Welcome! You’re in the right place to learn how to get started on Honeycomb and how to use the app to connect and collaborate with your parent community. Jump to wherever is most relevant to you.
Honeycomb is a parent collaboration app that helps you team up with your school, club or sport community to conquer day-to-day parenting logistics, together. Honeycomb’s private groups are set up by Room Parents, PTAs, school leaders, team managers and super awesome community-minded parents.
Our goal is to make it simple for families to collaborate on parenting. Honeycomb saves you time and energy on all the parenting things, while also helping you build a supportive IRL community.
Your school or club may use another app for official communication (e.g. school-to-family interaction). Honeycomb is a complement to these tools, as our focus is on family-to-family connection and collaboration.
Your school or organization's staff may be present and active on Honeycomb (they should be clearly badged). They may play an important role in helping your Honeycomb community run (e.g updating calendars, adding new members, posting updates). But they can never see chats they are not included in, private DMs, or events or activities they aren’t part of. Honeycomb is not built for organizations, it’s built for parents.
Sounds good? Let’s get started…
Your Honeycomb family profile helps your community put faces to names, makes it easy to get in touch, and creates opportunities for connection (pickleball, anyone?). Honeycomb profiles also share communication across a child’s parents –– so no more guessing who the primary parent is!
Make sure your whole fam is included: Help other families out by adding all the children and adults who live in your household. We recommend adding any caregivers as well. To add a family member, tap on the Profile tab, then swipe the hexagons at the top to the left, and tap on the “Add” hexagon.
Add photos: Give the gift of removing an awkward pause the next time you run into that parent who’s always forgetting your name at pick up. Check your family members’ hexagons at the top of your Profile tab to make sure everyone has a photo. Add photos and fill in member profiles by choosing a member, then tapping “Edit.”
Don’t have a photo on hand or not ready to share? You can add a placeholder photo (landscapes and animals are great!). Your partner can also login and change their photo when they join.
📣 IMPORTANT: Make sure your partner has access to your family account: If you live in a two-parent household, help both parents stay in the loop by enabling family account access. It means you can both see the same stuff (messages, calendar, etc.) as well as post messages, respond to and create events, edit the family profile and more.
You can give a partner access during account set-up. If you’ve already finished set-up, you can grant access in your profile:
The newly added parent will receive a text to join your family account.
📣 IMPORTANT: If your child lives in two households you should do what’s best for your family, but in general, we recommend that you create a separate account for each household.
Add useful profile details: From allergies to playdate sickness policies to knowing who is present in a household, profiles surface information that makes connecting easier.
To complete your profile, tap Edit while on each hexagon to enter helpful info at the family and individual level.
Once your profile is complete, explore the tabs at the bottom of your screen to get the lay of the land in Honeycomb:
Directory
tab: This is your
home
base, where you’ll see your
community’s smiling faces
whenever
you open the app. Tap on the
hexagons to check out different
families’ profiles, and scroll
through families’ individual
members
to get to know your kids’
classmates
and their siblings, parents and
caregivers. Cozy up next to your
kiddo and use Honeycomb to have
your
child share more about their
buds.
Shared
calendar
tab: Stay on top of
all the things with Honeycomb’s
communal calendar crowdsourced
by
your crew. Your calendar tab may
already have key reminders (we
call
them “FYIs”) like school picture
day, or the fall festival, added
by
another parent or school leader.
FYIs are visible to your entire classroom or school, and are editable by anyone, so please help keep them up-to-date. Events like birthdays or get-togethers show up here too. You can add an event or FYI at any time by tapping the orange plus button on the bottom tab bar.
Chat
tab:
This is where you’ll find all
the convos around your parent
life, neatly organized in a
single space –– no more
sprawling text chains or
overlapping WhatsApp threads!
To help make parenting logistics less overwhelming, all chats have topics, and we encourage parents to start new chats for new topics so they are easy to find, manage and revisit. Tap the “New chat” button on the bottom right to start a convo.
Mute or leave chat threads at any time!
Your “Community Chat” thread always includes everyone in your community (even those who recently joined) and is best for general, community-wide announcements.
Profile
tab: You can view how you
appear in your community, and update
your profile whenever you’d like.
Just
tap “Edit” in the upper right corner
to
make any changes. If you’re still
missing a family member, or want to
add
a caregiver (au pairs, grandparents
––
you name it!) scroll to the right of
your hexagons and tap “Add.”
Two additional spaces to note:
Drop down menu: If you’re in multiple groups, or your classroom is part of a larger school Honeycomb group, you can move between communities by tapping the drop down menu at the top of the screen and selecting a community.
