One big advantage of building messaging into LDS Tools that hasn't been mentioned is maintaining who is on the list and their contact info. The ward directory is the best place to maintain it. And, when people move in and out, LCR handles all that. I don't have to pay attention to adding contact info to 3rd part systems when the ward membership changes (which it does all the time). There needs to be more fine-grained control in LCR for people opting out of messages. We have a few that don't want emails but we don't want to delete their contact info in their membership record. So, we have to remember to remove them every time we send an email to ALL.mikefr wrote:This is a hot topic. As cool as LDSTools is, I agree with the need to add Texting & Chat with individuals and groups (by Auxiliaries and custom made groups). We'd like a way to easily & quickly send messages to our Ward members. This would be helpful to contact members in a short period of time during severe weather events and other situations when immediate communications with a couple hundred members in seconds/minutes is needed. Would be a great communications tool for disaster preparedness.
While I like Slack (use it at work), it's too feature rich for our needs. And while, Remind is much better suited as far as usability for our members goes, I'm very concerned privacy of members. As we're all aware, some apps like Facebook, Google, even Remind leave the door wide open to accessing and collecting far more personal information than needed to complete a simple task like texting. I would feel MUCH more comfortable with this functionality built into LDSTools. IE, I trust the Church more than profit driven corporations
Are there any plans in the works for texting/chatting tool coming from the Church? Thanks for all your efforts!
I'd like our ward to settle on one 3rd party tool for texting until the church does something itself. We have a mix of GroupMe and regular texting plus the usual 'send a message' in LCR. A bit of facebook.