How To Add A Free Live Chat Widget To Your Church’s Website

Alex Mills: Well hey there and welcome to Pro Church Daily, the show where in ten minutes or less, you’ll get your daily dose of tips and tactics to help your church share the message of Jesus, while we navigate the biggest communication shift we’ve seen in the last 500 years. I’m your host, Alex Mills. I’m joined, as always, by the boss man, it’s Brady Shearer. Today, we’re talking about how to add a free live chat widget to your church’s website.

Brady Shearer: Want to start with a story that we got from a user of Nucleus. This comes a user named Justin. He’s the lead pastor of a church. He said, “I cannot tell you how many great interactions that we have had with people who are skeptical and unsure about church through our live widget.”

He pasted in a conversation. If you want to see an example of what this live chat widget looks like, there are a number of different platforms that will allow you to enable this. We’ll talk about those software options later on in this episode, but this individual example on a Nucleus can be see at forefrontchurch.info. Like I said, you don’t need Nucleus to do this. We have a walkthrough in the show notes for this episode on how to do it within Nucleus, but forefrontchurch.info is where you can see an example of what this looks like.

Here’ the conversation. The conversation started with a user landing on this church’s Nucleus and asking the question: “Why is your world logo upside down?” This church’s logo is basically an upside-down globe. The conversation went from there.

The Forefront team, Jason, I believe responded. He said, “When Jesus interacted with people, he changed their world. We hope that when we love like he did, we can turn the world upside down.”

The visitor responds, “Dude, this feels like my kind of place. I haven’t even been to your church yet.”

Forefront responds, “Man, that’s awesome. We strive to be a church for the faithful as well as the skeptical. It’s messy, but we like it like that.”

Response: “What time is church, man?”

“We meet Sundays. 8:30, 10, 11:30 and 5.”

“Sweet. Thanks for the chat. I’ll see you soon.”

That is one conversation of dozens that we have seen from those that use Nucleus enabling live chat on their site. You don’t need to use Nucleus to do this, but we work so closely with Nucleus users that that’s where we usually see it happening because they’re using our platform. There are a number of different software options that you can use to do that.

Most Nucleus users have that a website, software called “Drift.com” is the best. They have a free option. You can get started for free and see if it works for you. We personally use intercom.com on all of our Pro Church Tools products because they existed before Drift. They are outrageously expensive and we love them, but we pay them many thousands of dollars each month.

We just surpassed during Nucleus Launch Week, more than 5,000 conversations with Nucleus users and leads, which is pretty crazy. More than 5,000 conversations.

Wanted to share with you some more stories of people using live chat on your website to convince you that your church’s website needs this. This one comes from Nathan. He says, “Boom! We got our first Drift interaction via Nucleus just now and the conversation read like this: ‘Hello, my name is Jennifer. My family and I visited your church today for the first time and we loved it. Everyone was beyond friendly, made us feel at home. We look forward to coming back. We’re wondering if there was any way for us to find out the songs that were played during church today, some that we knew, some were new to us. Also, what was the time for the lady’s meeting this Friday? Thank you for allowing us the opportunity of enjoying worship with you. We also loved the message that Ramon preached today.'”

Alex Mills: Awesome.

Brady Shearer: This is the power of live chat. It allows people in your church to get in touch with you immediately, instantly on your website. When you use your website as the single destination for every next step in your church, which you should, that’s why we built a software to allow you to do that, we want you do that no matter what you’re using, it is so powerful.

One of the ways that you can take it to another level is enabling a live chat widget. If you go nucleus.church, if you go to storytape.com, there is a little speech bubble in the bottom right corner of the screen where you can start chatting with our team at Story Tape or Nucleus right away and we can have a live chat going on. It can trigger to email if it goes beyond live chat. There are so many things that you can do, but it makes you that much more accessible as a church. This is seizing the 167 connection.

Alex Mills: Yeah, for sure.

Brady Shearer: It’s one thing for someone to attend your church and talk to your pastor. It’s another when you have another 167 hours beyond your Sunday service and live chat on your website, one of the best ways to do that.

