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ChurchLinker is a modern, all-in-one church management platform built specifically for UK churches. It replaces the spreadsheets, disconnected email lists and separate tools most churches rely on. In one place, you get a full member database, online giving with Gift Aid automation, rota scheduling, event management, a sermon library, small groups, mass communications and a branded member app. All of it connected.

You can be live in under an hour. Sign up, enter your church details, import your contacts (CSV upload or copy-paste) and you're ready. Our Getting Started guide walks you through every step. If you'd like hands-on help, a free 30-minute setup call is available on Grow plan and above. Just email hello@churchlinker.com to book.

Not at all. ChurchLinker is designed so that a church secretary or volunteer with no IT background can run it confidently. Everything has plain-English labels, contextual help tooltips and a searchable help centre. If you can use a smartphone, you can use ChurchLinker.

Yes. Paid plans start with a 14-day free trial, with no credit card required. The Seed plan is permanently free for churches up to 50 contacts, so you can also start there with no trial countdown at all. You can export all your data at any time.

Yes. ChurchLinker has a built-in CSV importer at Settings → Import People that handles exports from ChurchSuite, Breeze, Planning Center, Elvanto and standard spreadsheets. The importer auto-suggests how your columns map to ChurchLinker fields (so 'First Name', 'firstname' and 'Given Name' all land in the right place), runs a dry-run preview that flags bad rows by line number before anything commits and silently skips anyone already in your directory by matching email. If you'd like help mapping fields or planning the move, email hello@churchlinker.com and we'll work through it with you.

ChurchLinker charges a flat monthly or discounted annual fee, with no per-member pricing surprises as your congregation grows. Seed is permanently free for churches up to 50 contacts. Sprout (£19/mo) covers up to 150 contacts. Grow (£39/mo) up to 500. Thrive (£79/mo) up to 1,500. Kingdom (£129/mo) up to 5,000. Enterprise pricing is available for denominations, networks and multi-location churches.

Thrive bundles the full UK statutory compliance stack for safeguarding and charity governance, in one product on one bill. The DBS lifecycle (automated 30/14/7-day expiry reminders by email and push, a coordinator inbox bucketed by urgency, a renewal-in-flight pause so reminders stop nagging once the paperwork's filed, bulk import for backfilling existing records, an umbrella-body portal one-click link and an anti-phishing agency contact card on every member's profile). The formal Charity Commission members register (bulk-tick onboarding, snapshot reports for any historical date, AGM-ready printable PDF with signature lines, full audit trail). Five delegatable permission flags so a pastor can hand the day-to-day to specific people. Standalone DBS tracking tools typically run £20 to £40/month, and dedicated charity-register or AGM tools run £20 to £60/month. A church running all three separately would easily pay £70 to £140/month combined. Bundled in Thrive at £79, plus 0% on every donation.

Because almost every church running a formal members register is mid-size or larger. It's the register trustees use for AGM quorum, voting and trustee elections, typically a 150+ member conversation. Sprout (£19) is built around the genuinely small church (around 20 to 100 people) where a formal voting register often isn't the relevant tool yet. From Grow (£39, up to 500 contacts) it's included alongside everything else, and Thrive inherits it.

Yes. The Seed plan has no time limit. It includes core member management, basic giving and the member portal for up to 50 active members. As your church grows beyond 50 members you'll be prompted to upgrade, but we'll never delete your data or lock you out. We'll give you plenty of notice.

No hidden platform fees. Online giving is processed through your church's own Stripe account. Stripe's standard UK card rate (around 1.5% + 25p at the time of writing, see stripe.com/gb/pricing for the current rate) is the only deduction on each gift, and that goes to Stripe, not us. ChurchLinker takes a 0% application fee on every donation. For direct debit giving (BACS), GoCardless fees apply (1% capped at £4). Gift Aid reclaims (25p per £1 from UK taxpayers) go 100% back to your church.

Yes. Paying annually saves you two months compared to monthly billing, which is a 16% discount. Annual prices: Sprout £190/year, Grow £390/year, Thrive £790/year, Kingdom £1,290/year. You can choose monthly or annual at checkout and switch any time from your billing settings.

We believe every church should have access to great software regardless of size or budget. Registered charities (which most UK churches are) already benefit from our pricing structure. If your church is genuinely struggling financially, please reach out to hello@churchlinker.com and we'll work something out.

