Google Voice for Church - and Personal - use

If you phone my wife during the work day her cell phone will ring.  If you call in the evenings, her cell phone and our home phone will ring at the same time.  If she’s at home she can use the home phone, if she’s out of the house, she catches the call on her cell phone.  If you call in the middle of the night her phone(s) may ring, or you may get voicemail, depending on who you are.  When she’s on vacation, if family members call, her cell phone will ring.  However, if others call, they go straight to voicemail.  If someone leaves a voicemail, she gets an email transcription of their voice message.  When someone texts her she can either read and respond to the text from her phone, or if she’s near a computer, she can read it and respond to it on a computer.

Someday she may decide to change cell phone numbers or we may get a new home number (or do away with it all together).  However, all our friends will never know the difference because the number they dial or text to will stay the same.

It’s all done with Google Voice.  Just about everybody should have a Google Voice account.  When you sign up you can pick an available local phone number.  You then configure the account to handle calls and texts as I described above. 

Think of the advantages of this service for a church.  You can customize voicemail based on who is calling, you can listen to voicemail as it's being entered and answer right then, you can customize what callers are forwarded to what phone(s), and much more.  

And…it’s free!