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Group chats

A group chat is built from one of your existing groups — a section, an ensemble, a parent group — so you don't assemble the participant list by hand.

Creating one requires myChat Admin Access.

Creating one

Start a new chat, choose a group, and everyone in it becomes a participant. Then set the four options below before you send the first message — they shape how the conversation works.

The four options

Include parents

On by default for group chats. With a student group, this also adds the parents connected to those students.

Leave it on for anything logistical — pickup times, what to bring, schedule changes. Turn it off for something genuinely student-only, remembering that students will tell their parents anyway.

Disable replies

Makes the chat announcement-only: you post, nobody replies.

This is the right setting for a broadcast channel where forty replies of "thanks!" would bury the next announcement. It's the wrong setting when you actually need answers — people will reply to you individually instead, which is worse.

Hide participants

Hides the participant list from members.

Worth turning on for large parent chats, where the list is effectively a contact directory for your whole program. Families haven't necessarily agreed to that.

Sync to group

Keeps the chat's participants matched to the group as it changes. Someone added to the section joins the chat; someone removed leaves it.

Turn this on for any chat tied to a real group you maintain. Without it, the chat is a snapshot of the group as it was on the day you created it, and it drifts — new members never see it, and people who left keep reading.

Sync to group is the one most worth turning on

A chat that silently stops reaching new members is worse than no chat, because you believe you've told everyone. If the chat maps to a group, sync it.

Archiving

Archive a group chat when it's served its purpose. Nothing is deleted and the history stays.

Creating a new chat with exactly the same participants as an archived one reactivates the archived chat rather than making a second one. So the trip chat you archived in June comes back with last year's history when you recreate it in September — useful, and a surprise if you expected a clean start.

To start genuinely fresh, change the participant list, even slightly.

Running a group chat well

  • Set the options before the first message. Changing to announcement-only after a conversation has started reads as shutting people down
  • One chat per real group, not per topic. People mute chats they're in too many of
  • Say what the chat is for in the first message, especially whether replies are welcome
  • Archive at the end of a season rather than leaving a dozen live chats