You can export all your data in standard CSV and JSON formats at any time, including after cancellation. We retain your data for 90 days post-cancellation in case you change your mind, then it is permanently deleted. We'll always give you 30 days' notice of any changes to this policy.

You can store all standard contact details, family connections, membership status and date, small group memberships, tags, custom fields, notes, giving history, attendance records, DBS records (with automated 30/14/7-day expiry reminders, coordinator dashboard, renewal-in-flight tracking and umbrella-body portal links), Charity Commission register status with admission date and role assignments. All fields are fully searchable and filterable.

Create a rota from a starter template (Sunday Worship, Welcome Team, Children's Ministry, Youth, Sound & Tech or Prayer) or start blank. Generate a recurring batch of slots with one click, or duplicate a previous period forward. Assign people one at a time, drag-drop them on the grid view, or use the optional AI rota builder to draft a quarter in seconds (Thrive plan and above). ChurchLinker surfaces soft conflict warnings when someone's double-booked, has a block-out on the day, or has an open swap request. Not blocking, just nudging. Reminders run on configurable Light / Standard / Heavy presets and members get email, SMS, WhatsApp or push notifications.

Yes. Members open My availability in the app and add block-out dates (a single day or a multi-day window like a holiday) with an optional reason. The auto-scheduler then skips that volunteer for any rota slot inside the window automatically. If staff manually assign someone whose block-out collides with a date that's already on a rota, the coordinator sees an amber warning at the top of the rota detail page so it's caught before publication. Members keep their block-outs current themselves; staff can also record one on a member's behalf when a volunteer phones in.

Yes. Each member has a personal subscription link in their profile that any calendar app (Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Outlook) can follow. Slots show up automatically and update when anything changes, with no manual copying.

A mobile-first live-ops dashboard for the duty leader between 9 and 10am on a Sunday. It shows every rota slot for today across every rota, the assignment status of each person (Here / Expected / No-show, tap to cycle) and a one-tap ‘find cover’ sheet that lists active volunteers who aren't on anything today, ranked by skill match against the role you need. Pick someone, edit the pre-filled SMS, send. Polls every 30 seconds for out-of-band changes.

Yes. The Volunteer Milestones queue detects when a regular serves their 10th, 25th, 50th, 100th, 250th or 500th confirmed slot and surfaces a pre-drafted message for the pastor to review. One tap sends by SMS or email, one tap skips. Dedup is automatic, so no-one gets thanked twice for the same milestone.

Yes. The Resources hub at Dashboard → Resources lets your church curate its own content library. Create named categories like 'Sermons', 'Podcasts', 'Bible Study' or 'Volunteer Training', then drop in three types of resource: outbound links, document URLs (paste the link to a PDF or shared doc), or embedded media from Spotify, YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud or Buzzsprout. Embedded media plays inside the app so members never have to leave to listen. Paste your Spotify show URL or YouTube playlist URL and we'll render the player automatically. Mark a category or a single resource as staff-only when it's for leaders rather than members (volunteer training notes, leader guides). Each group and ministry team also has its own resource library for team-specific links and materials.

Yes. The member portal (at your church's subdomain, e.g. kcc-swindon.churchlinker.com) lets members log in, view and update their contact details, see their group memberships and upcoming events, give online and access the sermon library. Admins control which fields members can self-edit.

Yes. The Enterprise plan supports multi-location churches with a unified database, location-level filtering and location-specific admin roles. Each location or congregation can have its own giving funds, events and rotas while sharing the central member database. Contact us to discuss your specific structure.

Yes. ChurchLinker includes a built-in email broadcaster with audience segmentation by group, status, location or custom tag, with full open/click analytics. SMS broadcasts are available on Grow and above via Twilio. WhatsApp broadcasts are available on Thrive and above. All sends respect GDPR consent preferences and are tracked per recipient. If you use Mailchimp for more advanced campaigns, you can sync your ChurchLinker contacts directly to a Mailchimp audience from Settings.

Yes. ChurchLinker has a built-in Mailchimp integration available on Thrive plan and above. Go to Settings, then AI & integrations, paste your Mailchimp API key and choose which audience to sync to. Click Sync now and all active contacts with an email address are upserted into your Mailchimp audience. You can re-sync any time. The integration stores your API key encrypted and never shares your data with third parties.

Yes. Upload sermons with audio, video (YouTube/Vimeo embed), transcript and series grouping. Members can browse, search and listen from the member portal or mobile app. On Grow plan and above, our AI can generate summaries and key points, and members can ask questions about individual sermons via an AI chat interface.

