How to get your family data ready for Safe Messaging

Safe Messaging rests entirely on your family records. Every message goes to a child’s parent or guardian for approval first, so if Hubb does not know who a child’s guardian is, or has no way to reach them, the message cannot be sent at all. Getting this right first saves a lot of puzzled leaders wondering why they cannot message anyone.

What each child needs

Three things, and all three matter.

1. A date of birth. This is how Hubb knows the person is a child, and it drives the age-based settings too. A child with no date of birth on record is treated as under 13.
2. The right family. The child needs to sit in the family that contains their parent or guardian. A child in the wrong family, or in no family, has nobody to approve their messages.
3. A contactable guardian. Someone in that family needs to be marked as a guardian and needs an email address, because that is how the approval request reaches them.

Our guide on children and family data management best practices covers how to set all of this up, along with groups, leaders and consent.

Finding the gaps

You do not have to check your records one by one. Once Safe Messaging is enabled, your Safeguarding Dashboard does it for you.

1. Open the Safeguarding area from the shield icon in the left of your web office. Your Safeguarding Lead will need to do this, since only they can see it. See How to use your Safeguarding Dashboard.
2. Find the Children with no contactable guardian panel. It lists every child who has no guardian in their family, or whose guardians have no email address.
3. Work through the list, fixing each record. Use the search box if you are looking for one particular child.
4. Come back to it now and again. New families join, and details change.

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Good to know

• This is worth doing even if you are not ready to use Safe Messaging yet. Clean family data makes rotas, events, Child Check-in and communication all work better, and it means you can switch Safe Messaging on the day you decide to. See How to turn on Safe Messaging for your church.
• Parents can keep their own family’s details up to date from their profile, which spreads the work and keeps records fresher than any annual data-tidying exercise ever will.
• A child can have more than one guardian. That is worth setting up properly where families are separated, because every guardian is notified and any of them can approve, so nothing waits on one person being available. See What a parent sees, and how they approve a message.
• Dates of birth matter more than they look. They decide whether someone is treated as a child at all, whether they can reply if your church allows it, and whether they can log in. Your Safeguarding Dashboard flags accounts that change from child to adult, so keeping dates accurate keeps that panel quiet and useful.
• If a child has no contactable guardian, they are simply left out of any send, with a warning naming them. Nothing fails silently. See Why can’t I send a message to this child?