First, note that there are two versions of the app. The free version only seems to offer a link to your church’s e360 Giving form. The full-featured app has modules for your church’s latest news, sermons, events, giving, and contacting your church. This review is for the full-featured app.
Unfortunately the app is very basic and offers very little above a mobile website. With added features it could be worth the money.
The Discover module display your latest sermon (or other recording) on your media site, along with upcoming events (more on events later). It Mays be similar to your website’s Home or News page.
The Sermons module list all the recordings of your media site (in my case YouTube). Nice, but we have Sermons page on our website and also have links to our YouTube content.
The Events module is, quite frankly, the most disappointing. It only displays events for which you have built registration forms in E360 Giving. So if you want to make the app display your weekly services, you have to create forms for them and change the dates each week. This is a lot of unnecessary work; the app should natively support recurring schedules.
The Giving module simply opens the E360 Giving form for your church, just as your website probably does (unless you chose to embed the form in your website).
The Contact form allows app users to reach out to designated contacts at your church. If you also build a Prayer form in E360 Giving, you can add a Prayer tab to the Contacts module so app users can submit prayer requests. But your website likely has this feature as well.
If your church has no website, this app will be a great substitute, but will require a bit of work each week to maximize its usefulness.
Finally, the app has a nice push notification feature that allows you to let your app users know of any important or unexpected news. All users that allow the app to accept push notifications will get the message whether or not they are using the app. Other users will get the message when they open the app. It’s the only feature not duplicated on our church’s website.
The full-featured app is not free. It is a good value if your church has no website. If you have a website, this app needs more features to justify the cost. But you should consider that younger members may be more likely to use a mobile app.
At a minimum, the app needs a starting page to display a logo and basic information about your church, along with a better way to show recurring events.
A nice added feature would be to have a built-in Bible offering the most-used translations.
The app seems stable and has promise. I hope MinistryOne develops it further.
3.0
