Connections Documentation
Connections is the text messaging side of Shepherding Tools. It holds the people who are not on your rolls yet, keeps a record of who agreed to hear from you, and sends the messages. This guide covers what it does today.
Connections is in beta. The messaging described here works and churches are using it, but the product is still moving. Screens have been renamed and merged more than once already, so a tab name in this guide may not match what you see. Two things in particular are not settled yet: there is no delivery confirmation, so "sent" means your carrier accepted the message rather than that it reached the handset, and there is no way to merge two contact records that turn out to be the same person. Both are described in full below. Nothing you enter is at risk. Beta means the shape of the product can change, not your data.
Getting Started
Tracker holds your congregation. Connections holds everyone else: the visitor who filled in a card on Sunday, the man who texted a keyword off a banner, the family from the outreach event who have not decided anything yet. It gives your church its own phone number, a record of who has agreed to receive texts, and a way to follow up without anyone having to remember to.
Step 1 — Sign in
Go to shepherdingtools.com/connections and sign in with the same email and password you use for Tracker. Connections and Tracker share a login.
Step 2 — Find your way around
The top bar holds five places, plus a link out to support:
- Dashboard — recent contacts, pending tasks, the last messages that came in, and a few counts.
- Contacts — everyone Connections knows about. Click a name to open his profile.
- Inbox — two-way texting. Replies land here.
- Campaigns — four tabs: Automations, Keywords, Segments, Announcements.
- Settings — seven tabs: Team, Settings, Sending Rules, Connect Pages, SMS, Billing, Charges. Only administrators see this.
Step 3 — Decide who administers it
A pastor is an administrator automatically. Anyone else needs the Connections administrator box ticked on his row under Settings > Team. That box is a software permission and nothing more. It does not make him an elder, it does not give him access to Tracker, and it does not let him read pastoral notes he could not read before. The box is greyed out on your own row, so a church cannot lock itself out of its own team list.
Administrators are the only people who can send a message, create a contact, build an automation, or touch billing. Everyone else with Connections access can read and take notes.
Step 4 — Check what your plan includes
Contact management is on the free tier. Phone numbers and text messaging are not. If your church is on the Free Forever plan, Settings > SMS shows Phone & SMS Locked, and both ordering a number and buying credits are refused with a note about upgrading. Any paid Tracker plan turns both on, and we can also switch them on for a church we have agreed a custom arrangement with — ask us if that is your situation.
Step 5 — Set up, in order
The pieces depend on each other, so do them in this order:
- Fill in your church name, city, timezone and contact email under Settings > Settings.
- Order a phone number under Settings > SMS.
- Build at least one connect page under Settings > Connect Pages. Carrier registration requires one.
- Register your brand and campaign with the carriers, on the same SMS tab.
- Add credits under Settings > Billing.
Registration with the carriers takes days, not minutes, and it is the step people forget to start. Do it first and build your connect pages and automations while it processes.
1. Contacts
A contact is one person Connections can reach. He is not a member, and Connections does not treat him as one.
Three ways a contact appears
- You add him. Click New Contact on the Contacts page or on the Dashboard.
- He texts a keyword to your church number. The contact is created for you.
- He fills in a connect page. Same thing, from a form instead of a text.
Every contact carries a source, which is just a label for where he came from: Manual Entry, Church Visitor, Outreach Event, Website Form, QR Code, or Self Sign-Up. You can filter an announcement by it later.
The contact profile
Click any contact to open his profile. Across the top: his name, his consent status, and an Add to an Automation button. Below that, five tabs.
- Timeline — every message in and out, plus the automatic entries Connections writes for you when he opts in, opts out, or clicks a link.
- Notes — what you write about him, each with its own visibility.
- Shepherds — who is following this person up. The automation engine reads this when it needs to give somebody a task, and it decides who gets told when he writes in.
- To-Dos — open follow-up tasks.
- Prayer — the prayer requests on file for that household, filtered to what you are entitled to read. This tab only appears once the contact is linked to a Tracker household, which happens on its own. See How this fits with Tracker.
