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 and auditable by your church administrators.
This guide covers everything you need to start testing: getting the app on your phone, turning chat on for your groups, and what we’d love your feedback on.
One honest heads-up before you start: we have a batch of small improvements landing in the next few days, so a few of the rough edges you might spot right now are already being smoothed out. Don’t let that stop you flagging anything (it’s all useful), but do expect things to feel noticeably more polished very soon.
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, you can either turn them on in your phone’s settings, or delete the app, re-install it, and accept notifications when the pop-up 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.
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. Nothing sits on personal accounts, and your church administrators can audit conversations if they ever need to.
If you think you’ll want to use Safe Messaging (our parent-approved, safeguarded way for leaders to encourage children and young people), there’s one piece of groundwork worth doing now, ahead of it arriving: getting your family data in good order.
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.
The good news is it’s the same tidy-up that makes check-in, groups and the rest of Hubb run more smoothly too. We’ve written a full step-by-step guide to walk you through it:
Doing this in advance means that when Safe Messaging reaches you, you’ll be ready to switch it on rather than starting from scratch.
As a beta tester, your everyday use is exactly what we need. A few things to try and tell us about:
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. Already on the way:
And alongside Messaging, we’re building Safe Messaging for children’s and youth ministry (with parental approval and safeguarding oversight at its core) and Broadcasts for push notifications to your whole church. This beta covers Messaging for adults only; we’ll share more on the others soon.
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.