Push Notifications empower you to send personalized messages to your community instantly, via your app. You can create rich and engaging messages by attaching media, events, and other types of content to your Push Notifications. And with Push Notification Groups, you can send specific messages to targeted segments of your audience.
Getting Started
Head to the dashboard and select Apps, then Push Notifications in the menu to access your notifications. Here you will see a listing of all your drafted notifications, the history of sent notifications, and your notification groups. You can sort your notifications by all groups, or by a specific group to find just what you need.
Sending Push Notifications
Select Create Notification in the upper-right corner to get started.
Basic Info is where you can put the text aspect of your notification. There are two types of text that can be included in a notification: the Notification Text itself (the 140 characters your users will see on their phones) and the Additional Description where you can add further information.
Attachments is at the bottom and is where you can select if you want to include an attachment. Attachments allows you to attach Subsplash created items to your push notifications such as Link items, Media items, Calendar items, and more. Attachments, using a link item is the most common way to attach a URL to a push notification.
To the right, you can select a group for your notification so your notifications always go to the correct audience.
Once you’ve completed your notification, you can choose to preview and send or schedule your notification to be sent. This will allow you to double-check the notification and ensure it’s going out at the time that will be most effective.
Using and Promoting Push Notification Groups
Group push notifications are a powerful way to send targeted messages to your audience. Once you create groups, your users can join them directly through the app. To start using groups, just navigate to Push Notifications.
Creating push notification groups: Create groups with distinct purposes and communication needs. A church might create groups for Parents, Young Adults, Volunteers, Women’s Ministry, and Men’s Groups. Avoid creating too many groups or groups with overlapping purposes.
Promoting notification groups: Once you’ve created your groups, send a push notification to your general group letting them know about this exciting new way to stay connected. Consider promoting your groups through other communication channels, such as your Facebook page or a church announcement. Here’s a push notification you can use to promote groups:
“Have you checked out groups? Join today to get the notifications you want. Tap the side menu to get started!”
We also have put together this instructional video for you to share with your users in emails, on your social media channels, or even in church on Sunday!
Connecting with push notification groups: Now that you’ve created and promoted your groups, it’s time to start sending notifications! Send messages that are relevant and tailored to the respective group. Remember that groups are not confidential and anyone can join, so make sure not to use groups to send sensitive information.
Managing push notification groups: You can change a group name anytime, but make sure the topic is still relevant to the existing audience. For example, changing the Men’s Group to the Women’s Ministry would cause a lot of confusion! If a group is no longer needed or relevant (for example a group for Easter service volunteers), then it’s a good idea to archive the group.
Beware! Push notifications and push notification groups are not private, so make sure you are only sending content through the notification system that you would be willing to put on your website. Do not send sensitive or confidential information.
Subsplash Live Automated Push Notifications
Scheduling a push notification for your streams in Subsplash Live is a great way to ensure your app users are informed of an upcoming broadcast. This paired with our repeating live stream feature saves you the hassle of having to manually schedule individual live streams and push notifications to correlate.
When scheduling a live stream in your Dashboard whether it's one time or repeating, be sure to toggle on "Push Notification", this will display the following options:
You can choose when to send the push notification in relation to the scheduled start time of the live stream and customize the notification text to your liking.
Live stream push notifications will show in your Dashboard push notification page in line with the rest of your schedule streams, drafts, and history of push notifications.
Live stream push notifications will always be sent to the General notification subscriber group.