Learn more about Parable Group at https://www.parablegroup.com
Learn more about the Echo Prayer App at https://www.echoprayer.com
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Tithely provides the tools you need to engage with your church online, stay connected, increase generosity, and simplify the lives of your staff.
With tools like text and email messaging, custom church apps and websites, church management software, digital giving, and so much more… it’s no wonder over 37,000 churches in 50 countries trust Tithely to help run their church.
Learn more at https://tithely.com
Learn more about Parable Group at https://www.parablegroup.com
Learn more about the Echo Prayer App at https://www.echoprayer.com
--
Tithely provides the tools you need to engage with your church online, stay connected, increase generosity, and simplify the lives of your staff.
With tools like text and email messaging, custom church apps and websites, church management software, digital giving, and so much more… it’s no wonder over 37,000 churches in 50 countries trust Tithely to help run their church.
Learn more at https://tithely.com
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Modern Church Leader here with my new bud, greg, who actually has taken over as CEO of the Parable Group. But you've been doing it for a while now. You're six years in and we're going to talk a lot about kind of that journey and the new prayer app that you guys have and, you know, have a good time today. So welcome to the show, greg. Sounds good, frank. Yeah, glad to be here with you today. Yeah, it's going to be fun. It's going to be fun. Where are you coming to us from? San Luis Obispo, california.
Speaker 1:Oh, I mean.
Speaker 2:I'm in San Diego, we're right next to each other. We should have done this live in person. So good, so good. Well, man, parable Group has been around for a long time. We're going to talk a lot about prayer and everything, but I'd love to get you know, give our listeners kind of your background and how you got connected with you know doing business in the church.
Speaker 1:Yeah sure, so Parable Group was founded by a guy named Steve Potratz in the 80s with a mission to serve Christian publishers and Christian retailers.
Speaker 1:So that was in a day of lots of Christian bookstores in the 80s and 90s, and so what has continued on over 30 plus years is this mission to get the right message to the right person at the right time to draw people closer to Christ.
Speaker 1:So when I met Steve over a decade ago in this area Central Coast, California where Parable Groups operated all this time, it became clear that I was in similar spaces of local retail, digital marketing, a little bit of software and tech, and that perhaps there would be a day where Steve would need to move on. He was 70 at the time that I took on parable group and that I may be looking for a kingdom business or some way with which to weave business and mission together. So that's kind of how I was on a journey through college and early career of you know, ministry and mission and how does, how, do you weave kingdom principles into running an operating business, and so still on that journey. But it's an area of passion and interest. But yeah, Parable Group is my main work and our mission is to serve Christian organizations to spread their message, their story, their content, whether that's an author with a book or a church tech forum. That's reaching pastors, really with an aim to strengthen what they're doing and better tell their story.
Speaker 2:So we're still doing that today. How did you and Steve meet?
Speaker 1:We actually met at a global leadership summit hosted locally in California around 2012,. Summit hosted locally in California around 2012, you know and we went to lunch and got to know each other. And six years later, we sat down again for lunch and I said, hey, I'm in this software tech thing. It's going to get bought out again, just like the last one. I was in. I think I want to do something different. And he said, well, I'm looking for someone. And I said I want to do something different. And he said, well, I'm looking for someone. And I said, well, I'm looking for something that has a kingdom dimension to business and 2018, he transitioned out and I was in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's cool. So you, you kind of bought the business from him, took it over and what, uh, what did you see in the business, like, what did you see in Parable Group that you were excited about?
Speaker 1:Yeah, just first of all, an amazing team with people that really love what we do, which is to work with local retailers and publishers and to work with Christian ministries.
Speaker 1:And then there's just that heartbeat for marketing. I love getting the right message to the right person at the right time, and you know, modern marketing is very technical All the analytics required to do it right, measure it, help a client get results Right, and then just that I mean there's like, there's a culture, a heartbeat of love for the customer, love for the product, love for the mission, and that's something that over time I I don't think I realized how important and valuable that is that ethos, and I was very fortunate to inherit a very healthy ethos and a commitment of a team. My leadership team is still in place with all of those, all of the team been with Parable Group for more than a decade, some of them 25 plus years, so it's a really, really amazing team that has been assembled that I received the benefit of and you know now my role is to kind of adapt and shift and change for where we've been and what the future may hold Right. All right.