Help/feedback button: Tap the ?! icon in the upper right corner of your screen, and then tap “DM Social Bee” to reach our customer support team. We’re here to answer any questions and love to hear feedback!
Now that you have your bearings, help get the rest of your community families onboard. Your group has the highest value if your whole class or parent crew joins. Together, you can say goodbye to tracking down contact info for bday parties, or sending messages on multiple platforms trying to reach people.
Add a family: Scroll down to the last family hexagon, and tap “Add a family” in the empty hexagon to invite any missing parents to your group.
You can invite families via email or text. Honeycomb populates a message in your email or text client. Don’t worry, you can edit or personalize it before you send it!
Nudge a family: See a parent name on a gray hexagon? This means they haven’t finished signing up. Tap “Text” to get in touch, and while you’re at it send them a reminder –– your text will include a link to help them complete sign up (don’t worry, you can edit before you send!).
Directory
No more random phone numbers in your classroom group chat or WhatsApp thread: Honeycomb profiles include photos and info about the whole fam.
Honeycomb’s family profiles also mean you can communicate across a childs’ family instead of guessing who a primary parent is, and siloing the other.
Get to know your community and what’s important to them, and easily access info when you need it with dietary restrictions, allergies and contact info in a single space.
Interactive shared
calendarStop sifting through multiple calendars, chat threads, and buried PDFs. Honeycomb brings it all together with an interactive calendar that has chat threads and coordination built right in.
Honeycomb’s calendar includes Events and Community FYIs, each of which have their own chat thread to make it easy to share updates and collaborate on logistics.
Events have the functionality of an evite without the hassle. Choose invitees, add your event information and let Honeycomb nudge for RSVPs and send reminders. Think: birthday parties, school potlucks, volunteer days.
Community FYIs are more casual reminders that help keep everyone up to date and surface opportunities to collaborate. FYIs don’t have hosts and are visible to the entire community. Think: reminders for no school days, photo day, class recitals.
Are you that parent who is on top of everything? Share the wealth by adding important dates as Community FYIs, like Parks and Rec sign up deadlines and school picture day. Learn more here.
Add an entire calendar for your group: Got an entire school calendar or team schedule to share with your group? Email it to magic@honeycomb-labs.com we’ll upload everything for you. Really.
Chat
Topic-based chat: Honeycomb’s topic-based chats keep your conversations neatly organized. Whether it’s something timely, like teacher appreciation gift ideas, or long-term, like summer camp planning, separate chat threads help make logistics less overwhelming. Separate threads also give participants control over muting or leaving specific topics.
To start a chat, tap the “New Chat” button, choose participants –– you can invite your whole group, or a subset of families –– and give your chat a topic. Looking for inspiration on what to post? Visit our Community Building Guidebook.
Community Chat thread: This thread automatically populates with everyone in your community or classroom when you join Honeycomb. When new members join, they are added and can see the chat history. It’s great for general announcements or updates.
Magic
powers: The orange icon
in the bottom right corner of any
chat
is a shortcut to invite everyone in
the
chat to an event, or to coordinate
sharing care. Honeycomb’s share care
makes it easy to offer care via a
drop-off playdate, ask for help with
care, or propose a swap with the
participants in your chat group
(date
night, anyone?).
Emojis: Share some love with a like or heart by tapping and holding over a message.
Honeycomb is founded by parents of little kids who are active users of the app –– we treat Honeycomb user data the same way we'd want our own family data treated by any service we use.
Honeycomb is a private visual directory and shared calendar for your community, designed to help families build stronger connections within trusted groups. We ask for some basic info about your family during sign up, such as family name and photo, and your child’s first name, photo and birth month (to show age to others) to help facilitate community building.
Any content created by a user is private to their communities, including messages, photos and profile data. This content cannot be forwarded off of Honeycomb. We've also built privacy controls into the app so that users get to choose –– for certain pieces of data like phone, email, address –– whether they're made visible to others in their community. We're continually evolving these controls. You can read more about how we handle privacy and security here .
We ask for Photos and Contacts permissions in-app to simplify your experience of completing your profile and inviting families to join, but the only data we store on our servers is data that you explicitly choose, or create in the app. We don’t store your address book and we don’t upload any photos you haven’t explicitly selected as a profile photo or shared in a post.
It's highly recommended that you enable notifications so you don’t miss invites and conversations in your community. We also know parents have a wide range of participation preferences, so we’ve made it easy to manage notifications in the app.
You can mute any chat –– whether it’s a group chat, DM, FYI or event chat –– by swiping left in the chat tab on any chat summary, or by going into the chat’s settings. You can also exit group chats via the chat’s settings.
If you RSVP “no” to an event, you will stop receiving all event notifications.
