Creating a Church App with Buildfire: A Comprehensive Guide

You’ve delivered your sermon for the day, things are wrapping up and your congregation is flowing out the church doors. The pews were filled, but what about tomorrow or next week?

How will you make sure your congregation is actively engaged from the youngest members to the oldest?

An app can help. By creating a digital center for your community, you can effectively bring the church to your congregation. Effectively engaging those younger members who live on their smart phones. You’re engaging with them where they are, 24/7/365 right in their pockets.

At their finger tips they’ll have access to sermons, event calendars, to donate and more. In this guide, you’ll be walked through the process of building a simple and easy-to-use church app for your congregation, using the Buildfire mobile app building platform. We’ll be walking you through the church app template, Cross Church, as an example of what a church app should look like.

Church, synagogue, mosque or other prayer building – a mobile app is the perfect communication medium to engage your community. Engagement both inside and outside of church is one of the most important factors in growing an active congregation. This engagement can start before they even step in the front door through their mobile device.

 

Branding Your App

Let’s start with your mobile app’s appearance. The way your church app looks, should be in line with the way your congregation knows your church. What colors are in your logo and in your church?

What emotions do you want congregation members to feel when they experience sermons in your app?

When you have the answers to these questions, then it’s time to move over to the Appearance section of your control panel.

The Appearance section is where you can control the look and feel of your mobile app to fit with the experience you’re after.

The Font section is where you can control the font used across your app.

If you don’t see a font that fits for your church, you can contact our support at any time by clicking the little question mark bubble in the bottom right corner.

The section below Font is the Theme Colors section. This is where you can manually select colors for each section of your mobile app. Changing these colors will change the colors shown in the emulator on the right hand side.

The alternative option is to choose a Preset Theme if the color scheme matches what you are looking for with regards to your app’s aesthetics.

 

Plugins

Plugins are the main features and sections of your app that will contain content. Buildfire has dozens to choose from and if you’re using the Cross Church template, there are already several pre-loaded plugins to use.

If you’d like to explore the plugins available or add a new one, you simply have to go to the Plugin section and click on Add Plugin.

Then you can explore the plugins available or add a plugin by clicking the Add button.

After you have added your new plugin, you can add it to your app by going to the Home Plugin, or your Side Menu, clicking on “Add Plugin Instance,” and selecting the new plugin.

Now let’s review the default plugins that appear in the Cross Church app template. These are the most useful for any church.

 

This Week

This Week is a Folder plugin. You can tell what plugin you are in at the moment by looking at the top title. This folder is used to collect information on what’s new for this week: new sermons, events, membership orientation information and more.

If you click on Today’s Sermon Notes for instance, you’ll be taken to a Text WYSIWYG Plugin that can contain text, images and links to house sermons.

On this next page you can change the name of the sermon if it has a title, change the image or change the sermon based on the new sermon for today.

Changes made on the plugin pages are saved automatically, you’ll notice a green notification at the top of your screen when it’s in the process of saving.

 

Sermons

 

Next up is the Sermons feature, which is a Folder Plugin. It contains multiple types of Plugins to keep an archive of past sermons for congregation reference.

• Text WYSIWYG: Similar to the daily sermon, it’s just a plugin that displays text, links and images
• Media Center Manual: A plugin that acts as a folder for multiple types of media including video and audio versions of sermons
• Vimeo: A plugin that aggregates Vimeo videos specifically for video based sermons

Each sermon within the Media Center Plugin contains text as well as links to an audio file, a video file or both. In this case it links to a direct MP3 audio file and a YouTube video.

 

Donate

Give you congregation a new way to give back with a direct link to give or donate right from the app. The Donate Plugin is a Folder Plugin that holds a direct link to your donations page. That way you can accept donations from the younger members of your congregation where they are most often.

The image here links to a WebView Plugin, a type of plugin that allows you to link out to other pages or websites on the internet. To use this plugin as a donation medium for your congregation, you’ll just have to add your donation URL and set it to open in the mobile phone’s default browser. This is for compliance with Apple’s app store rules around payments within an application.

You could also use this area to link to a page on your church’s website with information around how you accept donations. In that case you can select Native in app and have the page load within your church’s mobile app.

 

Home Groups

Home Groups is a Places Plugin, it’s where you can collect a different location information for your church events, groups and regular mass. Much

like other plugins the Places Plugin allows you to have images at the top and text or links in the middle. Below that is the Places Plugin specific settings.

1. The first is where you can add location section and location items in bulk via CSV. If you click on the Get Template button here you can download a sample file to work with.
2. This is the location sections area, these location sections hold multiple locations items (addresses). For your church they can hold locations and addresses relevant to different age groups within your congregation.

If we click into Home Groups in the locations section, you’ll notice it’s blank. At the moment there are no locations added to any of the location sections, so let’s add one. To do that you can click on the Add New Item button.

Analytics

In the Buildfire platform we help you track the most essential metrics: app downloads and registered users. To help you boost your mobile app downloads, we compiled a list of 10 powerful strategies to help you here.

Buildfire Analytics	Segment Integration
Tracks app downloads and registered users.	Connects multiple analytics tools like Google Analytics, Marketo, Intercom, etc.
Provides essential metrics.	Tracks advanced metrics like plugin usage and behavior patterns.

In addition to the analytics we provide, we also integrate with a platform called Segment. Segment is an all in one way to connect multiple analytics tools like Google Analytics, Marketo, Intercom and more. These tools will help you in tracking more advanced metrics like which plugins are most used and the behavior patterns of your congregation members in your church’s app.

Frequently Asked Questions