Speaker 2:Can you, can you, give like a real concrete example of the kind of work you guys do like work with and what kind of digital things you do with them?
Speaker 1:yeah. So a client might come to us and say, hey, we have um. We have a goal to grow our audience and we have 5 000 email subscribers and we um. It's our aim to bring these christian resources to these audiences. And who might be?
Speaker 2:like? Who would give us like, a like? What kind of entity would come to you with their 5 000 subscribers?
Speaker 1:yeah. So we have um, a guy named roy goble who's an author. He came to us with the goal to grow his audience and he reaches um christians who are interested in growing in generosity. Um, we've done some book marketing for, uh, with Prayer. So this book here. There are some really great friends Ryan, peter and Cameron with this goal to take this book and bless the church with the intersection of prayer and leadership, and so it is a lot of book marketing.
Speaker 1:We serve some church tech platforms like Planning Center, pushpay. Fively, those types of organizations who want to reach church leaders. But the specific way that we do that is often leading with value-add content and often through email marketing, social media. So if we can get somebody on, say, an Instagram promoted post that would say 10 ways to increase generosity in your church, that would be. To do that requires thoughtful targeting, thoughtful messaging, thoughtful design and if that leads to a landing page, it's going to give that person value and we'd say, yeah, download, I want that content, here's my email, send it to me.
Speaker 1:And the specific, I guess, kind of unique value we bring to that experience is um is, can you really measure the dollars going in and then the results coming out Right. Very easy in marketing to kind of spend a lot and not really know what's working and what's not. Um, obviously, with digital marketing and the ability to use audience targeting, you can track all the way through. You can say, okay, well, to get a lead would be worth this amount to me, and if I can put a budget that would be very targeted and very measurable, then we can help guys like Roy and some other authors that we work directly to say, okay, for X dollars, we can grow this audience, which we then have other means with which to create value, whether that be through more books that we'll write or courses that we'll launch.
Speaker 1:So one course we work with is the journey course. Um, it's a um, beautiful set of content around sexual addiction and helping us go through, uh, understanding of that, either for ourselves or for someone we're working closely with. So there's there's many organizations and individuals like that that created something and I just I want to get the word out I need help doing it and I don't have a full marketing team. Can you help? That's where, where we love to jump in. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I love that Super cool Um. So then I guess you showed the prayer book. Um, I know that's a current thing that you guys are doing too, but you also. So you jump into parable group. You're doing your thing for the last six years and then you decided to go off and acquire another piece of tech specifically around prayer and a prayer app. So I mean, tell us like it's fascinating to me, right, like your digital marketing for kind of ministries, authors, those kinds of things. And then you jump into, hey, we're going to add a prayer app into our arsenal. So talk through that like what, what was that dream like?
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's this, uh, there's this book and this visual that really helped us about three or four years ago called lead from the future, and if you can imagine kind of a you know um upper right quadrant, um constellation diagram of what's in your kind of near term orbit and what's in your in your further you know orbit out in the future, and one of those things we drew on a board in a strategic session was some form of faith tech like an app or some digital platform that would serve the church, that would have an audience of people who are hungry to grow in their faith, and something that we could steward as an organization, and at the time we didn't have specific ideas of what that would be.
Speaker 1:So that was a seed that then led us to work with this team at Echo Prayer so Echo is the name of the prayer app. It was built in 2015. So it's been around almost 10 years and it had been launched and done quite well without a lot of activity or investment or really marketing behind it, and so we came alongside them a few years ago and helped the founders do a little bit of marketing and grow their audience and also serve their audience with some content and recommended books around, prayer and that sort of thing, and they came to the end of their time saying, hey, we're not really able to run this anymore, We've moved on to other things and we had the opportunity to add it to our suite of products.