Another story, this one comes from Devin. He says, “If you’re not using Drift with your Nucleus, you really should be.” Again, whatever website you’re using, live chat is awesome.

Here’s an interaction we had with a user on the site. The conversation went like this: … This is a good example of, it’s not super spiritual or exciting. This is with a current member of the church, but it shows just how powerful these options can be when it comes to just making sure everything is working correctly.

Visitor says: “Hey, I registered for a man-to-man conference. I was told that I would need to show my ticket QR scan code at the door, but I can’t find it. Can you help?”

The church response: “Hey there. Just give me a few minutes. I’ll figure that out for you. Okay, I have the registration pulled up. What name is your ticket registered under?”

Person responds with the ticket. Says, “Great. I have it here. This is registering as a group. Tickets will be emailed.” Basically solves the whole customer support issue with the conference over the live chat. The person at the end is like, “Man, thank you so much. Have a blessed day. This was awesome.” Live chat.

Alex Mills: Absolutely.

Brady Shearer: One more story. This one comes from Owen. Says, “We are on Drift. In a one month period, we have had 42 conversations, half of them coming from our Google AdWords campaign.”

Alex Mills: Wow.

Brady Shearer: That means more than 20 conversations with people that are not yet connected to Owen’s church prompting real dialogue and communication in one month. Have you had 20 conversations with new people in your community through live chat this month? That’s the power of live chat.

Alex Mills: Look, if you’re like me and you serve at a church of about 100 people, 200 people, you may be thinking to yourself right now, “Oh, there’s not too many people in our congregation. I can’t imagine that I’d be having too many conversations during the week with people on live chat.” Somebody commented in our Nucleus Insider’s group just the other day with this testimonial about how many conversations that they’re having on Drift.

He says, “We love Drift.” This is from Ben. “I’ve had several conversations every day since we’ve installed it. I need to get more of our team on it. Everything from kid’s ministry questions to counseling divorced couples, prayer for pets, all over. It’s amazing.”

Somebody responded to him in this thread and said, “Hey man, you’ve had multiple conversations every day? How many people go to your church?”

Brady Shearer: Got to be a big church, right?

Alex Mills: He says, “We have about 100 every week.”

Brady Shearer: Wow.

Alex Mills: Yeah. In a community of 100 people, there’s multiple people every single day interacting with a pastor online. It’s incredible, and with Drift, it’s free.

Brady Shearer: We talk about seizing the 167. Your church is one hour each week. You’ve got 167 hours to communicate with people beyond that. That’s 167 more times.

We’ve talked about internet statistics. We’ve talked about how 50-plus people spent an average of four hours a week on social media. I don’t think any of us truly grasp how powerful the internet is and how we are truly living through the biggest communication shift in the last 500 years. We’re in the middle of it, so we’re kind of pioneers in this new world trying to figure things out. We’ll look in 10 years and be like, “Wow, the world was changed forever.”

Every institution is being disrupted. Our churches are not immune to that. This is the one of the ways that, for free to start, you can seize the 167 and start having real meaningful interactions.

There are other options, too. You can embed Facebook live chat.

Alex Mills: Which is awesome.

Brady Shearer: [crosstalk 00:07:10] directly into messenger. There’s a tool called Many Chat, “Many” as in many people in a room. Manychat.com, it’s like $10 a month and you can take your Facebook chat to the next level. Automatic bots, intercom, Many chat and drift all allow that as well. You can say, “If this person says this, tell them this”, and you can qualify things.

Even we aren’t really at the level where we need to do that, but if you’re running a ton of ads, that might be necessary. Point is, it’s free to try and if it doesn’t work out for you, you’ve got nothing to lose. All you’re going to gain is, oh, right, real meaningful conversations with people that are either connected to your church already, and you can help them take the next step to get them even closer to Jesus, love God, love people, make disciples, get even more of that, or if they’re not connected to a church or any church, you can get them even closer to being connected to Jesus and his radical message of hope and reconciliation.

Alex Mills: Awesome. Yeah, that’s great.

Brady Shearer: That’ll do it for today’s episode of Pro Church Daily. We’ll see you tomorrow.