Moving a large church’s member platform to a modern setup, without stopping it

We keep this client’s name private. The client is real, and so is the system.

Client: A large church in Singapore with many departments, ministries, and volunteer teams
Industry: Faith and Community Organizations
Services: Platform Modernization, Microservices Migration, Access Management

Organise Event: events filtered by ministry, event type and date, each with its ministry, type, times, location, invitees and RSVP counts, and Create event. — The product’s own screens, white-labelled as Member Platform: its name, logo, colours and type are ours, not the client’s. Names and figures on screen are samples.

The challenge

The church runs its membership, events, and volunteer teams on its own platform. That platform was built as one large old system with a big database and many outside connections. Every change was risky, and access rules couldn’t keep up with how the church is organized: departments, then ministries, then teams, then members.

What we built

We moved the platform to smaller, separate services one piece at a time, so it stayed live the whole time. We built a roles and permissions system that follows the church’s structure. One person can hold several roles, like team leader or serving member, and admins control exactly what each role can see and do. On the same platform, we also built a dashboard that tracks how many children and teachers are in each kids’ classroom during services.

Creating an event, step one: ministry, event type, name and location, with its dates and times or an all-day option.

The event’s invitation email in a rich-text editor with a banner image, above the event settings and invitee steps, and Save and create event.

An event’s attendance list: members with contact, email, ministry, group and role, each marked present or absent with a reason, and actions for the selected rows.

The member directory: search and filters by ministry, campus, role and status, each member’s teams, roles, status and last attendance, and actions for the selected members.

Ministries and teams: a tree of departments, ministries and teams with members and leads, and one ministry’s teams, leaders and member counts.

Roles and permissions: each role with how many people hold it, and one role’s scope and its view, create, edit, delete and approve rights for each module.

The result

The platform was modernized step by step, with no big-bang cutover.
Access matches the real structure of the church, from departments down to teams.
More than a year of continuous work, extended several times, with an AI assistant layer now being scoped.

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