Candid answers to the questions we hear most about ParishGuard. Drop any of these into a board paper or safeguarding committee report — they’re written to be quoted.
No. ParishGuard is a diocesan assurance and parish self-service tool. It sits alongside rota, giving and CMS tools and integrates with your existing HCOMS platform where you have one.
Our engine visits each parish’s public website (respecting robots.txt and polite crawl limits), locates policy and safeguarding pages, and checks content against a two-tier checklist: items the Church of England definitively requires, and recognised best practice.
Results include evidence links so your team can verify every finding.
From your existing diocesan data, with cross-checks against A Church Near You. Parishes can correct or add their website address in the portal.
Official primary sources first — national Church of England resources and Charity Commission model documents — supplemented by your own diocese’s templates where you publish them.
You control the template library.
No. ParishGuard checks what parishes display and publish; it holds no safeguarding case data, and the assistant is hard-coded to signpost any live concern straight to your Diocesan Safeguarding Team.
UK-hosted, UK GDPR compliant, and only processes data your diocese already holds plus publicly available website content.
A full security and data protection brief is available on request.
For existing HCOMS diocese clients, the first full audit typically runs within days of sign-off. New dioceses need a short data onboarding exercise first.
An annual diocesan licence banded by parish count, with optional modules. Existing HCOMS clients receive bundled pricing.
Ask for a quotation — we’ll model your specific parish count in a one-page commercial summary.