What is Tabella?
Launched in 2019, Tabella is the free social app for Catholic communities on a mission to bring the world closer to God. The Tabella application helps parishes engage better through push notifications and donations, while helping parishioners grow in their faith through the best prayer content. Tabella is the most modern and fully free application where Catholics can join ministry groups, stay connected to their parish, and grow in the faith with the best religious content.
The current industry landscape
Catholic churches around the world rely primarily on paper bulletins in order to communicate with their faith communities about events, announcements, and any other updates. In the USA – which has more than 17K parishes – these paper bulletins are printed by private companies which require parishes to have announcements days in advance, making communications extremely inefficient and outdated. The churches that have adopted technology, struggle to pay yearly fees for B2B solutions that fail to meet the needs of the parish community.
Additionally, most church donations occur via cash baskets – and during a time when many churches have had to close due to the pandemic, collecting donations has been challenging.
This is where Tabella has stepped in to fill a void left by many other options.
The creation of Tabella
The idea for Tabella was one that the founder and Latino immigrant, Juan Acosta had over a decade ago, and it was placed in his heart during several Masses he attended as a teenager. After many years of challenges as well as experiencing miracles in his life, Juan felt a strong desire to use his talents to serve God. He left his role as COO of a Silicon Valley startup accelerator to focus his time toward building technology for today’s Church.
Juan wanted to build a global, online community for the Church that made it even easier for both parishes and parishioners to utilize.
The growth and mission of Tabella
Tabella is the only free application for Catholic churches to send out announcements via push notifications, and soon they will be able to receive donations from their communities via the app. The app has been downloaded by more than 15K Catholics all over the world, with rave reviews on both the Apple app store and Google Play Store.
St. Mary’s in Lampasas, Texas was an early adopter of Tabella. This church community has engaged its parishioners by leveraging many of the app’s features including event photos, weekly announcements, church profiles, and so much more. In 2022, Tabella is focused on getting their product rolled out to every Catholic church that wishes to stop paying for communications and wants to use a modern platform to engage their communities.
And parishioners love Tabella, in fact the company gets personal messages often about how Tabella is part of their daily devotional life. Aside from connecting with their parishes and ministry groups, on Tabella, users are able to listen to the Daily Gospel, pray Rosaries, listen to Catholic podcasts and much more. One user of the app, Alex in Miami FL, stated that the app has transformed and augmented his family’s daily prayer life.
About the team
Tabella is built by a team of Catholics from multidisciplinary backgrounds, ranging from product, development, marketing, content, and more. The team prays together every week at the start and end of the week, highlighting that prayer and their relationship with God is the most important thing to be able to execute the job correctly.
Customer experience
One really unique and interesting anecdote that highlights the culture the team has built, is that one of the app’s early users kept sending the founder messages on how to improve the app. After a few weeks, the user and Juan met together. It was during this meeting that Juan learned that the user found the Tabella app during a very intensely painful time in their life. Juan recognized that they had incredible skills as a professional and ultimately hired them on the spot.
Juan shares, “We want to build a culture where people experience miracles and are on fire for the faith – a place where through their work they can glorify God with their talents. With God at the center of our culture, we believe we can bring the world closer to Him.”
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