What do you like best about PastorsLine?
This is a simple service that provides in-depth texting options for connecting with new people & current people at churches. The setup system, although overly convoluted and difficult to use (more on that later), was quite powerful and provided me with a number of options that I found extremely useful, such as customizable follow-up texts & customizable follow-up texts asking for personal information. The texting system itself seemed useful, albeit not all that intuitive, and did its basic functions well (i.e. sending and receiving texts) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about PastorsLine?
I originally came to try this service as part of a free trial they provided to test out their planning center integration. Needless to say, I left the service rather quickly due to the reality that they only provide one-way planning center integration (i.e. you can import people from planning center, but can't export people to planning center). I was hoping that the service would be able to update people's contact information (i.e. cell phone numbers) on planning center, but found that when people signed up via text, it created a new account for them that was not linked with the people imported from planning center at all.
Furthermore, I disliked the website's UI - I found the colours were distracting and childish, the UI was unintuitive, cluttered, and confusing (lacking any sort of discernable "settings" area but rather hiding settings in other menu options that made no sense). Since I tried the program, they did fix an issue with the transparency of the top menu (which used to be indescernable because it was transparent and would morph into the information on the different pages), so good for them.
I also found that the texting aspects of the service functioned for basic tasks, but completely failed when I tried to do more complicated things. I found that deleting a phone number from the web dashboard and trying to resubscribe via text to that same number caused the system to glitch and fail to send any sort of welcome text. Furthermore, the lack of a 5 digit "text this code to [ex] 56789" was a let-down - that is a basic feature that I expect from any texting service.
The only other issue I found with this service was how they automatically, without my consent, in violation of CASL, signed me up for a mailing list that I did not want to receive, and could not unsubscribe from. They then proceeded to contact me several times a day via email using different email addresses, and later on to send me texts; again without my consent. As noted before, this is a violation of Canada Anti-Spam Legislation; and as a company advertising themselves to Canadians, I expected the company to be more in-line with the basic legal requirements of the countries they work with. Furthermore, their disregard for Canadian Law is concerning, because it makes me wonder what they do to help their customers stay within the boundaries of the law. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.