Online Safeguarding for Churches: A Practical Guide

Safeguarding used to stop at the church door. When church life happened in the building, a lot of it was visible. That changed when it moved onto our phones. Now it’s in the group chats where members can keep in touch between Sundays.

Being connected between Sundays is good. It also means those conversations now happen where you can't always see them. Online safeguarding is that same duty of care, carried into those places.

The online side of it matters more than it used to. The duties in the Online Safety Act are now being enforced on the platforms people use every day, and there’s a live, public debate about children and social media happening across the world. Churches aren’t the subject of that discussion, but the concern behind it is one most church leaders will recognise, and it’s part of why more of them are looking hard at how they communicate online.

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What Does Online Safeguarding Mean for a Church?

Online safeguarding covers the places your church talks, from group chats and messages to social media and video calls. It’s the principle that church safeguarding guidance keeps coming back to. Treat an online conversation the way you would a face-to-face one. Give it the same care and keep the same boundaries, with more than one person aware of what’s said.

If a youth session would always have a second leader present, the group chat is no different, kept in the open rather than in private one-to-one chats.

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Where Conversations Slip Out of Sight

Most of what safeguarding guidance is built around is small and ordinary: 

• A leader starts messaging young people from their own phone, and the line between youth work and their own life blurs. 
• An adult and a child get talking in a chat that stays private, which is the exact situation almost every church safeguarding policy exists to prevent. 
• Something worrying is said in a message and afterwards there’s no record of it, so it’s hard to respond well or to show how it was handled. 

None of this needs to be treated as a crisis. It just needs a normal way of working where being careful takes no extra effort.

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What Good Practice Looks Like

The same few principles come up every time, whether you're reading Thirtyone:eight, the NSPCC or the guidance your own church follows. They're worth knowing whatever tools your church uses.

Keep communication in the open

All conversations between leaders and young people happen in group settings, not private messages, so there is always more than one person aware of them.

Include the right people

A second leader, or a parent, is part of the conversation wherever a young person is involved. Nobody is messaging alone.

Keep a record

Electronic contact is documented, so if a concern arises there is a clear account of what was said and how it was handled.

Get consent and respect age limits

Parents know how their children will be contacted and agree to it, and platforms are only used by those old enough for them.

Use official channels

Communication runs through the church’s own accounts and tools, not a leader’s personal phone number or private profile.

Have a policy and know who to tell

Your church has a written approach to online communication; everyone knows who the safeguarding officer or designated safeguarding lead is and how to raise a concern.

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It’s the standard your safeguarding officer already works to. The real question is how you make it the ordinary way your church communicates, instead of a list of rules people have to remember.

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Where Jovo Comes In

Most churches start with WhatsApp or other tools not built with church safeguarding in mind. Private messages are there by default, so keeping everything out in the open is down to everyone remembering to. Nobody has real oversight, so a leader can end up messaging a young person with no one else in the chat. Nothing is kept on record, and the moment someone joins a group, their personal number is shared with everyone in it.

That’s the gap Jovo is built to close. It’s a messaging app made for churches, built so the safe way is the default.

There are no private direct messages. Conversations happen in groups rather than one-to-one chats nobody else can see, so there’s no route for an adult to start a private conversation with a young person. It’s built for oversight, with a safeguarding record a leader can look back on if a concern comes up. Your church keeps control of its own data. People join with a name and email, so no one has to share a personal number with the group.

It doesn’t replace your safeguarding policy or your safeguarding officer. It means the good practice they work to is built in, so nobody has to police it.

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Where to Start

Keeping people safe online is part of the job, not an extra. The good news is you don't have to work it out alone. Start with what your church already uses, and with Thirtyone:eight and the NSPCC, who both publish clear guidance written for faith settings. Bring in your safeguarding officer on any decision about how your church communicates online.

If you’d like a head start, we’ve put together a Digital Safeguarding Toolkit for churches. You can download it, work through it together and shape it into your own policy or a training session, without starting from scratch.

None of this is about mistrusting your church's group chats. It's about caring what happens in them, the same as you'd care about anyone who walked through the door on a Sunday. Wherever your church talks, the people in it matter just as much.

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If you’d like to see how Jovo helps churches keep those conversations safe, open and overseen, try it with your church.

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