Send messages from groups

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!