We're excited to announce the release of a long-requested feature in Church Social — sending messages from groups! If you've ever wanted to send a message on behalf of a committee, Bible study, council, or consistory — and have that group’s name appear in the subject line instead of your own — that's now possible!

Until now, every message sent from Church Social always came from the individual sender. The subject line would appear as “Your Name: Your Subject,” with no way to show a different sender. While this encouraged a high level of accountability — people tend to be careful with what they send when their name is attached — in practice it didn’t always reflect who the message was actually from, and could make members feel like communication was “too much about them.”

To send messages from a group, you must be one of that group’s administrators, and the group must have an email address set. For example, for your church council group, you might make your council clerk the administrator and set the email address to something like [email protected]. This email will be used as the reply-to address when people respond to messages sent from the group. You can add group administrators and assign email addresses from the “Edit Group” page in the Groups area of the app.

After you add an email address to a group, its administrators will see that group as a “From” option when composing new messages.

A nice benefit of this change is that members can now unsubscribe from messages sent by specific groups, instead of being limited to unsubscribing from an individual sender. So if someone isn’t interested in messages from a particular group, they can now opt out more easily.

Finally, to maintain accountability when sending group messages, you can still see who actually sent it. This appears in small text at the bottom of the outgoing email and is also shown subtly on the message page in the app.

We hope this change improves your member-to-member communication!

We've made a number of big improvements to how file folders work in Church Social!

More flexible permissions

Previously, you could only give one group access to a file folder, and only one person or group permission to edit it. That was pretty limiting!

Now you can grant file folder access to multiple people and groups. You can also choose whether each one is a viewer (the default) or an editor.

For example, a council or consistory folder might allow all elders and deacons to view the files, but only the council clerk and chairman to edit them.

Administrator access changes

Church Social administrators no longer have access to every file folder by default. This means sensitive folders — like council or consistory folders — stay private unless access is explicitly granted.

However, administrators can still manage folder permissions when needed (for instance, if a folder ends up with no remaining editors).

New folder descriptions

You can now add an optional description to a file folder. This text appears at the top of the folder's page and is great for adding context or instructions for your members.

File trash improvements

We've also streamlined the file trash:

• The trash is now located in the three-dot menu at the top right of the Files page (it's no longer shown at the bottom of your folder list).
• Trashed files are automatically deleted after six months, helping keep things tidy.

We hope these updates make managing your church's files in Church Social simpler, safer, and more flexible!

We've fixed two related issues that could cause dialogs to close when they shouldn’t:

1. Pressing escape while using a date picker or autocomplete input no longer closes the dialog.
2. Clicking an option in a dropdown that extends outside the dialog area no longer closes the dialog.

We’ve added a new “22 and older” age filter to the Safe Church page for churches that track this information based on age 22 and older, rather than 18 and older.

You can now upload HEIC images — a format commonly used on Apple devices — when adding photos to your family profile or the photos area.

One question we sometimes hear is: “What do I do if I want to record a marriage, but the spouse isn’t in our church records?” The answer has always been to create a new person record for that spouse, even if they’re not a member. This works well, since you can then add additional information to their profile (for example, a date of death for a former spouse).

But this path hasn’t always been obvious. To make it clearer, we’ve added a new “Add person” button right beside the spouse input in the marriage dialog. This lets you quickly create a new person record and have it automatically selected as the spouse, making the intended workflow much more clear.

We’ve also added the same button to the father and mother inputs. While this comes up less often, it can still be helpful in certain cases.

And don’t worry — since these are non-member records, churches are never charged for these additional people.

We’ve added two new options to the message approval feature in Church Social:

• Always require approval for messages from — This option is the opposite of Auto approve messages from. When enabled, any messages sent by people on this list must always be approved by a message approver, no matter what other auto-approval settings are in place. This is especially helpful in situations where certain members pose a risk of sending inappropriate messages to the congregation.
• Auto approve all messages by default — This option makes all messages auto-approved unless the sender is listed in the Always require approval for messages from option. It’s useful if you only want to enforce approvals for a select few individuals, while leaving all other messages to go through automatically.

These options should help churches ensure that all messages sent through Church Social remain appropriate and edifying for the congregation.

We’ve added a new "Fund totals with method totals" contribution statement to the giving area. This report works just like the existing Fund totals statement, but also includes a breakdown of the payment methods used for each fund, displayed directly below each fund total.

Treasurers can now quickly duplicate an existing deposit, including all its contributions, with a new date. This is especially handy for recurring contributions, like monthly pre-authorized deposits. You'll find this option on the deposit page in the three-dot dropdown menu.

When creating or editing a schedule, you can now set reminder emails to go out 3 weeks (21 days) or 4 weeks (28 days) in advance. This gives churches more flexibility to notify members about upcoming tasks earlier. While reminders closer to the task date are usually most effective, in some cases sending a first reminder several weeks ahead can be helpful.

We've fixed an issue with our calendar integration with Microsoft Outlook online. Previously, when you tried to add your Church Social calendar to Outlook, it would display the error message: "Couldn't import calendar. Try again later." This issue has now been resolved.

We've expanded the permission settings in Church Social to give churches more fine-grained control over who can create and manage content within the app. This update applies to the following areas:

• Messages (sending messages)
• Schedules (creating schedules)
• Groups (creating new groups)
• Files (creating top-level folders)
• Photos (creating new albums and uploading to existing albums)

Previously, these settings only had two options: Everyone or Administrators. We've now expanded them to include the following list of options, making them consistent with other modules in the app that already had these settings:

• Guests
• Members
• Baptized Members
• Professing Members
• Office-Bearers
• Administrators

These work on a minimum access required basis, meaning anyone with a "higher" role in the list automatically has access as well.

The main motivation for this change came from churches asking for more control over what Guests can do. While many churches are happy for guests to log in and view content, they often want to prevent guests from creating or sending content—such as events, messages, or groups.

We've set the default for these new permissions to Members, as this felt like a sensible starting point for most churches. Just be aware that guests who previously had access to create content may no longer be able to, unless you update the setting to include Guests.

Finally, this update also impacted who can send new messages. Previously, it was possible to send messages without being a guest or member. However, for consistency with the rest of the app, you must now have at least a Guest membership type in order to send messages.

We've added a brand new global search feature to Church Social! Using the new command palette, you can now quickly search for families and groups. If you're an administrator or statistician, you’ll also be able to search for people, making it easy to jump straight to the edit person page and make changes.

You can open the global search by clicking the search input in the app header. In addition, you can use these handy shortcuts:

• Command + K on macOS
• Ctrl + K on Windows

And this is just the start — we plan to add more resource types to the search results in the future, making it even easier to find what you’re looking for anywhere in Church Social.

Church treasurers can now set a custom title for giving statements, and optionally include notes that appear above the contribution table. This is especially helpful for churches that need to include specific wording on year-end statements, such as the IRS-required text in the United States.

We've just added a new "Method totals" contribution statement to the giving section. This gives church treasurers the ability to run a report that shows contribution totals by payment method (e.g. cash, cheque, credit card) across all deposits in a selected date range — useful for reconciliation and accounting.