Google Voice for Churches #1

Yes, it is FREE!

Free is not always better. If you were offered a free knock off version of the iPad that only worked about 25 percent of the time, it would not be better. Free yes, but not better.

However, there are many times where free software for churches is a great solution. Google apps and specifically using Google Voice for churches is a huge win if applied in the right situation.

I completely understand that this will not work for every church. It will not be a solution for every ministry.

One main issue to consider is whether the Senior Pastor approves of using Google Voice. There may not be a desire to have another phone number in addition to the church number being shared with people.

We ran into this issue with our church website. There was a desire on the part of a couple of our ministry departments to have a separate website in addition to our main church site. This is a great idea in certain situations, but our Pastor’s main concern was that we were not giving out so many website addresses that it caused confusion about where people go for church information.

That was the perspective he shared with me and I agree. It keeps things simple and lets you share one place to go for info and it was best for us to limit it to one web address.

There are potential concerns, but I think the benefits outweigh them.

A problem with one of our ministries…

Depending on the size of your church and the scope of individual ministries within the church, it is very likely that you will not have paid staff in every position. Sometimes even if you do, they may be part-time and do much of their work from home. They may even be co-leading ministries and sometimes there is a lot of turnover in those volunteering.

My wife Janet recently began coordinating our nursery ministry on a limited part-time basis. We needed a free church software solution to help her communicate to the 120 or so volunteers and weekly coordinators on a monthly basis as well as provide a free texting solution to text our parents during service if their child was having issues.

Google has proved to be that solution for our church and I think it can help yours too.

In upcoming posts about Google Voice for churches we will be looking at the benefits of this service and how we are using it in ministry.The first benefit is that it is FREE. This time free is a great solution.

Check out the overview video below and sign up using your free Gmail/Google account and get started with Google Voice today!