The questions diocesan
secretaries actually ask.
Candid answers to the ten questions we hear most. Drop any of these into a board paper or RFP response — they're written to be quoted.
Candid answers to the ten questions we hear most. Drop any of these into a board paper or RFP response — they're written to be quoted.
You still do — the platform sits on top of M365, not next to it. Calls run through Teams, email runs through Microsoft Graph, AI runs through Azure OpenAI, single sign-on runs through Azure AD.
We're not asking you to swap vendors; we're asking your existing M365 estate to do diocesan work.
It's the system that lets parishes stop learning systems. Today they juggle a CofE CMS login, an emailed Word document, a paper Form C and three different inboxes for three different teams.
The portal is one login. Two-factor email-based — no passwords to memorise. And it's built around what parishes already do, not what the back-office wants from them.
GDPR is a feature, not a worry. Subject Access Requests are a workflow with a tracked deadline. Right-to-erasure and right-to-correction are typed and tracked the same way. Retention is policy-driven. The audit log shows every decision.
PII is redacted from any AI input before it leaves the diocese. Inspection-ready, not patched-on.
Yes — and you can put your data in. Every entity has a CSV/XLSX export. The reporting layer can produce extracts on a schedule.
The data-mart roadmap exposes a read-only OData feed for Power BI or any third-party tool. There is no lock-in by design.
Diocesan work is church-shaped, not business-shaped. The platform was built around the diocese-episcopal-area-archdeaconry-deanery-benefice-parish-church hierarchy and the canonical structures (Common Tenure, Mission and Pastoral Measure, Form C, A of E, SfM/RoPF/EFT) — not the customer-account-opportunity model bent into a diocesan shape.
You'll spend zero time mapping a generic CRM onto canon law.
Two paths. One: embed your existing Power BI tiles in the platform's dashboards so they're surfaced where staff already work. Two: expose the platform's data through an OData feed so your Power BI dashboards refresh automatically.
Most dioceses do both — quick wins via embedding, strategic answer via the feed.
You take the data with you. The schema is documented, every table is exportable, and the source code can be transferred under the existing licensing agreement.
We've designed for portability because diocesan trust is earned over years, not signatures.
The Diocese of Leeds rollout was incremental: we lit teams up one at a time rather than waiting for a big-bang. A new diocese typically sees first-team production use in a quarter, full rollout within a year.
The platform is already built — your project is configuration, data migration and change management, not software construction. See the phase-by-phase implementation story →
The platform is Laravel and Nova — mainstream PHP technology used by many thousands of organisations, with a deep bench of capable developers. There is no proprietary runtime.
If you wanted to run it yourself or hire a different vendor to maintain it, you could.
The platform is licensed per diocese rather than per user — encouraging adoption rather than penalising it.
Total cost of ownership is dominated by Microsoft licences you already pay for, not by the platform itself. We'll model your specific case in a one-page commercial summary.