Brother Isaac had a theory, and on paper it was a good one. Email is free — or free-feeling, anyway, once you're already paying for data — and SMS costs UGX 35 a part. If he could get even half the congregation reading announcements by email instead of text, the church's messaging balance would stretch a lot further. So one Thursday he sat down, turned on the email channel for the visitor welcome sequence and the Sunday reminder, and figured he'd watch the SMS spend drop over the following month.
It didn't drop the way he expected. What dropped was how many people actually knew there was a service change the following Sunday.
He found out why on Sunday itself, standing at the door greeting people as they arrived confused about the earlier start time. "You sent that? I didn't see anything." A few had email addresses on file that were old church-registration addresses nobody checked anymore, made years ago for a form that asked for one. A couple more had the right address but hadn't opened the church's email in months — it sat under work mail, promotions, and the inevitable pile of things marked "important" that had trained everyone to stop looking. One usher admitted, not unkindly, that he genuinely didn't remember his own email password and hadn't logged in since setting it up.
Why this isn't really a FaithDash problem or an email problem
This is where it's worth being honest instead of clever: email isn't a bad channel, and FaithDash genuinely supports it — automation rules for visitor follow-ups, event reminders, and attendee follow-ups can each go out by SMS, email, or both, and the Messages page can send either straight to the same segmented recipient groups the church already uses. The feature works exactly as built. What Brother Isaac ran into wasn't a bug. It's a fact about how most Ugandan congregations actually use their phones day to day: SMS gets read because it interrupts you, sitting in the one inbox on the phone that everyone checks without needing an app open or a data bundle active. Email, for a lot of members — especially older ones, or ones whose email address was collected once on a form and never touched again — is a second-tier channel they didn't sign up to check regularly, if they check it at all.
That gap isn't unique to church communication. It's the same reason generic bulk SMS portals in Uganda are built around SMS as the primary product and treat email, where they offer it, as an afterthought — the market has already voted with its open rates.
What Brother Isaac actually did instead
He didn't turn email off. He just stopped treating it as a cost-saving swap and started treating it as a second channel for the people it genuinely reaches — a handful of leaders and partner organizations who'd specifically asked to be looped in by email for record-keeping, plus a monthly newsletter-style update that nobody's schedule depended on. For anything time-sensitive — a service time change, an event reminder, a funeral announcement — he went back to SMS as the default, sending to the same live segmented groups he'd been using before, and let email ride alongside it for whoever preferred it, rather than instead of it.
What it actually costs, honestly
Here's the part he had to accept: there was no cheap workaround. SMS through FaithDash is UGX 35 per part, drawn from the church's prepaid balance same as always, and that's the market rate for the underlying gateway — not a price FaithDash marks up or discounts. Email, where FaithDash sends it, doesn't carry that per-message cost, which is real and worth using where it actually gets read. But the saving only exists on messages people would have opened anyway. Sending an urgent reminder by email to save UGX 35 a part isn't a saving if nobody sees it until Tuesday.
If you're weighing the same trade Brother Isaac was, the honest answer isn't "pick one." It's: know which of your announcements can afford to be missed, and don't put those on email alone. For everything else — the ones where it actually matters that people show up on time — SMS is still the channel that gets read at a red light, in a matatu, between customers at the market stall, without anyone needing to remember a password first.