Yes. Dashboard → Service plans is a drag-drop timeline for each service: welcome, opening songs, notices, sermon, response, close. Each item carries a duration in minutes and the start/end times recalc automatically as you reorder or change a duration. Items can carry an optional category (colour-coded), a leader name (free-text so external speakers work too) and notes. The total runtime is at the top of the page so you always know when the service ends.

Dashboard → Pastoral care → Care heatmap renders every active member as a coloured tile, ordered coldest-first. The colour is driven by days-since-last-meaningful-contact, where contact means a pastoral note, a prayer request, a completed follow-up or an individual message. Tap a tile and a drawer opens with the last-contact summary and a one-tap ‘Mark as contacted’ action that creates an encrypted pastoral note (and optionally schedules a follow-up N days out). Pastor-only, so directory staff don’t see the cold-contact list.

Yes. Switch on the Weekly digest in Settings → Weekly digest and every active opted-in member gets one personalised email a week (Saturday by default, configurable per tenant): this week’s public events, their own rota slots, recent public prayer requests, the latest sermon and last Sunday’s notices. No AI writes the copy; it’s all data the church has already published. ‘Send me a preview’ button lets the admin see exactly what members will receive.

Yes. The Sunday recap lands in every STAFF+ inbox on the day after service (Monday by default) with attendance, first-timer names, rota confirmation %, open swap requests and giving total. The same view sits on the staff dashboard as a tile for anytime access. It’s pastoral framing, not a leaderboard. No donor names, no top-giver ranking.

Yes. Every member event detail page in the app offers ‘Add to Apple Wallet’ and ‘Save to Google Wallet’ buttons. Each pass carries the event’s time, location, the member’s name and a unique QR code, plus the church’s primary colour for branding. ChurchLinker is the platform issuer, so no church needs their own Apple Developer account.

Yes. A five-step wizard appears on first sign-in for the tenant admin: confirm the church profile, bring people in (CSV importer or manual add), invite a teammate, connect your church's own Stripe account for giving (5 to 10 minutes through Stripe's secure onboarding) and pick reminder defaults. Every step is optional, every step is reversible and the wizard never blocks the rest of the product.

Yes. The “How can we help?” surface on the member home opens a threaded conversation with the staff team. Members pick a category (prayer / practical / finance / pastoral / other), write what’s going on, and the team replies in the same thread. Bodies are encrypted at rest using the same field-level encryption pastoral notes use, members only see their own threads, and every reply is audit-logged. Staff find every thread at Dashboard → Pastoral care → Help threads.

Yes. When a member receives an SMS rota reminder, replying with “yes”, “y”, “ok”, “confirm” auto-marks their assignment CONFIRMED. “No”, “n”, “decline”, “can’t” marks it DECLINED. The system texts back confirming the role + date so they know it landed. Multiple slots on the same day get a follow-up SMS asking which role, and any non-yes/no reply is treated as a normal message. Members can chat with the church without flipping their rota by accident.

Yes. The pastoral care heatmap (Dashboard → Pastoral care → Care heatmap) now has filter chips at the top: All, Never, 90+ days, 30 to 89 days, under 30 days. Tap one to slice the grid to the bucket you want to action this week.

Yes. On any service plan (Dashboard → Service plans → open one), tap the Present button in the top-right. The timeline flips to a fullscreen read-only view that highlights whichever item is happening right now based on wall-clock time, and refreshes every 30 seconds. Esc to exit.

When a service is currently happening, the member event detail page shows a green “I’m here” button. Tapping it marks the member’s attendance with a check-in timestamp, no QR scanner needed. The button is only visible from 1 hour before the event starts until 2 hours after it ends, so it can’t be used to retroactively mark old events. If the member already pre-booked a capacity-limited slot, the registration is preserved (no silent freeing of a seat).

Yes. On the Sunday Command page (Dashboard → Sunday Ops → Sunday command), there's a collapsible pre-service checklist with eight standard items: building unlocked + lights, heating, sound check, slides loaded, live stream ready, kids team in place + DBS, welcome team briefed, refreshments. State is remembered per device per service date so a refresh doesn't lose progress.

Yes. From any sermon detail page (Dashboard → Sermons → open one), tap Generate clip moments. The AI picks 3 quote-worthy moments with timestamps from the transcript, then each clip records as a branded 1080×1920 portrait MP4/WebM directly in your browser. The canvas draws the caption plus your church branding, and the sermon audio is mixed in via in-browser MediaRecorder. You download the file ready to upload to Reels, TikTok or YouTube Shorts. No server-side ffmpeg, no per-minute transcoding bill. Grow plan and above.

