The administration committee meeting had one agenda item that ran long: which SMS tool should the church actually use. Three options were on the table, printed out from three different websites, and the discussion kept circling back to the same surface-level question — which one is cheapest — before the treasurer, a retired schoolteacher named Mr. Ochieng who'd sat through enough procurement meetings in his career to be suspicious of easy answers, asked the room to slow down. "Cheapest per message tells you almost nothing," he said. "Ask what happens the week after you sign up."
What follows is close to the list the committee actually worked through that evening, expanded a little, because it's the kind of list worth having on hand before any church commits to a tool.
1. Does it know who your members already are, or do you upload a list every time? This is the question underneath most of the others. A generic bulk SMS portal — the kind built for banks, schools, and SACCOs as much as churches — has no idea who's a member, a visitor, or a leader unless you tell it, every time, from a spreadsheet you maintain somewhere else. FaithDash's Messages page sends to segments already defined in the church's own live records — All members, Visitors only, Members only, Leaders only, or a custom tag — so there's no export step at all.
2. Can it segment by tag or role, not just "everyone"? Ushers, choir, youth, small group leaders — most churches have groups within the congregation that need their own messages. Ask whether that segmentation exists natively or whether you'd be keeping a second, separate list just to fake it.
3. Can it send automatically, or only when someone remembers to compose and hit send? This is the one that separates a portal from a system. A one-off blast is easy for almost any platform. A message that fires automatically — a welcome text the day someone registers as a visitor, a reminder before an event, a follow-up after one — generally needs the developer-facing tier of a platform like Africa's Talking, with someone able to write integration code. FaithDash's Automation section offers visitor follow-ups, event reminders, and event attendee follow-ups as rules you configure once through a form, no code required.
4. Do you see the cost before you send, or only after? A live counter showing character count, encoding, number of SMS parts, and cost for the exact recipient group you've selected — before you commit — is a small thing that prevents a lot of expensive surprises, especially the Unicode-character kind that quietly triples a message's part count.
5. Is pricing pay-as-you-go, and does it roughly match what everyone else pays? Be wary of any platform implying it beats the underlying telco rate — everyone in this category, FaithDash included, is ultimately paying the same class of gateway to deliver an SMS. FaithDash's rate is UGX 35 per SMS part from a prepaid balance; treat any competitor claiming to be dramatically cheaper with the same skepticism you'd apply to a fuel station claiming a much lower price than everyone else on the same road.
6. How do you top up, and how visible is the balance? A wallet that's easy to fund by mobile money, with a clear warning before it runs dry and an estimate of how many more messages remain, prevents the specific 11pm scramble of a reminder that needs to go out with a balance nobody checked.
7. Is there a record of what was actually sent? Ask whether the platform keeps a searchable history — recipient count, status, cost — or whether "did we send that reminder" is a question only answered by someone's memory.
8. What happens if your sender number isn't verified, or someone leaves messages open to abuse? A platform that enforces phone verification before anything can be sent is doing a small but real trust job on your behalf — worth asking about directly rather than assuming.
What the committee actually decided
Mr. Ochieng's list didn't produce a unanimous, dramatic conclusion — committees rarely do. What it did was reframe the conversation away from "which one is cheapest per SMS" (all of them, FaithDash included, are ultimately paying the same market rate for delivery) and toward "which one will still be doing what we need in six months without someone maintaining a shadow spreadsheet." That's the question that actually mattered, and it's the one the sign-up page never asks you.
If you're the one bringing a shortlist to your own committee meeting, borrow this list freely. It won't tell you which platform to pick — but it'll make sure whichever one you choose was chosen for the right reasons, not just the number at the top of the pricing page.