Council Post: What Businesses Can Learn About Texting From Faith-Based Organizations

Vijesh Mehta is the CEO and Co-Founder of EZ Texting, and CTIA Board of Directors. EZ Texting has served over 230,000 businesses.

getty

Nearly nine in 10 churches that text their members get a reply back. That number is roughly double the platform average across every other category we serve.

I co-founded EZ Texting in 2005. Over two decades, more than 230,000 organizations have used the platform, including retailers, schools, B2B companies, nonprofits and faith-based organizations. When our team looked across 1,485 of those faith-based accounts, I expected the usual cadence patterns. What I didn't expect was that the real story wasn't what these senders do. It's why their audiences talk back, and what business leaders can take away from that.

Trust is earned before the message ever shows up.

The first instinct on most communications teams is to optimize inside the message: subject line, offer or call to action. The data points somewhere else.

When an audience replies to nearly 90% of your texts, it's because they've already concluded, in advance, that you're worth replying to. The message is when trust gets cashed in, not when it gets built. Churches earn that trust outside the channel by showing up consistently in people's lives without an ask attached. By the time someone joins a text list, the sender isn't a brand. It's a person they already know.

The takeaway isn't "manufacture intimacy." It's to be honest about where you stand with your audience and design the channel accordingly. If you want to know whether you've earned the right to text someone, watch your reply rate, not your open rate. One tells you they saw it. The other tells you they cared.

The list decides the response rate.

The single most adopted feature across these accounts isn't an automation or an AI tool. It's the keyword opt-in—used by 93.5% of faith-based senders. The pastor says, "Text WELCOME to 55123," from the stage. A visitor opts in with their thumbs and gets an instant reply.

Any business can run that, at the register, at the table or from a conference stage. What makes it work is what it screens out. People who raise their hand stay engaged. People uploaded from a CRM leave. Keyword-built lists have meaningfully lower opt-out rates than imported ones.

If your engagement is flat, the answer is rarely a better template. It's a better list. Watch your opt-out rate within the first 30 days. That tells you whether you're building a list that wants you, or one you're forcing yourself onto.

Show up between the big moments.

Most church messages don't go out on Sunday. Wednesday is the biggest day for nearly every church size. The sender is in the audience's life between the major moments, not just during them.

That's the inverse of how most brands operate. The typical retail texting calendar is Black Friday, a seasonal sale or a birthday code, which equates to long flat stretches punctuated by spikes when something is being sold. The audience learns the pattern: This sender only contacts me when they want something.

Consistency without an ask is uncomfortable to budget for; it doesn't show up in next quarter's attribution report. But it's what makes the campaigns work when they do show up. A short, useful message between asks—a tip, a check-in, an update with no link—changes the sender ID in someone's phone from noise into someone they look for. The same logic holds for internal comms: If the only all-hands is the layoff one, no one's reading the next email, either. Watch the ratio of "messages with an ask" to "messages without one." If it's higher than 3-to-1, you're training your audience to ignore you.

Automation should make room for humans, not replace them.

Large churches schedule over 70% of their messages in advance. Smaller ones send mostly manual, day-of operational messages. Both produce engagement, but the larger ones found something worth borrowing.

"The forecast tomorrow says cold; the Gospel says come and be warmed. See y'all tomorrow morning!"

That message—warm, casual, signed in the sender's actual voice—went out as a scheduled broadcast, not a hand-typed one. These senders automated the predictable so staff had time to answer the inbound when it came. The scheduled message handles the calendar. The human handles the moment that matters: the customer reply, the employee question or the note that wasn't on anyone's content plan.

That's the opposite of how most companies use automation. The default playbook uses bots and drips to eliminate human contact. The better model uses automation to clear space for it. If your road map can't answer "what will my people do with the time this gives them back," you're building the wrong road map.

Where does the data get uncomfortable?

I'll be honest about where these senders fall short, because the gaps are the most useful part. Post-event follow-up is less than 1% of total message volume across every church size. After the service, the dinner or the outreach, the channel goes quiet at exactly the moment audiences are warmest.

That's the same gap I see in retail, in B2B and in internal comms. The campaign ended, so the messaging ended. The cheapest, highest-return move for almost any organization is a single follow-up in the 48 hours after an engagement. Almost nobody does it.

The data tells you the conditions for engagement are there. It can't tell you whether the inbound reply got a thoughtful answer or whether the person on the other end felt seen. That's still the job. The senders that an audience deletes never get to that part. The ones an audience looks for do.

Your customers and employees are already on their phones. The question isn't whether to meet them there; it's whether they'll be glad to hear from you when you do.​

Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?