Speaker 1:And so for Parable Group, it is a new thing to be running a mobile technology, but it's not new to be serving an audience or to be working in relationship with churches and Christian ministries. But part of what we're now doing, after almost two years of stewarding this app, is to assess what is it and how is it blessing people and how could it bless more people and help more organizations prioritize prayer. So it's a it's an extension of parable groups mission and something that we're excited about and excited to share.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, what? What is it like? What is a prayer app or like in the Christian context, right Like, or in a normal church. It's like you have like in my church, right you, you walk in and over to the left is kind of the you know, request prayer, like submit prayer. Kind of like there's an area right and like literally you go over there and you can like write down your prayer requests and put them in the box and then you know the pastoral staff is going to grab those and and have the prayer list. And now we have some tech, but nothing too sophisticated, but it's like that's the prayer list right there. It's people submitting prayers into a box and then pastoral staff prays.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so there's a process there. Whether it's documented and digital or not, there's a process, right, there's an input point, physical card, then those get organized somewhere and somebody probably types them out, emails them out. But the way that that's lacking is do you get notified if someone prayed for you, maybe? Maybe the pastor reaches out if it's some acute. You know, I have a surgery at 10 am on Wednesday, you know, does someone call you on Thursday, ask out when? Often, yes, um, but then how would the, how would you get updates Right, other than, oh, do we have Frank's cell phone? Can we email him? Who is this person? So what if that person? What if you could actually provide an update via some channel? So so I'll just kind of back up and say, well, what is a prayer app and how does echo prayer kind of fit into the landscape of apps?
Speaker 1:There are many apps that are out there that do lots of things. I would say that echo prayer is specifically a tool to help individuals manage their prayer lists and to set reminders to pray. Other apps have a lot more content that like abide and hallow and praycom. They're a lot more content forward, meaning they have lots of recommended guides and people that provide the contents, often some voiceovers that allow you to kind of enter into a meditative experience with the Lord really helpful. Echo has built some text-based guided prayers into the app experience. But really the goal is to provide a place for you to kind of have that conversation with a friend on Sunday morning and tell them about that surgery on Wednesday and say, yeah, I'll pray for you, but do we and do we remember and how can we, you know, be a little more organized around that?
Speaker 1:So the kind of person that's really drawn to this app is someone that does like lists and does like to track things and likes to keep things in one place, and so Echo is a free app for people to download and begin tracking prayers and getting into also a focused prayer experience. So we have this button called Pray Now and it kind of takes over the screen and you can swipe through the different cards. That for me it's like my four kids each have a card and my staff each have a card and uh, the different uh verses. There's a verse that you know came to mind and I'll just paste it in and you know, have that be in the flow of the thing that I want to be reminded of Right, um. But then where there's more is how do you turn that into a shared experience? And that's really what Echo Plus is and that has been around for some five years. But what we did this past year is expanded it and made a lot more robust to help Christian ministries better organize their prayer requests. Right, right, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I mean, it makes sense. It's like tithely giving was a way to take the you know, physical giving in a basket and make it digital. And this is kind of making prayer digital and putting it on your phone so that you can have your prayer list and be reminded about it. I mean super simple, but for everyone who's on their phone. You have it with you all the time and your notebook doesn't remind you, so you know your phone will.
Speaker 1:Right, well, and like I said, every church has this Christian ministry that prioritizes prayer. Every Christian school, every Christian led business has some way to have people submit prayer requests. Right, it could be a WhatsApp group, it could be a text thread, it could be an email list, it could be paper, right, you know?
Speaker 2:and so we have Slack, so we have a whole prayer channel and people post hey, whatever surgery or someone passed away or whatever it is, and so people, the whole company has the prayer channel and there's a meeting that happens once a week that people can kind of jump into. So it's just done in Slack for us right now.
Speaker 1:But there you go.
Speaker 1:It's a system that was designed using software to create a little bit more interaction, and that's what Echo aims to be is a kind of best-in-class prayer management system for organizations that say, yeah, we really want to embrace prayer and weave it through our organization, embrace prayer and weave it through our organization.
Speaker 1:So let's create an input point where we have a web form where people can say hi, I'm Frank, here's what's going on. You can mark it as anonymous if it is super private thing, and then there's tools to either get that to a staff team or an elder leadership team or it can actually go into a church's feed that gets shared with an intercessor team. And then the other thing we can do is like small groups. Right, you're sitting around a small group of 10 people and there's some text group you might be using, but is there one place where we can list those things? And then, when I'm praying for Frank a few days after our small group, he can get a notification that that Greg's been praying for him throughout the week and and chatter back and forth about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, what. What's been since you? I mean, you've been connected with Echo for a while. You guys have kind of taken it over over the last couple of years. What? Where have you seen it, you know, taking off? You know, like, where are you seeing it? Kind of like people, really, you know, enjoying the product. Is it like in churches? Is it in ministries, Like where's the signs of life?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, small to medium sized churches that are really wanting to prioritize prayer. We get such great feedback from those pastors who are like we get such great feedback from those pastors who are like I'm so glad I have this. I mean, even a small church of 50 people, they all just join the group Right, so let's have our prayer group and everybody in the church is in there, and so churches are a really strong user base. We've got several thousand churches that are using it. No-transcript. We're having an outreach tomorrow. Would you pray for us?
