ChurchExplorer app
Enjoy free days out visiting the UK’s best church heritage
The ChurchExplorer app is THE companion guide for discovering the rich stories of churches across the UK.
With ChurchExplorer you can discover the stories of churches and follow self-guided:
- Church interior building tours
- Churchyard trails
- Single page overviews
- Multi-church journeys
- Pilgrimages (1+ days)
At the centre of every experience are the buildings that have been at the heart of our community for centuries.
Use the ChurchExplorer’s map or search feature to find churches and tours.
Save your favourites and discover their stories both in the app and through seamless links to other digital content.
The ChurchExplorer app is a digital info point for churches. It guides visitors to the stories you want to tell. Everything you want to share is at visitor’s fingertips, whether your church is closed or not. Follow indoor tours, churchyard trails or pilgrimages to multiple places of worship. ChurchExplorer makes every visit meaningful and supports generous giving too.
Dan Boys, founder of AT Creative
Self-guided experiences
Offer fascinating self-led tours of your church with ChurchExplorer, without the clutter of leaflets, banners or exhibition boards!
Church building tours
- Showcase best features (or hidden gems) inside your church
- Bring your tours to life with text, images and audio
- Offer a guide to your stained glass windows or a create a fun quiz trail for children
- Add up to 12 points of interest, each linked by a church floor plan with interactive hotspots (included in the set up costs)
- Visitors use their phone to take the tour
- Add online/text giving donation buttons to your tour pages
Churches with a good visitor experience are more likely to receive donations from visitors. Don’t miss out on vital revenue!
Churchyard trails and pilgrimages
Extend (or start your tour) in the churchyard, in the wider local community or make it part of a multi-church journey
- Audio auto-play – audio content automatically plays when visitors reach each point of interest
- GPS-locked content – choose which content is only available to people who follow the tour
- Multi-church tour – create trails with two or more churches
“There really ought to be a trail which would allow people to travel around the country bagging these churches as hill-walkers do with munros.”
Peter Ross, ‘Chasing Steeples’ author
Do you already have a church tour on your website?
ChurchExplorer integrates seamlessly with your Wi-Fi system.
Visitors tap two buttons on your dedicated church page to connect. No need to mess around with connection settings, QR codes or typing in website links to access information you’ve already prepared.
Through ChurchExplorer’s Wi-Fi integration you can link visitors directly to content on your website or other Wi-Fi enabled devices that support a browser.
Perhaps you already have a self-guided/virtual tour or webpages with specific information about notable people or features linked with the church. Through ChurchExplorer you can link your church visitors directly to this content and also benefit from ChurchExplorer’s cross-promotion.
FAQs
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Our church is often closed
We understand security can be an issue, particularly at remote and rural churches…but that is where ChurchExplorer can help.
Participating churches that aren’t left open are opting for a churchyard tour to highlight those features that can be seen at any time.
Within the tour content we can still offer a building tour (for visitors to understand what lies behind the locked doors) or introduce stories from the church, and provide a link through to their website/church near you page to highlight when they are open, if people want to come back.
What a churchyard tour therefore does is provide the visitor with meaningful content that also allows them to get a feel for what is behind the locked doors, and signposts to further information (and donation links). If the ask is right then people are more likely to donate, and come back, if they feel their initial visit was worthwhile.
If you do include a tour of the church building, and the church happens to be open then visitors will have a fantastic ChurchExplorer self-guided tour to follow!
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We don’t have phone signal at our church
If there is no/poor 4/5G outside your church don’t worry, visitors can still take advantage of ChurchExplorer.
If people have downloaded your tour on the app before they arrive they don’t need any mobile connectivity because the app works completely offline.
Furthermore, if your church has Wi-Fi, can you provide access for visitors to use it to download the app?
Regardless, we also offer a companion kiosk app that we can install on Android tablets. The companion app only displays your tour content and the tablet can be secured to a fixed point such a table, wall or pew.
Remember, the app features other churches who are all doing their own promotion, so some of your visitors will arrive having done other tours on the ChurchExplorer app.
ChurchExplorer is coming soon
The video below explains the concept behind ChurchExplorer and features a church and churchyard tour on our free Places and Trails app – a great option to explore before ChurchExplorer launches, with the added bonus that your tour will also be added to ChurchExplorer app when it goes live.
It costs just £180 per year to publish a self-guided tour (or trail) + a one-off set up fee.
Pre-launch sign up
To register your interest in ChurchExplorer or publishing a self-guided church tour please complete the form below.