Yes. The same AI pick that powers vertical clips also produces three 1080×1080 branded PNG quote cards per sermon, perfect for Instagram, WhatsApp status or a printed insert. Cached on the sermon so re-downloads are free; regenerate whenever you want fresh quotes.

Sort of. It queues a thank-you per gift, but the pastor stays in the loop. Dashboard → Giving → Thank-you queue lists every recent eligible gift with a templated draft ready to send. Optional ‘Warm up with AI’ button rewrites the prose into something warmer. Privacy is non-negotiable: amount, fund name, gift-aid amount and date are redacted to placeholder tokens before the draft reaches the LLM. Only the donor’s first name and the church name ever leave the platform. The polished prose is reassembled server-side. Grow plan and above.

Yes. Dashboard → Giving → Stewardship moments surfaces faithful givers hitting a 1, 2, 3 or 5-year anniversary in the next 7 days. Click any row and the AI drafts a short pastoral thank-you note for the pastor to review. The AI sees only the donor’s first name plus anniversary years plus church name. No amounts, no cadence, no attendance. The pastor sees a separate warmth-context panel underneath (Sundays attended in the last 12 weeks, groups, giving cadence) so they can personalise the note themselves. That context is shown to the pastor only and never sent to the AI.

Dashboard → People → Visitor pipeline is a four-column Kanban for first-time guests: New this week → Need follow-up → Following up → Joined the church. Cards drag between columns (pointer or keyboard, fully accessible via dnd-kit). Dropping a card into ‘Following up’ marks the visitor as followed-up; dropping it into ‘Joined the church’ flips the linked Person to MEMBER and logs the change. Tap-buttons remain on every card for touch users who prefer them over drag.

Yes. ‘Your Year at Church’ is a personal year recap for every member: services attended, groups they’re in, sermons listened to, generated from each member’s own data. Opt-in, shareable as a card. It’s the rare moment when a church admin tool produces something a member actively wants to send to a friend. Available to members from the home screen once they have enough history to recap.

Yes. churchlinker.com/tools/gift-aid-declaration is a free, public, no-signup tool that generates a HMRC-shaped Gift Aid declaration PDF for any UK church. It’s ours, it’s useful on its own and you’re welcome to use it even if you never sign up to the rest of ChurchLinker.

Yes. Every sermon detail page in the member portal has a bookmark icon top-right; a member taps it to save the sermon, taps again to remove. The sermon list grows an All / Saved tab pair so saved sermons are one tap away. Saves are per-member and private; your bookmarks aren't visible to other members or staff.

Yes. Once your church's Stripe Connect account is wallet-verified (which it is by default for most UK charities), Stripe Checkout surfaces Apple Pay / Google Pay / Link first for returning wallet users. Face ID and you're done. ChurchLinker also remembers the donor's last amount, fund and once-or-monthly choice in their browser, so the second time they give it's one tap on the big Give button followed by the wallet sheet.

Yes. Dashboard → Giving → Recent gifts now ships sortable column headers (donor / amount / date), a filter row (donor search, fund, method, minimum amount, date range) and a 'Save view' button that stores any filter combination locally per-device. Saved views appear as chips above the table; one tap re-applies them. Built for treasurers who otherwise rebuild the same 'YTD Building Fund' filter every session.

Yes. Press ⌘K (Mac) or Ctrl+K (Windows / Linux) anywhere on the staff dashboard to open the command palette: type to fuzzy-search across the most-used actions (Add member, Record gift, Send message, Open pastoral, Visitor pipeline, Stewardship moments, Thank-you queue, etc.), arrow keys move, Enter activates, Esc closes.

Yes. Dashboard → People → Photo directory has an Export CSV button next to Print. The CSV includes first and last name, email, mobile, home phone and membership status. Excel-friendly: UTF-8 BOM is included so £ and accented characters open cleanly.

Yes. demo.churchlinker.com gives prospects the actual staff dashboard with realistic seeded data: people, donations, sermons, events, groups, rotas. Writes are rejected with a friendly 'this is the sandbox' message so the sandbox stays curated; data resets nightly. A banner at the top of every page makes it obvious it's the sandbox, not your real church.

churchlinker.com/vs lists each comparison. We name what the other tool does well, when it's the better fit, and then a column-by-column feature table. Honest, not slimy. Pages exist for /vs/churchsuite, /vs/planning-center and /vs/breeze.