Speaker 1:You know they can post that prayer and if I'm either following that feed through the app or I get emailed those requests through echo, because we added the prayers and then we click send email and it goes to all the followers, um, then they can be alerted and then can interact and chatter back and hear the updates and follow along, so that churches and missionaries are a real strong use case. A lot of small groups and we've had a bunch of christian schools and then even like a faith-led business, I use it to share with my advisors what's going on with things that I'm working on and ways that I need specific prayer. So I've been I've seen it used a lot of different ways, and that's kind of a sign of a flexible platform is people configuring it for different use cases, some of which you design for and others of which kind of get discovered.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, no, I love that. Where do you. Where do you go? Like? It sounds so basic on one hand, right, like you know, app-based prayer list, but it's got a bunch of like connectivity and flexibility and it's, you know, bringing the communities together and groups, small groups and churches and all that. So, like, where do you go now? Like, how do you keep improving the tried and true you know prayer list and making it better in the digital age?
Speaker 1:Yeah well, that's a great question of kind of where this is going and headed. We really want to listen to customer and understand, you know, we believe we're solving a particular problem, like we talk about the process, right, how is prayer submitted, how is prayer received, organized, sent, syndicated, and then how do you create the feedback loops? So, with that as kind of a primary problem solve, I think philosophically, one of the questions we're asking about an app is whether it should be a, a special purpose tool for a particular, you know, need prayer and prayer organization, right, you know. And or is there? There's a role for the super app, like the, the U version app is a super app, right, it'll do many things, and so and I'm sure you guys have thought about this, you know, from a product perspective with Tidely, is what is it? Do you want to create these specialized apps for specialized purpose that don't have a lot of noise? Or is the weaving of content where there are these guide, more guided prayer experiences? Is that really what the customers want, right? And I think so. That's a big strategic question for us as we kind of look at the other apps and see, you know, what's the engagement in that content and is there a role for a very specialized tool like this?
Speaker 1:Um, and that's where I'd say our current thesis is.
Speaker 1:But with a lot of our relationships with Christian publishers and ministries, there's lots of desire to provide content. Right now, we're doing a lot of that more through kind of email marketing and communication with our users outside of the app experience so that there isn't noise, and I think that's the approach that we believe we want to take with prayer is that you're using this digital device that is known for being the distraction demon. It's the thing that is keeping us from praying because I just am scrolling and spending too much time doing other things. But can it be redeemed and can we actually have tech to help us to be to not get alerted of all the things happening all day long, but actually be reminded to pray at 10 o'clock for my daughter and at 11 o'clock for my son and actually have the tech help me be a more prayerful person and abide with Jesus throughout the whole day? Can the tool do that? And I think that's that's what we're looking to really nail and to do that as best as we can.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how's the Echo Plus portion Cause that's like the premium feature set, the paid part of the product. Like are you finding people are really interested in those like the community aspects of it and everything? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, our subscriber base is growing, so Echo Plus really has two tiers to it. So Echo Plus has been around for some years. It's $15 a year, available in Google and Apple stores, and what that allows you to do is to create a group or create a feed. So think a missionary use case a small group, a family you know, or even a small church could use the tool and upgrade. And if one person upgrades, everybody benefits, right, everybody gets the free app and can join the groups and follow the feeds. So that's Echo Plus and that's been going well and we're sort of improving how people experience that.
Speaker 1:One big addition we made this past year was to add a web app.
Speaker 1:So it was mobile app only, so you're typing with your thumbs and if you have high volumes of prayers that gets really hard.
