Already Have Radios? Here's What They Still Can't Do

A lot of the security teams and volunteer groups we talk to already carry radios — Motorola, Baofeng, Kenwood, whatever their budget and training landed on. They work. Nobody's trying to replace them. But when we ask what happens after the radio call — who wrote down what happened, who knew where the responding volunteer actually was, who told the rest of the team it was handled — the answer is usually "nobody, really." That gap is what this is about.

What radios are good at — and what they were never built for

A two-way radio does one thing extremely well: it puts your voice in someone else's ear, instantly, with no setup. That's genuinely hard to beat, and GatherSafe's own push-to-talk feature exists because voice matters. But a radio channel is also everything at once and nothing afterward — whoever wasn't listening at that exact second missed it, and once the transmission ends, there's no record of what was said, who said it, or where they were standing when they said it.

That's not a flaw in the radios — it's just not what they're for. The gap shows up in three places every security team eventually runs into: a written record after an incident, knowing where people are without asking, and reaching absolutely everyone at once instead of whoever's on channel.

What the Connect plans actually add

GatherSafe's Connect plans ($19.99 to $199/month, sized to your team) are built exactly for this: every non-voice feature of GatherSafe, with push-to-talk left out entirely because your radios already have that covered. Unlimited groups, no per-seat pricing — you pick the tier that fits your member count, the same pricing model as every other GatherSafe plan.

• Separate teams — set up parking, interior, children's wing, or whatever teams your organization runs, each with its own chat and its own view of what matters to them.
• AES-256 encrypted messaging — a written channel to one person or a whole group, searchable later, that doesn't depend on being in radio range.
• Choose who an alert reaches — send it to everyone in the organization, or scope it to just the one team it's actually relevant to, instead of every radio getting every call.
• Panic alerts with GPS — one tap (or a triple-press on a paired Bluetooth accessory) notifies your entire team with a location, not just whoever's listening to a channel at that moment.
• Real-time team location — an opt-in map showing where your own people are, so "where are you?" stops being a radio call.
• Incident logging — a photo, GPS, and timestamp captured at the moment something happens, creating a record your team can actually retrieve afterward — for insurance, for leadership, for your own memory a week later.
• Service scheduling & check-in — who's covering which post this week, without a separate spreadsheet.

Which Connect plan do you need?

The four Connect plans are identical except for member count and campuses.Connect Starter covers up to 30 members, Connect Team up to 150, Connect Ministry up to 500, and Connect Ministry Pro up to 2,000 members across as many as 5 campuses, with campus-scoped alerts and the team map's campus switcher. The first three cover a single campus. Running more than 5 campuses or more than 2,000 members? Reach out about Enterprise.

When you might still want push-to-talk instead

The Connect plans assume your voice channel is already solved. If it isn't — if you don't have radios yet, if your current setup doesn't reach everyone reliably, or if you'd rather run voice through the same app as everything else — GatherSafe's Starter, Team, Ministry, and Ministry Pro plans include push-to-talk built in, so your phone becomes the radio too. Neither approach is more "complete" than the other; they're built for two different starting points, and you can switch between them from billing settings whenever your situation changes.