Group Messaging is in public beta, which means your small groups can make the Church Center app their official center for communication.
No more cycling between Facebook Messenger, the dreaded group text, and infinite email strings!
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We know many of you have temporarily suspended weekend services due to COVID-19, and some of you are also under state-mandated shelter-in-place orders, making even small gatherings impossible.
We hope Group Messaging is a place where your people can still experience connection with their communities, even from a distance.
How it works and what you can do
All administrators have to do to get started is to enable the feature within each group’s setting—a simple checkbox.
A quick note: this feature is currently available to groups with less than 50 members. And before you tell your group they can start messaging, you’ll want to make sure your member visibility settings are set to show names so people can see who is saying what!
Once the feature is enabled, group members will just have to update the Church Center app to 2.0. Then they can log in and start messaging away with emojis, sharing links, and, of course, what would group messaging be without GIFs?
You can think of messages as channels for different topics of conversation, like Prayer Requests or Sunday’s Potluck—however specific or general groups want. And if someone wants to make a quick announcement without having a whole discussion, they can disable replies to a message.
Group leaders can also keep the message count under control by deleting old topics, and anyone can edit or delete their own topics/replies.
For now, push notifications will follow whatever settings people have for the Church Center app. But one of the exciting things about seeing this in beta is you won’t have to wait too long to see new notification preferences, like muting, and the ability to archive messages and upload images.
Being in beta also means you might encounter some funky kinks we are still straightening out. When you come across these, please let us know. Chances are we are already working on it, but the more we know, the easier it is to fix!
Have any questions? You can reach out to our support team via email, or from the admin side, click the question mark in the top right corner of Groups.
Happy Messaging,
The Groups and Church Center Teams