Speaker 1:So that was a big change and addition we made and we're getting great feedback from our Echo Plus users who have been asking for this for a long time. And then Echo Plus for Ministries is the product that serves churches and ministry organizations and faith-led businesses and that has a 30-day trial and it's a $300 a year subscription that gets access to a whole robust set of tools, including the prayer submission form and a way with which to send out prayer requests through email and such, and all the web dashboard and tools. So so that's going quite well. That actually just launched a month ago. We did a private beta in the spring and it's going great. We're having people sign up and get through their 30-day trial, and that's all happening now. So we're just wanting to spread the word and our goal is that thousands of organizations would use this and be blessed by it, and now we can continue to serve organizations this way, yeah, yeah, I mean that's super cool.
Speaker 2:I mean going from kind of an agency into a software business. I mean you, it sounds like you had some kind of background in all of that, but it's a big shift right. And now you're out there like shipping product. What is the? What does the team look like on the tech side of things?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so Parable Group is a bunch of technical marketers and so while we do some work in retail, like we talked about, it's a very technical driven team. We have software, we have retail analytics, we hook in with point of sale data, so we have a pretty strong tech and data background. And then our digital agency doing all the tracking and monitoring actually requires pretty strong engineering experience and aptitude. So that's it's a really fun working with marketers that have the right brain, creative and technical teams that have the left brain, science and weaving those two too. So Echo, as a technical product that's to be marketed, certainly fits in our ecosystem.
Speaker 1:Running mobile app technology is the new space and we've been able to work with some teams actually out of Romania who are bivocational missionaries and we've been able to benefit from their work and their support to help with some of that mobile tech. Yeah, that's true, but yeah, we're on a journey around you know Parable Group running these different things and determining how do we steward this app into the future and perhaps add to running more apps or just finding ways we can serve and bless more people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that so good. Or just finding ways we can serve and bless more people? Yeah, I love that so good. Where is it? Just people go look up Echo Prayer on the App Store and they can go check it out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Echo Prayer can be found in Google and Apple. Echoprayercom is our website that explains all the different features and such I downloaded it today.
Speaker 2:This morning I was checking it out, so I got my first prayer in there, um, but I got to go check out the echo plus portion of it. Um, but it seems super cool. Um, is there any like new feature sets that you're dreaming up right now that you think you're going to lean into soon?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so one of the new things that we've built that is, as these users of the new stuff uh begin to use it is the ability to share out prayer requests in batches. And so think of you know, a large organization that may receive, like a Christian radio station or a large church or a ministry. That's global. They receive maybe hundreds of prayer requests at a time and then they have hundreds of intercessors. So the problem we've tried to solve there is that not everyone needs everything, because can one individual pray for hundreds of prayer requests, right, right? So we actually created a batching system that is working and ready but just hasn't had a lot of activity yet, because we just launched it and it's part of the new features, yeah, so I'll be really curious to see how that solves some of those higher volume environments where, you know, you just think, if I'm a user, I'm on your email list, I say I want to pray and we get, you know, hundreds of prayer requests, but then I'm actually going to get five or 10 that come to me and I get an email that says, hey, your prayer requests are ready.
Speaker 1:You know, would you join us and pray? Pray now, right, and you don't even need the app. You can just open it up in a browser URL so that way people who are following you are part of your prayer ministry. You know they don't have to have the app, they can just click a link and they can open up and they can get in this prayer experience and swipe through their 10 cards and then Frank gets notified that some person prayed for them. Right, and it kind of protected, anonymized kind of way, but still super interesting to create these tools and see how they get adopted and used. So I'll be really excited to see that leveraged in some really creative ways, yeah yeah, totally yeah, totally yeah.
Speaker 2:It's cool, man. Well, greg, this has been great and thanks for coming on and kind of sharing what you guys are up to and and even your journey into parable group.
Speaker 1:It's great to get to know you and kind of what you've been up to for the last six years uh, helping to build a great kingdom business the time and appreciate all the questions and the passion and love what you guys are doing at tithely and serving so many churches um thinking about the modernization of all kinds of things.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I mean great work. Church tech is a blast. Where should folks go?
Speaker 1:do you want to go check out the echo app or go to parable group, like uh, tell folks where to where to head next yeah, echo prayer dot com if you're interested in learning about modernizing the prayer chain, or use an app for your personal or for your organization, echo prayercom. Start there.
Speaker 2:Let's go Love it Awesome. Thanks, Greg. Thanks guys for listening. Definitely check out echo prayer and we'll catch you next week on another episode of modern church leader. See ya.