Messaging in MinHub Youth

Get the right info to the right people at the the right time with the power of automation.

For students (at least in America) the primary form of communication has moved from phone calls to text messaging. This is not the case for every country or for every kid, but for the most part, it is the best way to communicate with new students.

MinHub Youth makes it easy to compose a message once and send it to many students without having to copy and paste and compose messages over and over and over again.

Also, since most youth pastors are attempting to build relationships with students, it makes sense for most youth pastors to utilize their existing plan to communicate with students rather than to pay for a texting service with a five-digit or company number.

However, if the scale of your ministry goes far and beyond any central figure, it may be worth it for your ministry to invest in a texting plan with a dedicated number. MinHub Youth does not provide any such service.

Messaging actually loads up a text message sheet and utilizes the data from the app to send messages rapidly. If you are using an iPad, make sure to link your phone number to your iPad to utilize messaging. If you don’t know how to do that, this support article from Apple will help you out.

Mass messages to students are generated through the groups tab. Creating a group will allow you to send messages to every student that you are connected to.

Tap on the group that you would like to message. Tapping the messaging icon on the top of the screen will bring up the option to message students, staff or both. Select one of these options and you'll be directed to a message composition screen.

Here, there are 2 options, sending in batches of 10 or sending individual texts.

If you send in batches of 10, you can’t add any personalizations to the texts, but they will be quicker to send. We highly recommend that you turn off Group messaging in the your messaging settings of your device before sending batches. Otherwise, any reply will be redistributed back to the other 9 students that were in the batch as well. Batches are limited to 10 at a time based on carrier limits. This may be changed in the future depending on how carriers limit messages to be sent.

If you want to personalize texts to include student names, you will need to send each message individually. This just means that if you are messaging 42 students, you’ll have to tap Send > 42 times. The nice thing about this is that if you’d like to add any customizations to each message, you can as you send them. To include customizations, tap + Insert and choose whether you want to add their first name, last name, first and last name, or their nickname. Make sure you include spaces around the brackets so that the insertion code can find the placeholder.

Tapping send will pull up your messages app with the correct students. Tapping send through each one will send the messages and then return you to the group screen.

While sending messages, if someone replies, ignore the notification until you are all the way through sending. If you leave the app in the middle of sending, it may disrupt the process and not all of your messages will be sent.

Much like sending mass SMS messages, you can message every student and/or parent of a student in a group by tapping on the Portal icon at the top of the group detail screen.

If you don't see a Portal icon, Portal is not enabled for your ministry (you need a Sync subscription with Portal, available at minhubsync.com) or no one in this group nor any of their parents have a Portal chat.

When you tap the Portal icon, it will ask you whether you would like to message students, parents or both.

Then you can compose a message with placeholders. Just like with SMS messaging, make sure you include spaces around the brackets so that the insertion code can find the placeholder

Unlike SMS messaging, as soon as you hit send, it will instantly post that message to every selected recipient that has a Portal chat, and if they have turned on push notifications, a push notification will alert them to the message.

This same feature, to post instantly to all recipients through Portal is available when you filter a checklist.