A new trend that I have been receiving information about is sending text blasts to groups in order to get out quick announcements.  This is an excellent idea for youth groups.  In a nutshell, every cell phone number has an email address. When you send an email to that address, it is received as a text message.  They can respond to the text message and it will go to your email.

There are free ways of doing this and paid ways.  I am going to focus on one of the free ways of doing it.  I will explain some of the downfalls of the free way.  Just know that anything you want to be able to do can probably be done, but you would have to pay for it.

I will start by mentioning a few things this can and should be used for:

  • Send a quick reminder to youth for an application deadline, an upcoming meeting, or simply for youth group.
  • Send an announcement on a special deal of the day (example $10 off ski trip application today only).  They only get the discount if the app is turned in that day.  It catches them by surprise and is a special gift.
  • Send an invitation to a random gathering that was spare of the moment
  • Send prayer requests
  • Have contests or trivia

There a tons of possibilities.  But there are a couple things to think about before you go crazy with this.

Now in order to do this, you will need the cell phone number and the cell phone carrier of each person.  It is also good to get the name of the youth or parent so that you can organize your contacts a bit better.  We handed out little cards for youth to sign saying that they are allowing us to send them texts up to three times a week.  It is probably a good idea to get parents signatures also, but we did not.  We did make a big announcement about it beforehand making sure anyone who signed up was not going to get billed for our text, meaning they have unlimited or plenty of extra each month.

Here is the sheets we used:  TEXT BLAST (.pdf) – TEXT BLAST (.pub)

To figure out the email address, I use the list found at http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/email-to-sms/.  In most cases, it is the full cell number with the unique cell phone carrier tag at the end.

Set up your lists and start blasting.

Number one rule, just be courteous with the maximum number of texts you will send a week and make sure to take people off the list as they request it.

Enjoy!