Can People Request Help Without Calling the Church Office?
Yes. A church can put a help widget on its own website where a visitor describes what they need, sees matching local providers, and submits a request without phoning anyone. The request arrives in the church's referral list, the nominated people are emailed, and the visitor gets a reference code.
Why this matters more than it sounds
There is a group of people your office never hears from. They are not avoiding help. They are avoiding the phone call.
Some of them work during your office hours. Some do not speak English comfortably on a call. Some have asked a church for help before and it did not go well. Some are simply looking at 11pm, which is when a person in trouble is most likely to be looking.
A church with only a phone number reaches none of them.
What the visitor sees
A “Need help?” button on the church’s own site. Not a redirect to a vendor’s page — it sits on your domain, next to your church’s name.
They describe what they need. They get matched local providers back, with hours and contact details, which means the visit is useful even if they never submit anything. If they want the church involved, they pick the providers they are interested in and submit a request with their own contact details and the consent wording your church wrote.
They get a reference code. That matters: it gives someone with no account and no relationship to your church a way to ask “what happened to my request?”
What the church sees
The request arrives in the referral list, one referral per provider the visitor picked, grouped so a single request reads as one submission rather than four.
Your nominated people are emailed as soon as it comes in — your admins, or a benevolence team address instead. The email says who asked, how many providers they picked, whether they can be contacted back, and links to the request. It deliberately carries no phone number, email address, or description of the need. Those stay behind your login.
On the dashboard, a web requests needing follow-up card lists each request once, oldest first, and a badge on Referrals shows how many nobody has picked up yet. One click turns a request into a client record, linking every provider at once. If the person may already be someone you know, or may have written in before, the screen says so, so two volunteers do not call the same person twice. Nothing is merged automatically.
The honest limits
It is off until you turn it on. An admin enables it, chooses the recipients, and sets the consent wording under Admin → Settings → Website Integration.
Turning it on is not sufficient. The form stays hidden until the Cloudflare anti-spam check is configured for your site. A church that flips the switch and sees no change on its website is waiting on that step, not looking at a bug.
It is not an emergency channel. Anything involving immediate danger goes to 911, and the widget says so.
Related
Common questions
- Do we have to build anything?
- No. It is a one-line snippet pasted into your site. It is available on the Engage and Outreach plans.
- Will this flood us with spam?
- The form is protected by a Cloudflare check and is rate-limited per visitor and per network. It stays hidden until that check is configured for your site, so a church cannot accidentally switch on an unprotected form.
- Is it on by default?
- No. Requests are off until an admin turns them on, chooses who gets emailed, and sets the church's own consent wording.