What Chat is, and why we built it

Most churches did not decide to run their communication through WhatsApp. It just happened. Someone set up a group for the welcome team, someone else did one for the youth leaders, and a few years later the church has fifteen group chats, no idea who is in them, and no way to get anything back if a leader leaves.

Chat is our answer to that. It is conversation inside your own church app: direct messages between two people, and group messages for everyone in a group. It runs on the groups you already keep in Hubb, so there is nothing new to build and nothing new to maintain.

What was wrong with what churches were using

Nothing, exactly. The tools work. They were simply never built for a church, and three problems follow from that.

• They need personal phone numbers. Plenty of people will not give theirs to a group of thirty, and a leader who does cannot easily take it back.
• The church does not own them. A group belongs to whoever set it up. When that person moves away or falls out with someone, the church has no way in.
• They do not know who is in your church. People leave, join, change roles, stop serving. A group chat has no idea, so it drifts out of date the day it is made.

What we did instead

We built chat on top of the thing a church already keeps up to date: its groups. When someone joins the welcome team, they are in the conversation. When they stop, they are out. Nobody maintains a separate list, because there is no separate list.

Everything sits inside your own app, with your name and your branding. People log in with the details they already use for events, rotas and giving. No phone numbers change hands, and nothing to install beyond the app they already have.

Your church decides where conversations can happen. Chat is switched on group by group, and each group can be a full conversation, an announcement channel where only leaders post, or nothing at all. You can set quiet hours so a lively group stops pinging people at midnight, and you can switch it on with an end date for a team that will not need it forever.

The one thing we were careful about

Privacy. A church chat tool that leadership could read over people’s shoulders would be worse than useless, because nobody would say anything real in it.

So conversations between adults are private to the people in them. Nobody at your church can read them from the web office, administrators included. A group chat is visible to that group’s leaders in the ordinary way, because they are in the conversation, the same as everyone else.

Children are the deliberate exception, and they are not part of chat at all. Reaching a child is Safe Messaging, which is a separate thing with a parent approving every message and a permanent record for your Safeguarding Lead. See Who can see chat messages? for the whole picture.

---

Good to know

• Chat is one part of Messaging. The others are Mailing for email, text messages and mailing labels, and Broadcasts for news that lands on a phone.
• It is text, emoji and polls. No images or files, because it is a tool for church life rather than social media.
• It is included at no extra cost on church management plans.
• You do not have to move everything at once, and most churches should not. Start with one group. See How to introduce Chat to your church.