If you’d like to turn off all notifications for the app, you can do this via your phone settings.
Parents will receive a notification when you post a chat to a group they are part of, and a daily reminder if they have unread chats. In larger conversations, chat notifications start only once a parent opens the chat. Parents can mute or exit a chat thread at any time.
Go to your profile tab, and tap the family member whose profile you want to fill out. Tap “Edit” in the upper right. When you are done, tap “Save” in the upper right.
Go to your profile tab and scroll hexagons to the left until you see “Add.” If you’re adding an adult, you can add their phone number and they will receive a text to join your account.
To remove a family member, choose that family member, tap “Edit,” then scroll to the bottom of their individual profile and tap “Delete member.”
Sharing family account access keeps both parents in the loop. It means you can see the same stuff (messages, calendar, etc.) as well as post messages, respond to and create events, edit the family profile and more.
If you still need to add your partner, go to Profile, scroll the hexagons to the left, and tap “Add.” Enter their info including mobile number (account access is default set to on), and tap “Save” (upper right).
If you’ve already added your partner but did not give access during account set-up, tap the Profile tab, select their hexagon, and then tap Edit (upper right). Add a mobile phone number (account access is default set to on), and tap “Save.”
The newly added parent will receive a text to join your family account.
Do whatever works best for your family, but in general we recommend setting up one account per parent household.
You control what you make visible to your community. For address, in your Family profile, you can also choose whether to share an exact or approximate address. For email and phone, choose the adult member, tap Edit, then set the toggle “Visible on profile” to your preference.
To add allergies, tap on your child’s hexagon, tap Edit, and fill in allergy information.
Topic-based threads keep chats organized and give participants more control over muting or leaving chats. In the chat tab, tap the “New Chat” button, choose participants –– you can invite your whole group, or a subset of families –– and give your chat a topic.
Topic-based threads keep chats organized and give participants more control over muting or leaving chats. In the chat tab, tap the “New Chat” button.
Then choose participants –– you can invite your whole group, or a subset of families –– and give your chat a topic.
Your Community Chat automatically populates when you join Honeycomb, and includes all group members by default. It’s great for general announcements and updates.If a new community member is added to your group, they’ll be able to read the history. If you want to kick off a conversation, we recommend tapping “New Chat.”
The ability to archive chats is coming soon.
In the chat tab, swipe left on any chat summary to reveal a mute option for that thread.
Or, from within the chat detailed view, tap the chat’s header to get to settings, then tap “Mute.” To exit the chat, scroll to the bottom of the participants list and tap “Exit.” Note that you can mute, but not exit, your group’s Community Chat thread. You cannot exit a chat that you created.
Or, from within the chat detailed view, tap the chat’s header to get to settings, then tap “Mute.” To exit the chat, scroll to the bottom of the participants list and tap “Exit.”
Note that you can mute, but not exit, your group’s Community Chat thread. You cannot exit a chat that you created.
If you created a chat, tap the chat header to get to settings, then tap “Edit” to change the topic. Tap “Add participants” to add someone. Newly added participants will be able to see the chat’s history.
You can’t remove someone from a chat yet, but this feature is coming soon.
Events and FYIs, and their chats, are auto-archived once they are in the past.
To manually archive any chat, first go to the chat’s detailed view and tap the chat’s header to get to chat settings. Then scroll to the bottom of the participants list and tap “Archive.”
To find archived chats in the chat tab (whether auto-archived or manually archived), tap the drop down pill and tap on “Archived chats”.
To find archived Events and FYIs from the calendar tab, tap the drop down pill and tap on “Past activity”.
This feature is coming soon! In the meantime, you can email help@honeycomb-labs.com or tap the ?! icon in the upper right corner of your screen with a request to delete or edit an existing post. We’re happy to take care of that for you in a jiff.
How to translate a post:
How to translate your own post before you send it:
A Honeycomb event is
similar
to a light Evite, with
an
invite list you
determine as
the host, and a request
for
your community to RSVP
(think: birthday
parties,
school potlucks,
volunteer
days).
A Community FYI is a
more
casual reminder: FYIs
don’t
have hosts and are
visible
to the entire community
(think: reminders for no
school days, photo day,
class recitals).
Any parent can create Events or add FYIs to their community, and any parent can –– and ideally would! –– update an existing FYI to help keep the shared calendar up-to-date.
Tap the orange plus button from any tab, then select Community FYI or Event and follow the prompts.
Got an entire school calendar or team schedule to share with your group? Email it to magic@honeycomb-labs.com we’ll upload it for you. Really.
Community FYIs are designed to be easily shared with your entire community. You can choose whether that’s your classroom or squad, or the entire school or team.
