Going Old School With Online Phone Trees

So what do you do if you need to contact large groups of people, but don’t want to spend hours on the phone calling a group of people?

In the old days you would spend up to $1000 for a “phone tree.” That’s an electronic device where you can record a message, and have it automatically send that recorded message to hundreds of different phones. So if you need to message an entire church, you could do this quickly and easily. The only problem is that these things are expensive. So what do you do when you’re in such a quandary? Go to the internet, of course! A few days ago I started poking around on the internet and discovered that there are many online phone tree systems, many of which you can use for free.

One of them is called FreePhoneTree.com. The setup for this online phone tree seemed to be a little odd. I went through the regular registration process, but after I finished I was greeted with this message in my email inbox:

I found this email to be disturbing on several levels. For one, who receives a snail-mail “welcome letter” for registering on a website?! For some reason this gives me the creeps. Secondly, this was a few days ago, so even if they meant “email” instead of “mail” you would think that after three days I would receive the confirmation email. But no, none has yet arrived. So I’m officially mentally wiping this company from my mind, and moving on to greener pastures. Does this email seem odd to anyone else, though?

I did have success with another company called DialMyCalls.com. The registration was straight forward and only took a minute. The site works by you creating a list of different numbers that you want to be called. So you might have a group called church board, worship team, volunteers, or whatever else you might want to call the groups. The only catch with this site, is that if you’re using their free system, you can’t call more than 50 people at the same time, and the message that you send out has to be 30 seconds or less. I entered in a few of my leaders to try it out, recorded the message, and was rewarded by the thought that I will be saving myself time when I want to remind people of a meeting or of something important. You can edit the settings so that it can leave the message on someone’s voicemail, or you can have it call the people back until someone picks up. I would call that the stalker mode, but I’m sure that they have a more technical and non-scary term for that.