Messaging

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 by in large, it is the best way to communicate with 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. The messaging feature is currently only available on iPhone. To read more about why Google Play Store removed this feature, click here.

Also, since most youth pastors are already paying for an unlimited texting plan, it makes sense for most youth pastors to utilize their existing plan to communicate with students rather than to pay for a texting service.

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 the Messages app on iOS 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.  If you don’t know how to do that, this support article from Apple will help you out.

Sending Mass Messages

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 in the upper right will bring up the 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 Settings app of your iOS device under Messages 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.

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.