Who can read a note
Every note carries one of four levels, chosen when you write it and shown as a badge afterwards:
- Only me — nobody else, including administrators.
- Pastors & Elders only
- All Officers — pastors, elders and deacons.
- Everyone — anyone in your church with Connections access.
Eligibility runs on ecclesiastical office alone. Being a Connections administrator does not qualify a man to read a note he could not otherwise read. The filtering happens on the server, so a restricted note is never sent to a browser that should not have it.
The Notesfield on the contact's own details, the one that sits beside his phone number, is different from the notes on the Notes tab. It has no visibility setting, and everyone with contact access can read it. Put anything sensitive on the Notes tab, where you can set a level.
Archiving and deleting
Set a contact's status to archived and he drops out of announcements while his history stays. Deleting is different and it is permanent for the Connections record. His Tracker household is not deleted with him; it is archived, so the pastoral record survives an outreach decision. That is deliberate. Connections is not allowed to destroy anything in Tracker.
Two things it does not do
There is no spreadsheet import for contacts, and there is no way to merge two contacts who turn out to be the same person. If you find duplicates, write to support and we will sort them out at our end.
Duplicates were easier to create before August 2026, because a repeat connect-card submission was not matched against the existing record properly. Repeat submissions now match on the last ten digits of the phone number, then on email. Duplicates created before that fix are still there and still need a hand merge.
2. SMS Consent
This is the part of Connections worth reading twice. Nobody receives a text from your church unless his consent is on file. The check is not a warning you can click past. It runs on the server, on every single outbound message, whoever sent it and however it was triggered. If the consent record cannot be read for any reason, the message is refused rather than sent.
The three ways consent is recorded
- He ticks the box on a connect page. Only a ticked box counts, and only when he has also given a phone number.
- He texts a keyword to your number, or texts START. Reaching out is itself the opt-in.
- You record it by hand on the contact form or the contact profile.
Recording consent for somebody else
When you tick the consent box on another person's behalf, Connections makes you say how it was obtained. Four answers:
- They texted us first
- They told us in person
- Paper form or connect card
- Web form or online sign-up
There is a free-text detail box under it. Use it. Something like "signed the connect card at the 10:30 service" is what you will want on file if a carrier ever asks your church to evidence consent, and the penalty for not being able to is losing the ability to text at all. The date is recorded automatically; the source is the part only you know.
Contacts who consented before this requirement existed have no source recorded. That is left blank rather than filled in with a guess.
STOP, START and HELP
These are carrier rules, not ours, and they are handled before anything else you have set up.
- STOP, STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END, QUIT — consent is switched off, every automation he is part of is cancelled, and a note goes on his timeline. We send no reply. The carrier sends its own confirmation.
- START, UNSTOP, YES — consent is restored, and he is put back into any repeating-cadence automation set to enrol people automatically that he still matches.
- HELP, INFO — he gets a short message naming your church and your contact email. This is the one message that goes out even to somebody who has opted out, because carrier rules require an answer to HELP.
Only those exact words are read as opt-outs. Somebody who texts "stop texting me" will be treated as having sent an ordinary reply, and it will land in your Inbox. Read your Inbox. When you see something like that, open his profile and untick his consent by hand.
Unticking consent in the app does the same work as a STOP text: active automations are cancelled and a note is written.
3. Inbox
The Inbox is a normal texting conversation, one thread per contact. Anything sent to your church number arrives here, whether it was a reply to an automation or somebody writing in cold.
Sending a message by hand
Pick a conversation, type, send. The compose box only appears when that contact has consented, so if it is missing, that is why. Messages you send by hand are treated differently from automated ones in one respect: the Sending Rules never hold them back. No weekly cap, no cooldown, no duplicate check. They still need consent and they still need credits.
Any web address you type is replaced with a short tracking link before it goes out, so you can see whether he opened it. His first click is written onto his timeline.
Connections sends to United States and Canada numbers only. An international number is refused with a message saying so.
