How to choose your Safe Messaging settings

Once Safe Messaging is enabled, four settings control how it behaves for your church. The defaults suit most churches, so you may not need to change anything. It is still worth reading each one with your Safeguarding Lead, because two of them are decisions about safeguarding rather than about software.

You will find them in Site Settings, then General, then Safe Messaging, under the heading Settings. Each has an information icon with a short explanation beside it. See How to turn on Safe Messaging for your church if it is not enabled yet.

Approval expiry time

How long a parent or guardian has to approve or reject a message, set in hours. The default is 48 hours. If they do nothing within that window, the message is not delivered and the leader who sent it is told.

A shorter window keeps messages timely, which matters if a leader is writing about something happening this week. A longer window gives busy parents room to respond. There is one notification per message and no reminders, so a window that is too tight will simply mean more messages quietly expire. Expired messages show up on your Safeguarding Dashboard, so you will see the pattern.

Weekly message limit per child

The most messages one leader can send to one child in a week. The default is 10. Set it to 0 for no limit.

Three details are worth understanding.

• The limit is per leader, per child. If a group has two leaders, a child could receive up to double the number you set.
• It works on a rolling seven days rather than resetting on a Monday.
• It counts what a leader sent, not what was delivered. Messages a parent rejected, or that expired unanswered, still count.

Your Safeguarding Dashboard flags a leader once they have sent 80% or more of the limit to any single child, so you do not have to police it yourself.

Allow children to reply to messages from adults

This is a choice of three: No, Children over 13, or All children. It is set to No by default, and most churches will want to leave it that way. With replies off, Safe Messaging is one-way: a leader sends encouragement, a parent approves it, the child reads it, and there is no private back-and-forth for a child to be drawn into.

If you do allow replies, two rules apply whatever you choose. A child can only reply to a message that has already been approved and delivered to them, so a child can never start a conversation with an adult. And a child’s reply is held for guardian approval in exactly the same way, on the same expiry clock, so a parent sees what their child is sending as well as what they are receiving.

Choosing Children over 13 allows replies only from children aged 13 and over. A child with no date of birth on record is treated as under 13.

Treat this as a safeguarding decision rather than a settings change. Talk it through with your Safeguarding Lead, check your governing body’s policy, and put any extra safeguards in place first. Our guide Replies from children, and how they are approved covers it properly.

Login age restriction

This prevents children under 13 from logging in to your site at all. They are shown a message explaining they need to be at least 13. It is on by default, and only takes effect while Safe Messaging is enabled.

With it on, a child under 13 has no login of their own, and their parent reads them their approved messages from the parent’s own account. That keeps a young child’s church contact inside their family, which is where it belongs, and means children without a phone are not left out. See Safe Messaging: a guide for parents and guardians.

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Good to know

• Changing a setting takes effect from that point on. It does not reach back and change messages already sent or awaiting approval.
• Replies do not count against the weekly limit. Only messages a leader sends to a child are counted.
• Two of these four are safeguarding decisions rather than preferences. Replies and the login age restriction are worth minuting at a leadership or safeguarding meeting, so there is a record of the church having decided rather than the setting having drifted. See Safe Messaging and your safeguarding policy.
• Press Save after any change. The button sits at the top right of the page.