I am not a tech person at all, saying that I am diving in... Our little church is not a very tech savvy group. In my church with so many seniors and busy folks without smart phones, we're lucky to get good responses from emails. However even the seniors are able to perform text messaging. Texting/SMS would be great for us. Is there a way?
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There are a number of services that allow you to send an SMS to everyone on a database, for example www.textburst.com (google for others). You could export all the cellphone numbers to a CSV and upload them to a service like that to send the message. I haven't tried it but I am sure it work. You'd have to pay the SMS charges, you would not be able to use any included texts in a cellphone plan. You could include everyone that is OK to receive message like that in a group if you don't want to send the text to everyone in the database.
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You can try using BulkSMS (http://community.bulksms.com/) or Everlytic (http://www.everlytic.com/) as your 3rd party SMS provider (they seem to cater for NGOs too which makes costs a bit cheaper). There are APIs for these so I'm not sure if these could be built into Church Info at a later stage (but those using it will need to set up an account with the 3rd party service provider first and perhaps in the Church Info General Settings section, the credentials could be entered for use on the web system).
Otherwise as mentioned you can just export to CSV and import into the 3rd party tool :)
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I have modified our Church Info database to contain a new field for SMS texting then updated the CartView.php to allow sending a message via email to those who have an entry there. The field has the phone number concatiniated with the SMS gateway for the provider found by doing a reverse lookup on the phone number.
What I have is probably crude but is functional.
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I am not a tech person at all, saying that I am diving in... Our little church is not a very tech savvy group. In my church with so many seniors and busy folks without smart phones, we're lucky to get good responses from emails. However even the seniors are able to perform text messaging. Texting/SMS would be great for us. Is there a way?
There are a number of services that allow you to send an SMS to everyone on a database, for example www.textburst.com (google for others). You could export all the cellphone numbers to a CSV and upload them to a service like that to send the message. I haven't tried it but I am sure it work. You'd have to pay the SMS charges, you would not be able to use any included texts in a cellphone plan. You could include everyone that is OK to receive message like that in a group if you don't want to send the text to everyone in the database.
You can try using BulkSMS (http://community.bulksms.com/) or Everlytic (http://www.everlytic.com/) as your 3rd party SMS provider (they seem to cater for NGOs too which makes costs a bit cheaper). There are APIs for these so I'm not sure if these could be built into Church Info at a later stage (but those using it will need to set up an account with the 3rd party service provider first and perhaps in the Church Info General Settings section, the credentials could be entered for use on the web system).
Otherwise as mentioned you can just export to CSV and import into the 3rd party tool :)
This is one way of sending text that you do not need a third party involved:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/27051/use-email-to-send-text-messages-sms-to-mobile-phones-for-free/
I have modified our Church Info database to contain a new field for SMS texting then updated the CartView.php to allow sending a message via email to those who have an entry there. The field has the phone number concatiniated with the SMS gateway for the provider found by doing a reverse lookup on the phone number.
What I have is probably crude but is functional.