Who receives an announcement

You post to the whole church and the confirmation says "Posted to 41 people." Your church is 300. This article explains where the other 259 went, and what to do about it.

A recipient is someone with a churchHQ login

That is the whole answer, and everything below follows from it.

When you post, Scout resolves your audience to a set of people, then maps those people to churchHQ accounts and drops anyone who does not have one. Somebody in your directory who has never signed in is not a recipient. They are not messaged, they do not appear in Who's seen it, and they are not in the denominator of Seen 4/12. Nothing tells you they were skipped.

So the recipient count is a count of your congregation's app adoption, not of your congregation. On the day you launch the app it is close to zero, and it grows as people sign in. See Getting your church into the app.

What each audience resolves to

• Everyone at {your church name}: every churchHQ account in the church.
• All leaders: team leads and co-leads, plus group leaders and co-leaders, church-wide. It is a leadership-of-a-thing concept, not a staff role, and it does not read permissions.
• Everyone serving {date}, and the per-team serving rows: people holding a slot on the next upcoming published service, counting slots that are planning, requested, or confirmed. Declined and unfilled slots are excluded. If nothing upcoming is published, the whole Serving this week section disappears from the picker.
• A team: members with active status.
• A group: members with approved status. A pending join request is never messaged.

Only active teams and groups appear in the picker at all, so an archived team cannot be posted to.

How it reaches them

Two channels, and it is worth knowing exactly which:

1. A card in their Updates feed. Always, for every recipient.
2. A push notification, but only to someone running the churchHQ app from the App Store or Google Play with notifications turned on.

There is no email. There is no text message. There is no web push, so a member reading churchHQ in a browser tab or from a home-screen shortcut gets no alert at all and only sees the announcement the next time they open the app.

A member who has muted that team or group still gets the feed card and still counts in your totals. Muting only suppresses the push, and it is ignored entirely for church-wide, all-leaders, and serving-cohort posts.

Push failures are silent. If a post reaches zero devices, the composer still reports success.

The audience is a snapshot

Recipients are fixed at the moment you post. Somebody who joins the team tomorrow will never see today's message, and there is no way to add them to it.

One narrow exception exists, for groups only. When a person first gets a churchHQ login, or is newly approved into a group, Scout backfills the group's posts from the last 30 days into their feed. No push goes out for a backfilled post, and those rows do count in the leader's seen totals. Team posts and church-wide posts are never backfilled.

Audience labels are frozen too. Rename a team after posting and the old post keeps the old name everywhere it appears.

Two people, one inbox

An email address can belong to only one churchHQ account across all of Scout. A couple who share an inbox can have one login between them, so the second person has no account, receives nothing, and cannot appear in any recipient list.

The fix is a separate email address per adult in your directory. Where that is not possible, treat that household as unreachable in the app and cover them the way you did before.

Making the number bigger

• Get people signed in. Recipients follow adoption and nothing else does.
• Point people at the app stores rather than a browser, since push only reaches the installed app.
• Give each adult their own email address on their person record.
• For anything a person genuinely must see, use a channel you own as well. Scout is not a broadcast system for the whole church, and an announcement reaches the people who are already in.

Next

• Posting an announcement
• Notifications and profile covers the member's side of muting and push.