.”
A survey of church members further confirmed that church leaders made the right call when they chose One Call Now. The survey focused primarily on evangelism and outreach programs. But one question polled members about the notification system.
“Unanimously, across the board, everybody voted, yes, don’t stop it. We depend on it,” Davis recalls. “I’m a full 100 percent fan of One Call Now.”
And Davis has recommended the system to two churches that have called him about Adairsville SDA’s experience.
One Call Now is America’s largest group messaging provider. The company’s SaaS-based solutions equip organizations with fast, reliable tools for sending critical information and alerts to many contacts at once across multiple devices, www.onecallnow.com.
