Thank you for joining the Messaging beta. Messaging brings simple, secure chat to your church’s own Hubb app. You get one-to-one and group conversations for your teams, ministries and small groups, with no personal phone numbers and no separate apps to manage. Everything stays inside your church’s Hubb account, securely stored, with conversations private to the people taking part.
This guide covers what you need to start testing: getting the app on your phone, turning chat on for your groups, turning on Safe Messaging if you work with children and young people, and what we’d love your feedback on.
We’ve switched Messaging on for your site, and we’ve created a Beta Test Chat group with your beta testers in it, so you can start chatting straight away. If you’d like other people added to the test group, just let us know, or add them yourself through the group’s member list in your admin area.
Messaging lives inside your church’s app, so each person testing will need it installed:
If you already have the app but didn’t allow notifications when you first installed it, log out and then log back in, and accept notifications when the prompt appears.
Chat is enabled group by group, so your church stays in control of exactly where conversations can happen. Any administrator who can see a group’s settings can switch it on:
You can enable chat for as many or as few groups as you like, and switch it off again at any time.
Children are not part of group chats, by design. If you switch group chat on for a group that includes children, the adults get their conversation and the children simply don’t have it. A leader who wants to reach the children in a group should message them individually, which routes each message through Safe Messaging in the normal way.
Tap the chat icon in the app to see your conversations. From there you can:
Every message is stored securely within your church’s Hubb database, and nothing sits on personal accounts. Conversations between adults are private to the people taking part, and can’t be read from the web office by anyone at your church. A group chat is visible to the group’s leaders in the ordinary way, because they’re in the conversation. Messages to and from children work differently: they all go through Safe Messaging and are permanently recorded for your Safeguarding Lead. Chat history is never deleted, so if your church ever faces a formal safeguarding case, we can extract the relevant conversation data for you on request.
Safe Messaging is now switched on for your site in beta, alongside Messaging. It gives the leaders you authorise a safe, accountable way to encourage children and young people through the week. Every message a leader sends goes to the child’s parent or guardian for approval first, and is delivered only once they approve it. Your church’s Safeguarding Lead can see the messages leaders send. Messages are one-to-one and text only, and no message reaches a child until their parent or guardian has read it and approved it.
Safe Messaging isn’t switched on group by group like Chat. It applies across your whole site. Once it’s on, no one can message a child through Hubb, by chat or any other tool, unless you’ve given them Safe Messaging permission. The people you authorise can still only reach the children they’d normally message through their group access. So enabling Safe Messaging tightens who can contact children across your site, and every message those leaders send still needs a parent’s approval.
Before you start, get your family data ready. Safe Messaging only works where each child’s record is set up correctly: a date of birth entered, the child placed in the right family, and a contactable parent or guardian (with an email address) linked to them. A message can’t be sent to a child who doesn’t have a contactable guardian to approve it, so this is the foundation everything else rests on. If you haven’t done this yet, our guide walks you through it:
We’ve enabled the Safe Messaging beta on your site and given your nominated beta tester the Safe Messaging permission needed to send messages. The steps below are yours to complete.
Before anyone starts messaging, look over each setting and read the information icon next to it. These control how Safe Messaging behaves for your church:
A leader writes a message to a child in Chat, just like any other conversation. Instead of going straight to the child, the message is held and the child’s parent or guardian is notified. They approve or reject it from a link in that notification. If they approve it, it’s delivered to the child. If they reject it or it expires, the leader is notified. Your Safeguarding Lead can see the messages leaders send.
To let another leader use Safe Messaging, give them the permission on the Site Administrators page.
As a beta tester, your everyday use is exactly what we need. A few things to try and tell us about:
If you’re testing Safe Messaging, we’d also love to know:
Nothing is too small to mention: a button that felt out of place, a notification that didn’t arrive, wording that made you pause. That’s the gold dust of a beta. And don’t worry about flagging something we might already know about. A duplicate is far better than a miss.
Messaging is being actively developed, and your feedback shapes what we build. A few things you can already use:
Safe Messaging is in beta now too (see above), and Broadcasts, for push notifications to your whole church, is also available.
Found a bug, hit a snag, or have an idea? Email us at hello@hubb.church with “Messaging beta” in the subject line. Screenshots are always welcome. Thank you for helping us make Messaging brilliant for every church.