The Failed marker
A message marked ⚠ Failed did not leave. Either Connections refused it (no consent, no credits, no church number) or the carrier rejected it outright. Anything without that marker was accepted for sending. What that does and does not tell you is covered under What "sent" means.
Getting told when somebody writes in
Nobody is notified by default. Under Settings > Team, each person has two boxes: Notify by email when an assigned contact sends a message and Notify by SMS. They only fire for contacts he is listed against on the Shepherds tab, and no more than once an hour for the same contact, so a back-and-forth conversation does not turn into a stream of alerts.
Assign a shepherd to a contact as soon as the contact exists. Without one, a reply sits in the Inbox until somebody happens to look.
4. Connect Pages
A connect page is a public form with its own web address. No login, nothing to install. It is what you put on a card, a banner, or the back of a bulletin.
Creating one
Go to Settings > Connect Pages. Give it a title, a URL slug, and a short description. You can choose which interest tags to show, write the confirmation text that gets sent afterwards, and name an automation to start when the form comes in. The slug is fixed once the page is created, because the address may already be printed on something.
The finished address looks like shepherdingtools.com/connections/c/your-handle/easter-2026. There is a QR code button beside each page that generates a printable code for that address.
Connect pages need your church handle, which is set in Tracker. Until one is set, the tab says so and no public address exists.
What the visitor fills in
First name, last name, phone, email, and whichever interest tags you chose to show. Then an SMS opt-in checkbox with fixed wording underneath it, covering message frequency, data rates, how to stop, and a promise that his number will not be sold. That wording is not editable. It is what carrier registration requires, and changing it would put your registration at risk.
The box is optional. He can send you his details without agreeing to texts, and if he does, you get the contact and no consent. Giving an email address does grant email consent.
Two other public pages you get
- A hosted privacy policy at
shepherdingtools.com/privacy/your-handle. Carrier registration requires a privacy policy at a real address, and this is the one we register on your behalf. - A printable visitor card at
shepherdingtools.com/visitor-card/your-handle, which links back to your privacy page.
If you change your church handle later, the old address keeps working. Every handle your church has ever held still resolves, so a card printed two years ago does not become a dead link.
Connect pages are rate-limited: ten submissions an hour from one internet connection, and five an hour from one phone number. That is there to stop a form being hammered, and ordinary Sunday traffic stays well underneath it.
5. Keywords
A keyword is a word somebody texts to your number to sign himself up. Put Text GOSPEL to (616) 555-0142 on a slide and the rest happens without anybody at church touching it.
Setting one up
Go to Campaigns > Keywords and click New Keyword. Beside the word itself you can set:
- A follow-up message, sent straight after the confirmation. This is where the actual content goes, such as the first day of a reading plan.
- A segment to add him to.
- A staff member to assign him to, so somebody is responsible.
- An automation to start.
The opt-in confirmation itself is fixed and shown to you on the form. It names your church, says message frequency varies, mentions data rates, and explains STOP and HELP. Carrier registration depends on that wording, so it is not editable.
What happens when somebody texts it
If he is new, a contact is created with consent recorded and the confirmation goes out, followed by your follow-up message. If he already exists and has opted out, nothing is sent. He has to text START first. That is not us being cautious; a number that keeps texting somebody who opted out gets blocked by the carriers.
Matching is exact. GOSPEL works, and so does gospel, because case is ignored, but "send me GOSPEL" does not. Anything that is not a keyword is treated as a reply and lands in your Inbox.
6. Segments
A segment is a named group of contacts. Young families, Alpha course, Easter 2026, whatever you need. Create them under Campaigns > Segments.
Contacts land in a segment four ways: you add them by hand, a keyword adds them, a visitor picks the matching interest tag on a connect page, or an automation step adds them. A contact can be in as many as you like.
Segments are then used to choose who an announcement goes to, and to decide who an automation enrols automatically.
7. Automations
An automation is a sequence of steps that runs against one contact over days or weeks. It is the difference between meaning to follow up with a visitor and actually doing it.
