How to turn on Safe Messaging for your church

Safe Messaging cannot be enabled until you have named a Safeguarding Lead, and this is deliberate. Your Safeguarding Lead has oversight of every message leaders send, so choose the person who already holds a safeguarding role in your church rather than whoever happens to be nearest the computer.

Safe Messaging is switched off when your site is created. We enable it for your church first, along with the Inbox section of your app where parents find messages waiting for their approval, so ask our support team to turn it on for you. After that, the rest is in your hands.

Before you start, your family data needs to be in good order. Every child needs a date of birth, needs to be placed in the right family, and needs a parent or guardian with an email address. A message cannot be sent to a child who has no contactable guardian to approve it, so this is the foundation everything else rests on. Our guide How to get your family data ready for Safe Messaging walks you through it.

Naming your Safeguarding Lead

1. In your web office, go to Site Settings, open General and select Safe Messaging.
2. Choose your Safeguarding Lead from the Safeguarding Lead dropdown.
3. Press Save.

Switching Safe Messaging on

1. On the same page, tick Enable Safe Messaging for this site.
2. Look through the four settings underneath and read the information icon beside each one. They control how Safe Messaging behaves for your church, and the defaults suit most churches. Our guide How to choose your Safe Messaging settings goes through them one by one.
3. Press Save.
4. Give the leaders who need it permission to send. Nobody can message a child until you do, including your administrators. See How to give a leader permission to send Safe Messages.

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Good to know

• Switching Safe Messaging on tightens things rather than opening them up. Before it is enabled, contact with children follows your ordinary group settings. Once it is on, only the leaders you have authorised can reach a child at all, and every one of their messages needs a parent’s approval.
• The leaders you authorise can still only reach the children they would normally reach through their group access. Safe Messaging adds the approval step, it does not give anyone access to children they could not already see.
• Your Safeguarding Lead cannot be deleted from your site while they are assigned to the role. If they step down, assign someone else first.
• Only your Safeguarding Lead can see the Safeguarding area, so the choice matters. Full site administrators cannot. See How to use your Safeguarding Dashboard.
• Messages to children are one-to-one and text only. There is no image or file sharing, and children are not part of group chats, by design.
• Safe Messaging sits under your existing safeguarding policy and your denomination’s guidance. It is a tool for the trained people who already do this well, not a replacement for them. See Safe Messaging and your safeguarding policy.
• For the whole setup in order, see Setting up Safe Messaging, start to finish.