Experience.FellowshipOne.com

I was wondering if anybody used cell phones as there way of paging parents?  We use pagers wright now but we have lost so many we only have enough for our TinyZone. (0 - 2)  They are expensive to replace so I am thinking about moving to cell phones.  Your thoughts?

How does that work?

We do that at our church and ask the parents to give us a cell # if we don't have it. I think that it's a reasonably safe bet for most people that they have a cell phone.  If they don't have a cell phone, we ask where they'll be so we can find them if needed. Our pager system went out a while ago and the cost to replace was hard to justify.

I know that some worship presentation software has a way to put up a number on the screen. That could work as well for parents who don't have a cell phone and will be in the main service. If that number/code appears in the corner of the screen, it's a note indicating that their presence is needed.

I go to a much smaller church, so we're pretty much able to keep things personal, but I realize this could be a challenge with larger campuses.

We use cell phones to page parents. For the most part it works great....there are a couple things to be aware of though. The first being that people will usually put their phones on vibrate or silent and then they get put in a purse and the parents don't hear it. We have just trained the people doing check in to remind them to have their phone on vibrate and some place they will be able to feel it should we need to page them. The other issue, which tends to go away because they get used to it, is the fact that since you have to enter the pager # each time they come in, they get frustrated that it can not be saved from week to week. We tell them it turns out to be a good thing because phone #s change or they might not have that phone w/them or they might want to use their spouse's that day - so that just ensures we always get the best # to reach them at. Again, it's something they get used to and finally just accept, but those questions do come up.

I have a few questions about this.

1. Are you "texting" the parents or are you simply calling their phone?
2. If you are just calling the phone is it just the church number that shows up? if so and they have multiple kids how do they know where to report to?
3. What phone are you calling/texting from?

---

Kim Ludwick
Database Manager
Champions Centre
"One Church, Two Locations"
Tacoma/Bellevue, WA

We use a seperate, small LED display mounted directly above our presentation screen that is able to be controlled by our Children's ministry. If it is absolutely necessary to get the parent and they don't respond to that, we can use the paging feature in our presentation software.

 

---

==================
Matt Beeman
Website Project Manager, Marketing Ministries