Clubs
Coaches who want a boundary
Most volunteer coaches want their personal number out of it. A thread inside the club app gives them a way to talk to a family that is on the record and not on WhatsApp.
- No personal numbers
- On the record
Module 06 - Messaging
The club, not a group chat.Conversations that stay attached to a player.
Messaging in Athra is per player and visible to that player's own family, which is a different design from a chat app and a deliberate one.
What it does
Puts the conversation on the record
Club communication usually lives on personal phones. That has two problems. The club cannot find anything later, and an exchange between an adult at the club and a child happens somewhere nobody else can see.
Athra attaches the conversation to the player. The coach side works from an inbox of player threads. The family side works from their own children's threads. Both are looking at the same thread, which means there is no channel where an adult and a child are alone together.
Broadcast communication is separate and deliberately so. Announcements go to the club or to a team, and are composed by the people given that permission.
Who it serves
Clubs and schools, the same way
Schools
Staff communicating with parents
A school needs contact with families to be traceable and appropriate by default. Per-player threads visible to that family are the shape that gives you both.
- Traceable
- Family visible
Capabilities
What is in the module today
Threads
One thread per player
A conversation about a player is attached to that player rather than scattered across personal phones, so it is still findable in March when it started in October.
- Per player
- Kept together
Coaches
A coach inbox, not forty chats
Staff with club messaging permission work from one inbox of player threads instead of remembering which parent messaged which coach.
- Single inbox
- Permissioned
Families
A parent sees their children's threads
A parent opens the threads belonging to their own children. Reaching another family's thread is blocked, not discouraged.
- Own children only
Announcements
Club-wide and team-level notices
Announcements are composed by the people given communications permission and read by everyone in the club, with a news feed on the home screen rather than a noticeboard nobody visits.
- Composed by permission
- Read by all
Alongside
Gallery and team documents
Photos and the documents a club keeps handing out are in the same app as everything else, reachable by every role.
- Gallery
- Documents
Where this is currently thinner than it should be: message notifications are not yet wired to open the thread they refer to the way fixture notifications open a fixture. The messages are there and the access rules hold. The push straight into the thread is on the build list, and we would rather write that down than let you assume it.
Founding clubs
See how a family thread actually works
Fifteen minutes, with the person building it. We will show you both sides of the same thread on the call.