If you set Connections up before August 2026 you will remember three separate tabs called Automations, Drip Sequences and Series. They are now one Automations tab, and the two behaviours live on checkboxes inside each automation. Nothing you built stopped working and nothing changed how it behaves. The tabs merged. This is the sort of thing that happens in a beta, and it is why a screen name in this guide may not match what you see.
The steps you can use
Each step has a type and a trigger that decides when it runs. The types:
- Send SMS and Send Email
- Create Task, Phone Call Prompt, In-Person Visit Prompt — these make a to-do for a person rather than sending anything
- Add Note and Assign to Team Member
- Update Status / Tag, which adds or removes a segment
- Wait / Delay and Branch (If/Then)
- Send Link, Send Form Link, SMS Opt-In Request, SMS Opt-Out Confirmation, End Workflow
And the triggers: Immediately, After previous step completes, After N hours, After N days, On specific day of week, On specific date, and When contact replies.
A Branchstep is what makes a reply useful. It reads what he texted back and sends him down one of two paths, so "yes" and silence do not get the same follow-up.
Getting people into an automation
- By hand, from Add to an Automation on a contact profile.
- By keyword, if you named the automation on the keyword.
- By connect page, if you named it there.
- Automatically, by ticking Automatically enrol new contacts who match the audience below and choosing a segment. This is only offered on automations set to a repeating cadence.
Repeating cadence
Tick Send on a repeating cadence and the automation stops using the delay on each individual step and starts running on a fixed schedule instead: every so many days, on the weekdays you allow. This is the setting for a devotional series or a reading plan. Leave it off and each message waits the delay set on the message itself.
Sending through a pause
Tick Keep sending during pause windows for anything a person has explicitly signed up for and is waiting on. A pause window you set for Christmas week should stop your general outreach, but it should not stop day nine of a Bible study somebody asked for.
Being told when somebody opts in
Each automation has a Notify member on opt-in setting naming one person to email when a new contact joins through it. It is blank by default and there is no fallback. If nobody is named, nobody is told. This is the single most common reason a church says an opt-in went unnoticed, so set it when you build the automation.
What can stop a step from sending
An SMS step is skipped rather than sent when any of these is true:
- The contact has not consented, or has opted out. Opting out cancels the whole automation for him.
- His number is not a United States or Canada mobile number.
- The Sending Rules block it: weekly cap reached, cooldown not elapsed, or the same wording already went out in the last seven days.
- Your church has no phone number, or no credits.
Web addresses inside an automation message are replaced with a short link unique to that contact, so a click is recorded against him. A click can also add him to a segment, which is a tidy way to find out who is actually interested.
8. Announcements
An announcement is one message to a filtered list of contacts, sent once. Automations follow a person over time; an announcement is a single send to many people.
Writing one
Go to Campaigns > Announcements. Give it a name, which is internal and nobody else sees. Choose SMS or Email. Email announcements also take a subject line. Write the body, using {{firstName}}, {{lastName}} and {{sourceName}}where you want each person's own details. A counter under the box shows the character count and how many SMS segments the message will be split into, so you can see when a long message stops being one text.
Choosing who gets it
Filter by contact status (active, or everyone including archived), by source type, and by segment. A running count under the filters tells you roughly how many people match before you commit to anything.
The count of people who match the filter is not the count of people who will receive it. An SMS announcement only goes to contacts with SMS consent, and an email announcement only to those with email consent. A smaller number than you expected is almost always consent doing its job.
Scheduling and sending
Leave the schedule blank and Save Draft keeps it as a draft. A draft is never sent on its own, no matter how long it sits there. Set a date and time and Schedule queues it. Send Now starts it immediately.
The confirmation you see means the send has started, not that it has finished. Watch the status on the announcement list, which moves to sent once every recipient has been dealt with. Nobody is texted twice, even if a send is interrupted and picked up again.
Sending Rules apply to announcements, per recipient. If somebody has already had five automated messages this week, your announcement will skip him. And announcements do not shorten web addresses, so a link in an announcement goes out exactly as you typed it and clicks are not tracked.
9. Sending Rules
Everything that decides when an automated message goes out sits on one screen: Settings > Sending Rules. None of it touches messages you send by hand from the Inbox.
