Clearstream

What do you like best?

The experience from the end user (members of our church) is simple and straightforward: receive a text and answer/ignore it. For our team, being able to text/respond without using our own cell numbers is a plus. Also, the integration with Planning Center makes this much more powerful.

What do you dislike?

The admin portal from which you send messages is clunky and not incredibly user friendly, making the training side of things a little more difficult. Always defaulting to sending a message to a group rather than an individual is also frustrating when trying to send a quick message.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Definitely a strong, functional option that should only improve over time.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We used Clearstream's integration with Planning Center to create a text-based paging system during our church services. The parent's names and numbers are synced to Clearstream, allowing us to send a message through the admin portal if a parent needs to be contacted for bathroom or behavior reasons. It has allowed us to completely eliminate our old, expensive pagers. We also plan to begin using Clearstream as a way to contact people about events, schedule changes, small groups and more, but haven't quite gotten to that point.