Your organisation is already having the conversations. None of them are governed.
WhatsApp lives in your care homes, your frontline teams, your fundraising threads, your trustee chat. Your data protection lead knows. Whoever minds your IT has tried to stop it. The conversations happen anyway – just outside everything you bought to keep the organisation safe.
Then one morning it surfaces. A solicitor's letter asks for "all WhatsApp messages concerning my mother". A safeguarding review needs a thread that lives on the personal phone of someone who left in March. An inspector asks how handover decisions are recorded, and the only honest answer is "on people's own phones".
You can spend another year fighting the culture. Or you can govern the channel your people refuse to give up.
Three doors everyone tries. None of them hold.
Write the policy. Send the memo.
The chats don't stop; they go quiet. Risk you could at least see becomes risk you can't, and the next incident arrives with "and they knew" attached to it.
Roll out the approved app.
Teams, Slack, a "secure messenger". Adoption lasts a fortnight, the night shift never moves, the families never join. Now you run two channels: one official and empty, one real and invisible. The lesson isn't that Teams is wrong – it's that families and the night shift will never live there.
Hope the letter never comes.
The cheapest option, right up until the morning it isn't. This strategy ends with a Subject Access Request, a tribunal order or an inspection finding – and it picks the date, not you.
Don't fight WhatsApp. Govern it.
Keep the app every member of staff, every volunteer and every family already uses. Move the conversations onto a number branded in the charity's name. Capture everything, disclose everything, and be able to answer anything. Same habit, now on the record. And where door two asked everyone to move, this asks no one: families stay on WhatsApp while your office answers from Microsoft Teams – the system you already pay for.
Four steps. Then it just runs.
Stand up a governed channel
A WhatsApp Business number we set up and run for you, branded in your organisation's name. Staff and families message it like any other contact – same app, nothing to install.
Bring your people across
We set up your relay groups and one-to-one bridges, and supply the staff and family comms. You control membership from one page: add someone in a click, remove them the moment they leave. And your office answers from Microsoft Teams – families notice nothing.
Every message captured
Each message is captured, the moment it is sent, into your own Microsoft 365 – kept, held and searchable under the same rules as your email, using the Microsoft controls your IT lead already runs. Disclosed to members, never covert.
Search, hold, answer
Subject Access Requests, safeguarding evidence, retention and litigation holds – the WhatsApp records found in hours, not weeks, in an archive held in your own Microsoft 365, with no lasting copy on our side.
Two modes. Every word on the record.
A private line, family to office.
One person – a resident's relative, a parent, a client – messages the number branded in your organisation's name, and it reaches your staff in a Microsoft Teams channel. Your reply goes back only to them. It is never shared with anyone else: private by design, the safeguarding default.
Any size, from day one.
No cap, no badge, no waiting. Members message your organisation's branded number, and every text and photo is passed to everyone else under the sender's name – «Margaret»: … A board of fifteen or a home of eighty chats as one governed group, from the first morning.
Built for the people who have to answer for it.
A number branded in your name
Conversations run on a WhatsApp Business number we operate for you, branded in your organisation's name – not a volunteer's personal phone. The channel survives staff churn, phone upgrades and awkward exits.
Joiners in, leavers out, instantly
Add and remove members from an easy-to-use admin page. When someone leaves, they're off every governed conversation before they reach the car park. No more "who still has access to that chat".
Every message, in your own Microsoft 365
Texts, photos, voice notes and documents – captured through WhatsApp's official channel into your own Microsoft 365, not ours. Not a vendor vault you rent space in: the archive sits in the tenant you already own, under your own rules for keeping, holding and searching, from day one. If you ever leave, there is nothing to hand back – the records were always yours.
Families on WhatsApp. Your office on Teams.
Relatives never download anything new – they message the home on WhatsApp as they always have. Office staff and managers answer from a named, threaded conversation inside Microsoft Teams, every word still archived. Staff who prefer the handset keep replying from WhatsApp.
Relay groups, any size
Group conversations run as relay groups, with no size cap: each text or photo reaches your organisation's branded number and is re-sent to everyone else under the sender's name – «Margaret»: … – so a committee of six or a whole board chats as one governed group, from day one. No Official Business badge, no waiting.
Even the gaps leave a record
WhatsApp's rules sometimes hold a message back – a group gone quiet for more than a day, or a kind of message WhatsApp hasn't yet cleared for business numbers. When that happens, the attempt itself is recorded: who didn't receive it, when, and why. Your evidence trail covers what didn't arrive as well as what did.
The WhatsApp side of a SAR, found in an afternoon
Search by the person asking, across every governed channel. Your own team redacts, packages and delivers inside the statutory month – ours on the call beside you if you want company. A workflow built around ICO guidance, for the person whose name goes on the response.
Holds that survive deletion
Messages are archived the instant they are sent – deleting a message in the app cannot claw it back out of the archive – and Microsoft 365 litigation hold preserves them through any purge attempt. A trustee-ready evidence trail.
Nothing of yours to breach
No copy of any conversation ever exists with us – not for support, not for backup, not at all. Most of this category keeps every client's messages in one cloud the vendor owns; we keep none of yours. A break-in at our end would surrender billing records, not messages. Your archive lives behind your own locks, and we keep no copy of it.
Find out where you stand before someone asks.
Thirty minutes with our team. Bring your messiest scenario – the group nobody admits to, the leaver with two years of messages – and leave with a one-page, board-ready summary of your WhatsApp exposure, plus a straight answer on whether we're the fit. Even if that answer is no.
The briefing: one page on WhatsApp exposure, written for boards. No follow-up unless you ask for one.