Please explain why our church doesn’t use an app for our online presence. Allow me to walk through why we have chosen to shy away from them.
In addition, we’ll look at the primary reasoning for staying away from the Church App world.
First, having your very own branded church web app can run into big money. I’m talking a comfortable five figures. That doesn’t include having it hosted to permit your users to access its content.
If you choose to go with one of the “Big Box” type apps, then you’re stuck with a recurring monthly fee. Most churches don’t have the budget to support that.
There are two things in particular that play a huge role for our church. First, since we allow for online donations, having a link for that in a web app would merely be a redirect that brings them straight back to our website.
The other one is the fact that the biggest player in the app field, Apple, doesn’t permit web apps that are in containers to be listed in their online application store.
What is container app? So glad you asked.
I’m going to utilize one of the bigger players, Tithely. Don’t’ misunderstand me, they offer some really amazing services, however, by the time you get around to the app portion where your people can engage with our content, the pricing becomes absolutely to expensive too justify the investment.
This is why our web dev team has worked so incredibly hard to ensure that our website works well across all devices, regardless of their screen size.
Basically at the end of the day, we can create a different looking view on for every screen size that exists.
So what one person may see on their desktop machines, may look entirely different than those who are interacting with us using their smartphones.
We could if we wanted to, make it look entirely web appy, however, we have chosen to ensure that our content remains consistent across all devices.
This ensures that visitor’s and frequent users of our ministry website are able to enjoy the same content.
Needless to say, what we need to be hyper-focused upon is delivering engaging content that is alluring to those who are not within our body of believers.
After all, at the end of the day, that truly should be what the mission of any ministry website is.
While I’m on that note, I want to encourage any of you who would like to contribute to writing on our church website to get with me so I can get you all set up to do so.
Trust me, you’ve heard me say this before, if you can post to Facebook, you can create and successfully post an article here on our ministry website.