Send Window
An earliest and a latest send time, in your church's own timezone. Anything scheduled outside those hours waits until the window opens again. Connections adds a random offset of up to nineteen minutes to each send, which spreads a batch out and stops carriers treating it as a burst.
The timezone here comes from Settings > Settings. If that is wrong, your send window is wrong by the same number of hours, and messages meant for after breakfast can land in the middle of the night.
How Often
- Most automated messages a contact receives per week — five by default, counted over a rolling seven days.
- Least hours between two messages to the same contact — one hour by default.
- Skip a message if the same wording already went to that contact in the last 7 days— on by default. Because messages are personalised with each person's name, this catches genuine repeats rather than a template used twice.
Set any of the numbers to 0 to turn that limit off.
Pause Windows
A pause window is a named date range where automated sending stops. Christmas week, a death in the congregation, a week the office is shut. Anything that would have sent during it moves to the day after the pause ends.
Two optional extras on each pause. A replacement message goes out at the originally scheduled time instead of the regular one, which is useful when silence would be strange. An alternative automation enrols contacts somewhere else for the duration. Automations with Keep sending during pause windows ticked ignore all of this.
10. Your Phone Number
Your church sends from its own number. Connections will not fall back to a shared one, which is why a church with no number configured cannot send anything at all rather than sending from an address nobody recognises.
Getting a number
Under Settings > SMS, search by area code, state, or city, then order one from the results. This needs a paid Tracker plan. Once it is ordered, replies to that number arrive in your Inbox.
Registering with the carriers
American carriers require every organisation sending texts from a local number to register. There are three parts, and the tab walks you through them in order.
Register Brand
Identifies your church. One to five business days. If you have an EIN, use it; a church registered as a non-profit gets better terms from the carriers than a sole proprietor. You can submit the campaign while this is still processing.
Register Campaign
Describes the kind of messages you send. Usually approved within hours. It needs an approved brand, a contact email, and at least one enabled connect page, because the carriers want to see where people opt in.
Request Vetting (optional)
Raises your daily sending limit above the roughly 2,000 messages a day the standard tier allows. Five to fifteen business days and a one-time fee charged by the carrier registry. Most churches never need it.
Status updates arrive on their own and the screen refreshes as they do. Your hosted privacy page is generated and submitted for you.
Connections does not stop you sending before your campaign is approved, but the carriers can quietly filter or drop unregistered traffic. Those messages will show as sent at our end and never arrive. Wait for approval before you rely on it.
Call forwarding
People ring the number that texted them. Under Call Forwarding on the same tab, enter a number and calls to your Connections number are forwarded there. Leave it blank and incoming calls are declined.
11. Message Credits
Messaging is paid for out of a credit balance, separately from your Tracker subscription. You buy credits, sends draw them down, and when the balance cannot cover one more message, sending stops.
Buying credits
Settings > Billing shows your balance and the rate, which is $0.02 per outbound SMS. Add credits in any amount from $25 up. Payment goes through Stripe, and your card is saved so you can turn on auto-replenish afterwards.
Auto-replenish
Tick Automatically add credits when balance is low, set the balance that triggers it and the amount to add, and Connections tops up on its own after a send takes you below the threshold. It needs a saved card, so make one purchase first. If the charge fails, nothing is retried and the balance simply stops being topped up, which is worth knowing when a card expires.
Running out
When the balance cannot cover a message, that message is refused and recorded as failed. Your administrators get a low-balance email, at most once a day so a busy automation does not fill anybody's inbox. Nothing is queued and re-sent later. A message refused for lack of credit does not go out once you top up. Send it again.
The Charges report
Settings > Charges is the itemised version: messages sent and received per period, every credit transaction with its description, receipts where there was a card payment, and totals at the bottom. There is a Print button, because at some point a treasurer will ask.
If your church is on the free plan
Contacts, notes and connect pages all work. Buying credits and ordering a number do not. If your church moves down to the free plan while still holding a phone number, that number keeps costing something to hold, and the monthly charge for it is drawn from whatever credits are left. Since you cannot buy more on the free plan, the balance only goes down. It appears on the Charges report like any other transaction. Tell us if you want the number released rather than held.
