When the Pope starts his State visit to the UK on Thursday, we at 3^rd Sector Digital will be taking more of an interest than most technology-based businesses.

By arriving in Edinburgh (to be greeted by the Queen), travelling to London and then heading to Birmingham, the Pope will be visiting three of Britain’s biggest Roman Catholic dioceses:  St Andrews, Westminster and Birmingham.

All are major customers of ours.

Innovation and modernisation

There aren’t many institutions as old as the Catholic Church. And there can be few that are dogged so much by arguments over the need to change and ‘modernise’.

But over the past 5 years, in working with staff and priests across a number of dioceses and parishes, we’ve had a rather different view of the church - one that itself has been about, well... modernisation!

Through website design, donor management and accounting support, we’ve been helping dioceses and parishes to adopt new technologies and ways of working that reflect some pretty impressive bouts of innovation.

From online Gift Aid and accounting...

Take Gift Aid, for example - the scheme by which charities can reclaim tax paid by their donors (providing accurate records are kept and managed). A large diocese might have upwards of 60,000 registered Gift Aiders, with annual tax reclaims in excess of £2.5 Million.

In the Catholic Church, it is the diocese that claims tax back. There is thus an ongoing exchange of data between the central diocese and (in some cases) 200+ parishes and other bodies that receive donations and help enrol donors into planned giving and Gift Aid arrangements.

Our ‘Gift Aid Manager’, which has been designed and implemented with the support of several dioceses, supports this process – allowing for the two-tier approach typical in the Church. Based on a browser interface, with a hosted data solution, the system gives both parishes and the centre real-time access to records, as well as secure back-up and advanced analytical facilities.

For some dioceses, Gift Aid support has also been integrated with ‘Financial Manager’, our accounting solution.  Unlike many similar organisations, where local branches (think ‘parishes’ in this case) manage funds using a potpourri of spreadsheets and accounting packages, a number of Catholic dioceses now manage their accounts via a common web-based system.

Again here, the data is hosted centrally, using a secure, advanced server farm, giving both parish and the central diocese access to the same information, and a more seamless link between local financial data and the central chart of accounts.

...To website design and Web 2.0 developments

Then there are all the things we’ve be doing on the website side, employing more modern design principles and using ‘web 2.0’ technologies and mobile platforms. One diocese now enjoys over 70,000 website visits a month.

As far as we know, we also built the first ‘virtual diocese’ in the UK – a mash-up of directory data and Google-Maps, which allows users to search for churches, schools and diocesan events (like the Pope’s visit) using a graphical, map-based interface (for example, see Westminster’s: http://www.rcdow.org.uk/virtual/).

We could say more

So innovation there has been – and some of it cutting edge. We could say more...much more. But then we’re not the real stars this week – those that have implemented these technologies and embraced change in their dioceses are.