Using SMS for live Q&A

One of the most often asked questions that I receive from other churches and ministries is in regards to how we technologically support the live SMS (text-messaging) question and answer sessions that we do here at Mars Hill Church.

There are a two main aspects to the live Q&A event – obtaining the questions and then filtering and communicating the questions to the presenter, speaker, or pastor that is fielding the questions on the spot.  The first step is to establish a short code with a SMS gateway provider, this will allow you to have everyone send questions from their phones to your email inbox or a web interface.  Secondly, someone must be sitting in the production booth filtering through all the questions, weeding out the jokes, and prioritizing the questions in some order.  Lastly, we input the questions into a graphics engine that pushes the content to the stage.

There are two avenues of obtaining a short code for texting the questions to.  You can lease your own dedicated short code costing $1000/mo for a specific one (i.e. PEPSI bought the short code 73774, or you could buy 53787 which is available and spells JESUS) or $500/mo for a random one.  Or you can set up an account with a gateway/service provider to utilize a shared short code.    Mobilestorm has a good article on the differences between the two options, but the big idea is that dedicated short codes are cooler because you don’t need to establish a KEYWORD, though they are significantly cost prohibitive for churches and small businesses.  I recommend the shared short code approach as it is affordable to most everyone.  There are many gateway/service providers (Mobivity, Mobilestorm, or clubtexting to name a few) in this growing market.  This is a regulated market so you can see all the players in the short codes business within the US by visiting the WHOIS directory online.

Once you have a short code and keyword, you’ll need to communicate out to your audience or congregation how to text in their questions.  I would recommend assembling a slide with pictures so that people can see an example of how to write out their questions.  For exeample, with a shared short code your audience would need to send a text to “95495″ that reads KEYWORD followed by the question (i.e. “JESUS How do I become a follower of Jesus?”).  Usually you can setup an auto-response for those that submit questions, assuring them that their question has been properly submitted.

As the questions are sorted out back stage, they will need to be manually entered into your graphics system.  We currently enter the questions into an Excel spreadsheet on a staff member’s laptop that our Chyron character generator automatically pulls data from over the network and generates new slides for.  One could just as easily utilize cheaper and simpler applications like Keynote, Powerpoint, or Propresenter and have the same outcome.  The questions are then pushed to the LCD screen that we have on stage for answering.

All in all this is a fairly simple and affordable way to engage a large group of people, allowing them to ask honest and hard questions without the classic operational issues of an open-mic.  People are no longer able to debate with the person on stage, nor are they put in an uncomfortable situation by talking in front of a crowd.  We have found this to pull out tough questions on hard issues, allowing the gospel to be presented in topics that may rarely be talked about from the pulpit in churches.