12. How This Fits With Tracker
Connections and Tracker are not two address books that have to be kept in step. Every contact you create in Connections is also a household in Tracker, created at the same moment, without anybody doing anything. Tracker's own documentation describes the same seam from its side, under Exempt households.
What Tracker does with him
He arrives marked exempt with the reason Visitor, and carrying the date he first appeared. That marking is what keeps him in his place. An exempt household stays out of your contact coverage figures, out of the Assistant's shepherding queue, and out of Prayer entirely. Your officers can see he exists without him being counted as somebody an officer has failed to visit, and he is never prayed for alongside the congregation as though he were a member.
Tracker's People page has Visitors and Exempt filter chips that narrow the list down to exactly these households. There is no equivalent list inside Connections, so that is where to look for a roster of who has been visiting.
One record, not two
Correct a name, phone number, email or address in Connections and it changes in Tracker too. It is the same record read from two places. Anyone you list alongside him in Connections, a wife or children, arrives in the same Tracker household.
Family members flow one way. A name you fix on the Connections side reaches Tracker; a name fixed on a family member in Tracker does not travel back. The contact himself is fine either way.
When he joins the church
Remove the exemption on his household in Tracker. That is all. He starts counting in your coverage figures, he becomes visible to Prayer, and there is no second record to merge and nothing to re-type. This is the reason the two are wired together rather than kept apart.
Deleting a contact
Deleting a contact in Connections archives his Tracker household rather than deleting it. The record and its history stay, and Restore in Tracker brings it back. A household that has since become a real member of the church is left alone entirely.
13. What "Sent" Means
This is the clearest gap in the beta, so it is worth being blunt about. Connections cannot tell you whether a text arrived. Delivery confirmation is not built yet. It is on the list.
A message marked sent means our messaging provider accepted it and took responsibility for delivering it. That is most of the way there. What it does not mean is that the message reached a handset.
A message can be accepted and then quietly dropped for reasons nobody tells us about:
- The carrier filtered it as spam, which is most likely when the number is not registered yet.
- The handset has do-not-disturb or a block on it.
- The number was a landline, or no longer belongs to anybody.
In every one of those cases the message reads as sent in Connections with no error anywhere. The ⚠ Failed marker in the Inbox only covers what we refused outright or what the provider rejected on the spot.
If you genuinely need to know what happened to a particular message, write to support with the contact's name and roughly when it was sent. We can look it up at the provider. It is not something you can check yourself today, and pretending otherwise would be worse than saying so.
14. What It Does Not Do Yet
An honest list, so you can plan around it rather than discover it. None of these are faults to report; we already know.
- No delivery confirmation. Covered above.
- No merge for duplicate contacts. Support can merge them at our end.
- No spreadsheet import. Contacts arrive one at a time, by keyword, or by connect page.
- United States and Canada only for SMS.
- No visitor list inside Connections. It is in Tracker, on the People page.
- Opt-in alerts are per automation. Nobody is emailed unless that automation names a person, and there is no church-wide fallback.
If one of these is blocking something you need to do, tell us. During a beta, what churches actually run into decides what gets built next.
Tips & Best Practices
- Start carrier registration on day one. It is the only step measured in days, and everything else waits on it.
- Fill in the consent detail box when you record consent by hand. "Signed the connect card at the 10:30 service" is what protects your church later.
- Name a person under Notify member on opt-in on every automation, or nobody finds out somebody signed up.
- Assign a shepherd to a contact the day he appears, so his reply reaches a human rather than sitting in the Inbox.
- Leave the default frequency limits alone for the first few months. Five messages a week is already more than most churches should send.
- Check your timezone under Settings > Settings before the first automation runs. A wrong timezone sends at the wrong hour and looks like a fault in the send window.
- Put a QR code for a connect page on your visitor card. It is the shortest path from a Sunday conversation to a follow-up that actually happens.