Student association

The situation: an association with a few hundred members spread across twenty-odd WhatsApp groups — year groups, committees, a sports team, an alumni group — and a board of eight, most of whom want to announce something this week.

This is the setup we'd run.

1. One shared number#

Link one dedicated number for the association and put everyone on it. Resist the urge to give each committee its own number: separate numbers mean separate group lists, separate analytics, and no shared view of who's being messaged this week — which is exactly the coordination problem you're trying to solve.

Use a spare SIM, not the chair's personal phone. Numbers.

2. Tag by audience, not by committee#

The instinct is to tag groups by who owns them (events-committee, sports-committee). Don't. Tag by who receives them:

Then add presets:

• everyone = year-1 … year-4
• everyone-plus = everyone + alumni + sports
• internal = board + committees

Now the events committee sends to everyone and the secretary sends to internal, and neither has to know which group belongs to whom. Groups, tags & caps.

3. Caps that protect your members#

Set these on the Groups page:

The alumni row is the important one. Alumni are your most valuable and least tolerant audience: one message a week, maximum. A weekly cap makes that structural instead of a thing you have to remember in week nine.

4. Roles that match reality#

Committee members as members is the whole trick: they can draft events and sends, but on the shared number those become approval requests that a comms admin reviews. You get eight people contributing and one person's judgement on what actually goes out.

Two admins minimum, so nothing waits on one person's holiday. Team, roles & approvals.

5. A weekly rhythm#

• Monday morning — a recurring weekly digest campaign to everyone. One message, everything in it.
• Ad hoc during the week — only things that genuinely can't wait until Monday. This is the rule that actually reduces message volume.
• Events get their own timeline with the standard cadence. One big event per term can have the aggressive cadence.
• Friday — check the calendar for next week and spot collisions before they happen.

The digest is what makes the rest work. Once committees know there's a Monday slot, most "can we send something?" requests become a line in the digest instead of a fourth message into year 2.

6. Once a term#

• Retire dead groups. Review inactive groups — last year's event committee, a trip group from two years ago. They cost plan allowance and drag your click rate down.
• Import new groups and tag them. First-years arrive; new chats appear.
• Re-read the analytics. Which tags click? A year group with a click rate near zero doesn't need more messages, it needs a different channel or a real conversation.
• Hand over cleanly. New board: change the owner, invite the new committee members, remove the old ones (which revokes their access immediately).

What this costs#

Roughly: 30 groups in everyone, one weekly digest, plus two events a month with a three-message timeline. That's about 120 digest messages plus ~180 event messages a month — comfortably inside the Team plan, which also gives you the five seats and Monitor. See Plans & billing.

What to read next#

• Staying unbanned — non-negotiable.
• Writing messages that land — worth circulating to the whole board.
• Shared number, many senders — the approval workflow in detail.