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Co-ordinating Church Activities with CiviCRM

St Paul’s Church is a large, active Anglican church in St Albans. With around 600 regular attendees, many visitors and a staff team of 10, effective administration and information management is vital. CiviCRM has replaced an old, in-house Access database providing a much richer range of functionality and enabling all staff to share and manage information effectively.

  • Background

    The aim of the project was to improve the management of data helping St Paul’s staff in their roles and enabling more targeted communication with members.

  • Challenges

    St Paul’s has many families but the concept of family is not well supported in CiviCRM. Core features do not include a “family editor” to add all family members on one page and set up multiple relationships (spouse/partner, parent/child, sibling, household member, household head). Households are a partial solution although that requires additional household entities to be maintained.

    However, one of the great features of CiviCRM is its extensibility and with the help of the webform_civicrm Drupal extension we have created a webform to fill the gap for entering and maintaining family members and relationships.

    Children’s and youth groups are often based on age. Although the contact summary page displays an individual’s age, it has not been possible to use that in searches. Code was developed to add searching by age range to the Demographics section of Advanced Search. This was contributed back and released in CiviCRM 4.7.0

  • Solution

    There are many church database systems available: closed or open source, free or paid, online or standalone.

    St Paul’s wanted a flexible system capable of organising a wide range of data making it available to the right people in the right way at the right time. Their needs included data relating to individuals, families, groups and related organisations with facilities to manage events, take online payments and manage volunteers.

    St Paul’s also wanted a system that avoided proprietary lock-in where they truly owned the data and could choose to migrate to an alternative system at a later point if desired. At the same time, they wanted a system with an established user base, an active ecosystem and a range of support options enabling them to manage costs. The church wanted something that could grow with them – providing great ‘out-of-the-box’ features while also adaptable to their specific needs, both current and as yet unknown.

    CiviCRM’s wide range of built-in features, its extensible architecture, widespread adoption and flexible hosting options were a natural fit.

  • Functionality
    • Flexible, accessible system replacing an old Access database
    • A family-based members address list
    • Easy administration by staff

The staff of St. Paul’s Church, under the leadership of the vicar, Canon Tony Hurle, spearheaded the project. Aidan Saunders from Squiffle Consulting oversaw the implementation of CiviCRM and managed the data migration process.

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Provided By: Squiffle Consulting

Squiffle Consulting has the aim of Helping Charities Succeed: You do great things for those in need, for your community, for the environment or for those in a forgotten corner of the globe. Your focus is not IT, but you can’t escape it. Our aim is to help you get the right IT in place that supports your mission and lets you focus on the things you’re passionate about. CiviCRM meets the needs of a wide range of charities, churches and non-profits and is our primary tool of choice.

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