Sending a mailing or Broadcast to a group that includes children

Safe Messaging is not only about chat. Once it is switched on, every route to a child passes through guardian approval, and that includes your mailings, Broadcasts and text messages. There is no separate screen for this. It happens inside the ordinary sending process whenever the people you have selected include anyone under 18.

If Safe Messaging is new to you, start with What Safe Messaging is, and how it works.

What happens when you send to a group with children in it

1. If you do not hold Safe Messaging permission, the children are left out of the send and you see a warning naming each one. The adults receive your message as normal. See How to give a leader permission to send Safe Messages.
2. If you do hold the permission, each child’s copy is held and their guardians are notified, exactly as with a chat message. Children with no contactable guardian are left out, with their own warning, because there is nobody to approve for them.
3. The sending page shows a Safe Messaging progress panel while this happens.
4. Your delivery report lists each held child as Awaiting Guardian Approval. Once a guardian approves, that copy sends normally. If a guardian rejects it or nobody acts in time, it is never delivered, and you are told.

Reaching the parents instead

Often what you actually want is to tell the parents something: a change of time, a permission form, a reminder about the trip. For that, use the Substitute children option in the sending wizard. It replaces any children in the groups you have selected with the adults in their family, so you can pick your children’s group and email the parents. You can choose one adult per family or all of them.

It is switched off by default, so you need to choose it each time. Nothing you send this way needs approval, because nothing is going to a child.

Which channel to use

• Email reaches children and parents alike, subject to approval for the children. Under-13s have no login, so for them email is the only channel that can arrive at all.
• Broadcasts arrive as a push notification in the app. A child’s copy is held for approval like any other. Under-13s cannot receive one, because they have no login for it to reach. See How Broadcasts work, and what your church controls.
• SMS is treated the same way: a child’s copy is held for approval.

For choosing between them generally, see Broadcasts, email or SMS: which to use when.

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Good to know

• Everything held for approval appears in your Safeguarding Lead’s Safe Messages record alongside chat, marked as Email rather than Chat, with the same statuses and the same permanent record. See How to review Safe Messages.
• The guardian’s side is identical to chat: an email and an app notification to every guardian in the family, the same approval page, the same Approvals tab, and the same expiry window. See What a parent sees, and how they approve a message.
• If children are being left out of your sends and you do not know why, check whether you hold the Safe Messaging permission, and check the family records for the children named in the warning. See Why can’t I send a message to this child? and How to get your family data ready for Safe Messaging.
• Think about what the message is before you choose. A personal word of encouragement is a chat message. A change to Sunday’s arrangements is a mailing to the parents. Safe Messaging makes both possible, but they are different things.