HuddleUp vs Slack, GroupMe, or Facebook Groups

Hey there. I’m Scott from ServeHQ and I want to answer one question that we get asked on a regular basis about HuddleUp and that one question is really simple. It’s what’s the difference between a HuddleUp and Slack or GroupMe or asked in another way? Why use HuddleUp when we’re already using Slack or GroupMe or Facebook messenger or fill in the blank for whatever messaging platform you’re using with your ministry teams?

Slack and GroupMe Are Not Safe

There are four reasons. First, the reason we built HuddleUp is because Slack and GroupMe are not safe tools for communication between groups of people that include men and women or adults and minors.

The tools just make it very simple, too easy really to have one on one conversations that are private and unaccountable and could go in wrong directions, go in directions that are not healthy for you or for your ministry or for the people that you’re ministering to.

HuddleUp solves this problem by making everything accountable so nothing in the HuddleUp system can be deleted. That means everything is saved. Not only could it not be deleted, every chat message, every conversation, even one on one conversations are monitorable by the account admin.

That means that the youth pastor can see all of the leaders in their youth ministry and the conversations they have with youth or the administrative or the senior pastor or the church secretary, whoever you set as the admin can see all of the conversations that are happening with all of the ministry leaders and all the volunteers, all of the parents, all of the students in the entire HuddleUp ecosystem.

And that’s really important because accountability brings safety to the conversation for everybody.

In our system there’s a banner that’s persistent at the top that says all conversations are monitored. When you know that you’re being watched, you just tend to act better. You tend to not cut the inappropriate jokes or you don’t compliment somebody else’s wife or you don’t ask for private communication, phone number or email from a minor when you’re not supposed to have it.

You do the things that are right because you know you’re being watched. And the same way that pastors have glass doors on their office, like you don’t drive one-on-one in a car with a woman that’s not your spouse or a person that’s not your spouse because there’s no accountability there.

And so the same thing we want to bring to digital communication, we want to bring accountability to that chat.

Communicate With The Right People Easily

Number two is that HuddleUp makes it much easier to communicate with just the right people to just the right time GroupMe and Slack are good at having channels or groups, but when you want to have a new conversation with a new group of people, it’s kind of cumbersome to get just the right people into the right chat.

HuddleUp already mirrors, already uses all of the organization of people that you have in your entire ServeHQ account.

So if you want to start a new group chat with just the people that are serving on this coming Sunday, that’s really easy. That way, you don’t have to reuse old chats. Or if you want to have a one on one chat or one on two or one on three chat with just the right people, ServeHQ makes it very easy to be able to grab the right people from a group that you’ve already built and then bring them into the chat.

So it’s very easy to have the right conversation with just the right people without having to worry about sifting through lots of people or having to add them to a GroupMe account or make sure they download an app.

None of that has to happen for people to participate in a HuddleUp conversation.

HuddleUp Has Smarter Notifications

Number three, and this one is really actually very unique in communication world. HuddleUp has the ability to send notifications to people by email or by text message.

That way, you know that can get a hold of somebody, you can send a message to the right way that they prefer to be contacted and sometimes you want to be able to send an email to somebody and then you also want to be able to send a text message to that group of people without having to use separate tools.

HuddleUp is really good at that. And if you have the optional mobile app chat messages come through as a native notifications on, on your device, on your Android or iOS device. That way you have the best of all three worlds, email notifications, text notifications, and native push notifications. So smart notifications and HuddleUp really mirror the way that ministry leaders want to be able to get ahold of their people.

HuddleUp is a Private, Custom Facebook Group Replacement

Finally, and this is really again another unique thing from any chat app is that HuddleUp chat also has HuddleUp posts.

HuddleUp posts are sort of like a private Facebook group where you can send or create posts and send them ends notifications to people and you can create posts for just the right number of people or just the right group of people.

If you have a Facebook group, when you grade a post, it goes to everybody in the group, no matter whether they’re serving, whether they’re a parent or a child, whether they’re in your ministry or not in your ministry anymore. A post in HuddleUp just goes to the people that you particularly want it to go to.

That way you’re not blasting it to everyone. Not everybody is seeing it. If you have something private you want to share with just a certain group of people, you can create a post that’s just for those people. They can still have comments, they can still view a video, they can still download files that you’ve attached to the post, but you’re not worrying about sending it to a huge mass of people that most of the people won’t want to know about it.

And on top of that, instead of going into a Facebook notification list of what’s going on on your Facebook account, this actually comes to their email address or to their phone as a text message so they can actually see that they were given a message, not just dropped into a list of notifications from Facebook.

That’s the top four reasons. It’s safer. It gives you more control over who is in your conversations. It has smart notifications to send people just the right information at just the right time and just the right place. And then also we have posts which allow you to communicate with just the right people in a way that’s similar to Facebook groups, but gives you a lot more control and more privacy.

So I hope that you give HuddleUp a try, check it out. Even if you already use Slack or GroupMe or some other chat tool, even if you have a Facebook group for your ministry teams, you’ll see that it is a better tool for communicating specifically with ministry teams than you might find from Slack or GroupMe or Facebook.