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Realm Messaging and Your Church

Sometimes you need to communicate to someone in your church quickly. This may be when a meeting time has changed, or you want to check in with the Johnson’s because you just heard Dan was in the hospital. There are so many situations where having real-time messaging can make a huge difference.

Realm Connect and Multiply packages provide churches with a messaging feature for these very situations. This allows you to send messages to a whole group, specific people in your group, or individuals.

Group leaders can also send a message that emails everyone in their group for important announcements.

Sending Messages, Getting Messages

The first message you create will send a notification to everyone you included in the conversation. Those who use the Connect mobile app will receive an app notification on their mobile device. This also creates a conversation in the Realm Messages section. If someone doesn’t respond to the message, or doesn’t have the mobile app, they will receive an email after the first five minutes of the conversation.

You can go to the Realm Messages section anytime to see replies and add your own responses. All messages post as soon as you send a reply, and everyone in the conversation can see it. This allows you to communicate quickly, ask questions, get answers, and keep in touch with the latest information.

Controlling Your Messages

Realm Messaging provides options that put you in control of what you see and when. Messages do create notifications for new activity, but you can choose to mute any discussion that gets too noisy. You can mute it for a certain period of time, or forever. If you change your mind, you can also unmute it at any time.

Once the conversation has run its course, you can leave the discussion. This removes the message history from the Message screen and stops all notifications.

You can also archive a message. This clears old messages you currently don’t need to participate in, but saves them just in case you want to come back to them. You can view archived messages in the Archived section. If you want to restore an archived message, just type something new in the conversation, and it becomes active again!

Message Your Group

Group leaders can also message everyone, or just certain people, in their group. Leaders can find the Message Group button on their group’s Participants tab. By default, this messages everyone in the group. However, leaders can also click Message Specific People to select only certain people in their group.

Messages sent by group leaders will email everyone in a group. The message will then also appear in that group’s conversation tab for further discussion.

Help! I Can’t Message my Group!

Realm Connect and Multiply packages provide group messaging as part of the new communication tools. However, even if your church uses Realm Connect or Multiply, group messaging isn’t enabled by default. This is so that church leaders and administrators can choose to introduce these features to their groups at a time that’s best for everyone.

Group messaging, like all communication features, must be turned on at both the Ministry Area level, and then at the group level. Once you turn on group messaging, then everyone in the group, including group leaders, will have access to messaging for that specific group.

Communication on the Go

The best thing about Realm messaging is that you can use it anytime, anywhere. If you are on your home computer, you can send messages through your church’s Realm website. If you’re on the go, you can use the Connect mobile app to check messages and respond to them. Realm messaging is always happening wherever you are!

Tap here to get the Realm Connect app for your mobile device.

2 thoughts on “Realm Messaging and Your Church”

  1. Avatar for Brian Gardner

    Realm has been incredibly helpful for communication with the group that I am in.

    One thing that would really help us out that I don’t believe yet exists would be the ability to set up scheduled messages. For example: our group meets every third Thursday of the month. With the hustle and bustle of life, it can become easy to forget about the next meeting. It would be great if there was a way to be able to configure in Realm a way to say “Send out a reminder for the repeating meeting (using a custom message) one week before the meeting date.”

    From a user perspective, it would be a very simple level of automation to use that would really help out a lot. I’m not sure how feasible that is with the technologies that Realm leverages, but if that is something relatively straightforward to develop, I would highly recommend it.

    Thank you for the great service and for helping us to stay connected!

    1. Avatar for Rachel Ankers

      Hi Brian! Thank you for the positive words and suggestions for continued improvement. If you don’t mind, please enter an enhancement request getsatisfaction.com/realm so we can add your idea to the queue and work on making that happen. If you have any other ideas or comments to share, just let us know. Thank you for serving the Kingdom!

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