Communication Tools & Best Practices

BoosterHub gives you three ways to reach your members: Chat, Announcements (with optional SMS), and Email. This article walks through how each one works, when to use each, and tips for keeping your member database organized so your communications always reach the right people.

Chat

BoosterHub chat supports both individual and group conversations.

Individual chats are great for one-off conversations — for example, setting up a carpool with a couple of other parents. These work fine as member-selected groups.

Group chats, however, are best created using the tag system rather than by manually selecting individual members. Here's why: once you create a group chat by selecting specific people, you can't add or remove members later. But if you build the group by tag, membership updates automatically as you add and remove tags from people's profiles.

Example: To create a chat for senior parents, select by the "Parent" tag and then filter by "Class of 2026." Anyone tagged with both will be in the group. If you want students included too, just remove the Parent filter. Name the group something like "Senior Parents 2026" so you can disable it and start fresh next year.

Announcements

Announcements are delivered through the BoosterHub app to your members only. They're ideal for one-way, broadcast-style messages where you don't need a reply from 100 people.

Adding SMS (Text Messages)

When you create an announcement, you can optionally add a text message. This is useful for reaching:

• Members who don't check the app regularly — a text goes directly to their phone
• Non-members in your database — sponsors, alumni, and other contacts who aren't app users can receive a text even though they won't receive the in-app announcement

When to use SMS: Reserve texting for time-sensitive situations — a bus with a flat tire, a rain delay, an urgent schedule change. Using it for every announcement double-pings your active app users and may lead to notification fatigue.

Cost: Text messages cost $0.02 per recipient. The PRO subscription includes 500 outgoing texts per month (meaning 500 individual recipients, not 500 messages). You can monitor your monthly usage under Settings → BoosterHub Settings → Receipts.

What's different between an announcement and a text

In the app, announcements can include images, formatted text, and clickable links — they look polished. Text messages, by contrast, send only the plain text and any links. Images do not come through in SMS.

Link tip: When adding a link to an announcement, make sure it starts with https:// — not just www.. Highlight your URL and use the link button to hyperlink it. This ensures the link works correctly in both the in-app announcement and the text version.

Pro tip: The "Test" tag

Before sending an announcement to your full membership, send it to yourself first. Create a tag called Test and assign it only to yourself (set it as admin-only so members don't see it). Send the announcement to that tag, check how it looks on your phone, and then go back into All Announcements, edit it if needed, and send it to your full audience.

Email

BoosterHub includes a full email module with a drag-and-drop template builder. There is no limit on the number of emails you can send.

Building templates

When you create a new template, BoosterHub automatically pulls in your club's colors and logo for a branded starting point. From there, you can customize it further:

• Add a banner image — design one in Canva and upload it as your newsletter masthead, or use the "masked head" option for an artsy logo overlay effect
• Add text blocks — use the Virtual Volunteer AI assistant to generate a starting framework (for example, ask it to "craft a weekly newsletter template") so you're not starting from scratch
• Add a button — link it to your website, store, or registration page
• Add a product block — highlight one, two, or three items from your online store directly in the email. Leave the product block blank in the template itself and fill it in each time you send, so you can feature different items each week

All blocks are drag-and-drop, so you can reorder them in the template or in the message itself before sending.

Pre-scheduling: You can schedule emails to go out at a specific date and time. If you need to make changes before it sends, you can go back in, edit the message, and reschedule it.

Targeting the right recipients

Emails can be sent to:

• Tags — select one or more tags to target specific groups (e.g., "Class of 2026" + "Student" for just the seniors, or add "Parent" to include their families)
• Relationships — if students are tagged but their parents aren't, enable "send to relationships" to also reach the people linked to those profiles
• Non-members — by default, emails go to both members and non-members who share a tag. If you want to limit a send to members only, add a "Member" tag filter
• Specific individuals — search for and select individual people. All emails are automatically sent as blind copies, so recipients can't see each other's contact information

Practical example: Create a "Background Check Due" template, then each month pull the list of people whose checks are expiring, select that template, and send. Easy, repeatable, and professional.

Keeping Your Database Clean

Your communication tools are only as good as your database. Here's how to keep it organized.

Use custom fields

Custom fields let you capture the information that matters most to your club — graduation year, instrument section, dietary restrictions, and so on. You can collect this data through a registration page on your website or import it via upload.

Graduation year is the most important custom field to track. It's what lets you do clean, efficient year-end database maintenance.

Bulk tagging

Once your custom fields are filled in, use filters + bulk actions to tag groups of people at once:

1. Filter your People list by a custom field (e.g., Instrument = Trumpet, or Dietary Restriction = Nut Allergy)
2. Select all matching members
3. Use Bulk Actions → Add Tag to apply a tag to the entire group at once

This is far faster than tagging individuals one by one.

Year-end cleanup

When the season ends, use your graduation year tags to transition outgoing members:

1. Filter by "Class of 2026" (with both Student and Parent tags if applicable)
2. Select all
3. Bulk Actions → Move to Non-Member + Add "Alumni" tag

Making someone a non-member removes their app access and hides them from your default member view, but preserves their history (required if they have accounting records — the system won't let you delete those). Toggle the view to "All" if you ever need to see non-members.

Why keep an Alumni tag? Former families are still supporters. If you send them a fundraising email or a sponsorship ask, many will respond. One participant noted she'd still donate $25 to her son's old band three years after he graduated — as long as they kept her email address.

Remove stale tags when people graduate

When you move someone to non-member, consider removing their active participation tags (like "Student," "Color Guard," "Varsity Parent"). If you leave those tags on, they'll receive emails sent to those groups unless you remember to filter for members-only every single time. It's cleaner to strip them down to just their alumni or sponsor tags.

The "Who Is This?" tag

If you've inherited a database that hasn't been maintained and you don't recognize some of the people in it, try this:

1. Create a tag called Who Is This (set it as admin-only so members can't see it)
2. Go through your member list and tag anyone you don't recognize
3. Send the list to your board members or band director and ask them to review it
4. Once identified, remove the tag and update their records — or move unrecognized contacts to non-member

Quick Reference: Which Tool to Use?

Getting More Help

All workshop recordings, including a dedicated session on Registration Pages, Tags & Custom Fields, are available in the BoosterHub Help Center → Booster Hub Academy (scroll to the bottom for workshop recordings). The Academy also includes short tutorial videos on individual platform features — most are just a few minutes long.

If you can't find what you're looking for, use the Contact Us form in the Help Center and a member of the support team will respond. For more complex questions, they can schedule a call to walk through your specific situation.