Yes. The dashboard home now surfaces a Pastoral snapshot tile for PASTOR+ users: top four urgent counters (follow-ups due, quiet members, visitors awaiting follow-up, DBS attention) with one-tap drill-in. The tile hides itself on calm weeks so it never nags.

Only your pastor or admin. Leaders and staff can attach a person to an existing group, but they can never invent a new group on the side. This stops the spelling drift that happens in most church CRMs over time: 'Women's', 'Womens', 'women's' and 'WOMENS GROUP' all coexisting after a year of free-text input. One canonical list, controlled by leadership.

On the person's profile, open the Groups tab. There's a dropdown of every group your pastor / admin has set up, plus a role selector (Member / Leader / Co-leader / Administrator). Pick + tap Add. A member can be in any number of different groups at the same time, and leaving a group is a soft remove; the 'previously in' history stays for pastoral context.

Yes, multi-question polls and surveys on every plan. Each question can be single-choice, multi-choice, a number input, or short text, with a per-question required flag and optional helper text. Per-poll switches: anonymous (responses can't be traced even by the admin, enforced at the schema level, not just the UI), open to all members or restricted to a single group, optional open or close dates. Results page shows aggregate bars + a CSV export; identified polls also show per-respondent answers. Members vote from the member app; if push notifications are on they get a 'New poll' nudge as soon as it opens.

Yes. Email / SMS / WhatsApp sends from /dashboard/communications land in the member's in-app inbox, and they can hit Reply right there. Their reply shows up on the church's communications page as a threaded conversation, with the admin able to reply back inline. Push notification fires both directions when the app is installed.

Yes, saved segments. Pick people in the directory, click Save as segment, give it a name ('Worship team prospects' or 'Easter visitors 2026'). Re-apply that segment any time from the directory or load it as the audience for a new email / SMS in the compose form. Segments are stored as JSON filters so future versions can support dynamic shapes (everyone born after 1990, every member who hasn't given this quarter) without a schema change.

Yes, through the native ChurchLinker mobile app (iOS and Android). Pushes fire on: a new poll opening, a new public event being added, a new sermon being published, the church replying to a message the member sent and a group join-request being approved or declined. Members can switch push notifications on or off per-account from their profile in the app; the toggle writes a GdprConsent audit row alongside the Person flag so a regulator can see when consent was given or withdrawn.

Every visitor submission lands on Dashboard → People → Visitor pipeline as a card in the ‘New this week’ column. The pastoral team can see at a glance who showed up on Sunday, what they wrote on the card and how to reach them. Cards age into the ‘Need follow-up’ column after 7 days without contact, so nobody quietly falls off the radar.

Drag the card between columns on the pipeline, or tap the action button on the card. ‘Following up’ marks the visitor as followed-up (one record-keeping click for the pastoral team). For full membership, the welcome team clicks ‘Request membership’ on the card and adds a short note (‘Attended 6 weeks, joined a small group, finished Alpha’). The request lands in the pastor’s inbox for approval. The pastor decides MEMBER or REGULAR_ATTENDEE, with an optional decision note that the requester sees by email and push. Every action audit-logged.

Submission is gated on the ‘Visitor follow-up’ permission flag (delegatable per-user from Settings → Users → Permissions). Pastor and Admin auto-have it. Approval is restricted to Pastor and Admin only. The follow-up team submits, pastoral leadership decides. The split is deliberate: it gives churches a way to delegate the legwork without delegating the pastoral judgement.

Yes. The original requester can cancel a pending request from the visitor pipeline card. The pastor can approve, approve as ‘regular attendee’ instead of full member, or reject, all with an optional note that the requester sees. Cancelled is distinct from rejected in the audit trail so the pastor’s ‘recent decisions’ view stays focused on actual rulings.

Yes. The Communication Pack includes printable QR codes that point to your church’s public visitor form. Print the QR onto a welcome flyer, scan, fill in name + email + how they heard about you. The submission lands on the pipeline immediately.

Each morning UK time the system walks every DBS record and sends an email + push at 30, 14 and 7 days before expiry, then once on or after expiry. Each threshold fires at most once per cycle. The system tracks what's been sent on the person's record so a re-run never double-sends. When you save a new issue date the ledger resets and the next cycle starts. The reminder email names your church's chosen umbrella body in the body, so a phishing email from any other sender reads as obviously wrong.