After tapping on “Add a Community FYI” from the plus-button, tap on the “Select a community” bar at the top of the screen to choose which community you want to share the FYI with. Depending on how your Honeycomb communities are set up, you may be able to pick the entire school or club (in this case, Happy Day School), an entire grade or larger group (e.g. Kinder), or just your classroom or squad (e.g. Ms Honey’s Class).
For now, once you’ve published an FYI you can’t edit the audience it’s shared with. If you need to change the audience, you’ll need to delete and re-add for now.
Plans and dates change! Tap the FYI to get to its detailed view, then tap the header of the FYI to get to settings. From here, tap “Edit” in the upper right corner. Since Community FYIs are shared across your community, your edits will be reflected for your entire community.
Just as with any chat, you can mute a Community FYI from the chat tab by swiping left. Or you can go into the Community FYI’s detailed view, tap its header to get to settings, and tap mute to turn off notifications for the FYI’s chat.
Go to the Honeycomb Calendar tab and tap the calendar icon in the upper left corner. Follow the prompts to either add or view your Honeycomb community’s Google calendar. Each community –– e.g. each classroom in a school –– has its own Honeycomb Calendar, which also includes school/club-wide events.
Honeycomb Events have invitee lists chosen by their hosts, and are not necessarily community-wide. Soon, event invitees will be able to copy Events into their personal Google calendars.
Coming soon! Meanwhile, you can add FYIs by tapping the add calendar icon in the upper left of the Honeycomb Calendar tab, then tap View Google calendar, navigate to the event you want to add, and then choose “copy to my calendar” from within the event.
Google Calendar is a commonly used and trusted tool for preschool and elementary schools. Your Honeycomb community’s Google calendar will only be viewable to people who have access to the link in the app, e.g. the members of your private community. You can learn more about Google Calendar here.
Not yet — but we’re working on it! 💪🏼
Often school calendars include the big stuff — like no school days and conferences — but miss important dates like theme days and permission slip deadlines. Your Honeycomb calendar will include all the community events that have been added by fellow families into Honeycomb that your school calendar may be missing. Continue to add events and reminders as Community FYIs to keep your calendar up to date –– or sign up for our beta, and let us help you do it faster!
If you’re in multiple groups, or your classroom is part of a larger school Honeycomb group, you can move between classrooms or communities by tapping the drop down pill menu at the top of the Directory screen and selecting a community.
Tap the ?! icon in the upper right corner of your screen to contact Honeycomb support, or email help@honeycomb-labs.com with your request.
Add a family: Scroll down to the last family hexagon, and tap “Add a family” in the empty hexagon to invite any missing parents to your group.
You can invite families via email or text. Honeycomb populates a message in your email or text client. Don’t worry, you can edit or personalize it before you send it!
Nudge a family: See a parent name on a gray hexagon? This means they haven’t finished signing up. Tap “Text” to get in touch, and while you’re at it send them a reminder –– your text will include a link to help them complete sign up (don’t worry, you can edit before you send!).
Some Honeycomb communities have teachers and staff as part of their communities, and some don’t. Regardless, teachers, staff and administrators are never able to access Honeycomb content they have not been invited to join.
As a platform focused on parent-to-parent communication, we want parents to clearly know when a school or organization’s staff are present. So we badge staff profiles, and, whenever a staff member is in a chat, we include a notice near the comment box to alert you.
If your Honeycomb community or classroom does include teachers or staff, they will be able to see posts in your Community Chat and in FYI chats, as these include everyone in the community by default (look for the “staff member(s) in this chat” notice). You can see which staff are part of a chat thread by tapping the chat header to get to settings, and then scrolling through the participant list and looking for the staff badge.
When you start a new chat on Honeycomb, or set up an event, you are always in control of whether to invite staff, and they are clearly marked with staff badges during the invite process.
You can create a
new group
by tapping on
the drop down
pill in the
directory tab,
and tapping “+
Create a new
community”.
Or you can visit
our website
and click “Get
Honeycomb,”
or go directly
to this
link.
If you’d like to
bring
Honeycomb to a
new school,
you can connect
your school
leadership (your
Room
Parent, PTA
leader or
Preschool
Director) to
Honeycomb to
help kickoff
the convo. Just
email
help@honeycomb-labs.com
to
get started.
Honeycomb is entirely free. In the future, a Honeycomb parent may have the option to opt-in to a premium version of Honeycomb that offers special features that help them save time, like a carpool coordination tool. This will be optional and won’t impact a parents’ ability to use all of Honeycomb’s existing features.
Email help@honeycomb-labs.com, or tap the ?! icon in the upper right corner of the app to reach out to our customer support team. We’re here to help!