Staff to Family Direct

This type of chat, available in the Full Out messaging, is designed to allow your staff member to directly communicate with one or more members of a family.

There are different options in terms of enabling this feature:

  • Only allow specific staff members to communicate with families. This permission is set under the Employee tab on the Staff User page.  This permission, Can direct message families, is defaulted to Disabled when staff users are created.  Admin must set it to Enabled for any staff to communicate directly with families.
  • Enable parents to start new messages to staff users directly, from the parent app.  This permission is set by going to Settings > App Settings>Allow Parents to Message Staff.  This setting is defaulted to No for the tenants.  If enabled, all parents will have option to message staff users.  However, if a staff user is not enabled to message families, they will not appear in the parent list of staff members to message.
  • If you do not want any Staff to Family direct messaging on the platform, both settings listed above must be OFF.
  • Note:  If a staff user is set to Can direct message families and parents are not allowed to message staff, the parent will be able to respond to a Staff Family direct message thread on the parent app, they just are not allowed to create a thread with the staff.

From the Staff App to create a new message:

  1. Go to Messages and select Family - Staff
  2. Click the + button near the top right corner.
  3. Search for a user to start a Family Chat.
    1. This will show you all the members in the family, making it easy to search by the athletes name for the correct family!  Select the correct family when found.
  4. Select which members of the Family you would like to be in the thread.
    1. You have option to select only one parent, or all family members with a profile (athletes with no profile will be greyed out, cannot be selected).  Only the users selected will have access to the messages. Select the Next button.  A new chat message opens for you to start typing a message.  If a thread already exists between these exact users selected for this chat, that chat message thread will be opened.

From the Parent App to create a new message:

  1. Go to Messages and click the + button near the top right corner.
    1. Reminder - you must have the setting on to allow parents to create messages with staff.
  2. Select or search for a Staff User to start a message thread.
  3. Select which members of your Family that you would like to be in this thread, select Next button.  A new message thread opens for you to start typing the first message.  If a thread already exists between these exact users in the thread, that message thread will be opened.

Viewing Conversations

It is important for Admin to stay informed of the conversations that are happening on the platform, however it can be overwhelming for all the those threads to be located in the chat groups. From the Users page on admin portal, you can view which conversations a user is in by clicking the Communication section for that user, and selecting the message category on the filters shown under Chat History.   Admin can view the messages, has access to the Message Options for deleting specific messages in the conversation or adding reactions.