Have you used Epistle (https://www.epistle.org/)? Epistle is designed to make getting updates to your ministry partners as easy as possible. Their website says, “…you add posts to your Epistle site as things happen in your life and ministry. You can post at any time and any frequency. Posts normally include some text, pictures and video, similar to an Instagram post. We want you to be able to simply post as things happen in your life and ministry and not worry about things like gathering updates together, putting them into an email, determining when to send them out, getting responses from ministry partners, etc.” Do you use Epistle? What do you like about it? Please comment!
This looks good, but we have been using a free alternative that we really like, called Prayvine. Here’s their website: https://www.prayvine.org/
Hi!
I’ve been using and recommending epistle since April 2020.
Earlier this year I wrote to epistle in response to a questionarie:
Hi Frankie,
I went back to 2020, when I started using Epistle and looked at the average monthly gifts for the years 2020-2023 and then for 2016-2019. The increase was more than $1000 a month compared with the two 4-year periods. However, in a way it was a perfect statistical storm for epistle as four things happened all at once. (1) The beginning of 2020 I toured the US with an Armenian pastor and that had a positive impact on old and new sponsors, (2) a donor church kicked-it-up in 2020, (3) I went back to my original mission service agency (that is how I found out about epistle), and (4) my journey with cancer began. So, although readership numbers have fallen significantly since 2020, income has grown. As you know, it isn’t the raw number of subscribers but rather the number of readers and of the readers, the percentage of those who are sponsors. The cancer part of the perfect storm certainly impacted total readership, especially in the beginning of treatment.
I’ve tested it out, but it’s no longer possible to import your existing list from somewhere like MailChimp. Your subscribers have to give consent all over again. While I understand the reason why, it didn’t work well for me.
In addition, it doesn’t allow for sophisticated tagging and segmenting for targeting your audience with year-end campaigns and such.
It does a good job of ensuring your emails are delivered and of making you aware when they aren’t. It does encourage interaction and makes it easy for recipients to do that as well as allowing them to control the frequency with which they receive emails.
My conclusion was that it worked fine for just pushing out updates, especially if you don’t have an existing list, but if you want to do any sort of sophisticated “marketing-style” targeting, it just isn’t set up to do it. I tested it out about 9 months ago and ended up moving everything back to MailChimp.