Members with the app can get notifications on their phone. Everyone else gets email.
Turning them on
The app asks once, during setup. Tap Allow and it works.
It only asks once. Somebody who dismissed the prompt has to enable it in their phone's own settings afterwards. The app cannot ask again, and that is a phone rule rather than ours. See Turn on notifications for what to tell them.
The app is on both the App Store and Google Play, so iPhone and Android members can get notifications. Anyone who has not installed it yet is on email only, and that is likely a good share of your congregation at first.
What sends a notification
Things with a time attached:
- Announcements you send
- Event reminders: one nudge, early on the day of an event that uses RSVP, to members who have not answered yet. They can tap I'm Going right on it. Someone who already said going, maybe or not going is not reminded
- Volunteer invitations: answerable straight from the notification, without opening the app
- Group activity in groups they belong to
What does not
This is the part churches assume wrongly.
Publishing a sermon notifies nobody. Neither does publishing a page, a blog post, or an event on its own. Those appear on your site and in the app, and members find them when they look.
If you want people to know a sermon is up, that is an announcement you send. The publish action does not do it for you. It is the single most common mistaken assumption about how this works.
Group chat has its own controls
A member can mute an individual group's chat without turning off notifications generally. Somebody in six groups is not stuck choosing between all of it and none of it.
Mentioning a member directly notifies them even in a muted thread, so use it deliberately, not casually.
When somebody says they get nothing
In order:
- Do they have the app at all? Many of your members may not.
- Is notification permission on in their phone settings? This is the answer most of the time.
- Have they muted that particular group?
- Are they actually in the group the announcement went to?
The thing to protect
Notification permission is granted once and revoked permanently. A church that sends four announcements a week trains people to turn it off, and there is no way to win them back.
Every message you do not send protects the one you will genuinely need to.