By default 24 months from the issue date. Change the church-wide default at Settings → Regional settings → 'DBS check validity'. For higher-risk roles or insurer-specified periods, a coordinator can override per-person on the DBS panel of that person's profile.

A flag the safeguarding coordinator sets when they've filed the renewal application but the new certificate hasn't come back yet. While set, the daily reminder cron skips that person (no nag) and the dashboard count excludes them. Clears automatically when you save a new issue date. The marker also captures a free-text note ('thirtyone:eight, ref ABC123, filed 5 Jun') so you can chase the umbrella body if it's slow.

Yes, via Dashboard → DBS attention → Bulk import. Download a template CSV, fill it in (email OR firstName + lastName + dateOfBirth needed for matching), preview the matches, apply. The system matches each row to an existing member; unmatched rows show 'Did you mean Jonathan Smith?' fuzzy suggestions. Never creates new members.

Anyone with the 'DBS coordinator' permission flag (Settings → Users → Permissions) can edit DBS records on any person's profile: issue date, expiry, number, certificate type, provider, validity override, renewal-in-flight marker. Pastor and Admin auto-have it. Typical pattern: delegate to the church's appointed safeguarding lead so the pastor isn't the bottleneck.

Record your umbrella body's contact details (name, email, phone, address) once at Settings → Regional settings → 'DBS agency / umbrella body'. The card then appears on every person's DBS panel + their member portal + the body of every system-sent reminder email. If a member receives an email from a different agency claiming their check is expiring, they can spot it as a scam at a glance. The legitimate reminder always names the agency; a phisher wouldn't know it.

Yes, via Settings → Regional settings → 'DBS renewal portal URL'. Set it to your church's umbrella body (thirtyone:eight, CCPAS, DDC, uCheck, etc) and an 'Open renewal portal' button appears on every person's DBS panel and inside the renewal-submitted modal. Saves the coordinator 15 to 20 minutes per renewal.

The Member status is the general 'they're part of the church family' label, used across rotas, groups, comms. The Charity Commission register is stricter: a formal list of people who can vote at AGM, elect trustees and count toward quorum. The two are deliberately distinct in the system: a person can be a MEMBER without being on the formal register, or vice versa. Tick on the person's profile via the 'Church Member (Charity Commission)' panel.

Yes. Dashboard → Charity members register → Bulk tick. Filters out anyone already on the register, lets you search by name/email, pick a batch and set a single admission date for the whole batch. Cap is 500 per call, so tick in batches if your church is bigger. The cold-start unblocker for existing-church onboarding.

Dashboard → Charity members register → click 'Print PDF' on the 'Members as at <date>' tile. Opens a print-friendly server-rendered page with church name, full member list, signature lines for chair and secretary, plus a generation timestamp. Use File → Print → Save as PDF in your browser to keep the board copy. URL is bookmarkable (?asOf=YYYY-MM-DD) so AGM paperwork can link to the exact 'as at' date.

Two on the main reports page: 'Members as at <date>' counts everyone ticked on AND admitted on/before that date (the standard AGM snapshot); 'Admitted in <year>' counts people whose admission date falls in that calendar year + shows the chronological list. Both have CSV export and the snapshot has the print-friendly AGM PDF.

Anyone with the 'Charity register' permission flag (Settings → Users → Permissions). Pastor and Admin auto-have it. Typical delegate: the church secretary, who maintains the register day-to-day. Every tick, untick and admission-date change is audit-logged.

The pastoral team does. Dashboard → Pastoral care → 'Register anniversaries' card surfaces people whose admission date falls within the next 7 days in any prior year ('Sarah's been on the register 10 years today'). Pastoral encouragement, not gamification.

Five: Treasurer (giving), People directory, Visitor follow-up, DBS coordinator, Charity register. Each is a checkbox on Settings → Users → Permissions, separate from the user's main role. Pastor and Admin auto-receive everything except Treasurer (Admin only auto-grant). The flags let you appoint specific people to specific responsibilities without giving them blanket admin powers.

Click the 'N permissions' button on a user's row in Settings → Users. A focused panel opens with the five flags, each with a description and a (?) tooltip linking to the FAQ. Auto-granted flags (e.g. Pastor has everything except Treasurer) render disabled with an 'auto-granted by role' note. Every grant / revoke is audit-logged.

Because real churches don't fall into neat tiers. The treasurer might be a LEADER role; the safeguarding lead might be a STAFF role; the church secretary might be a MEMBER. Roles set the floor; flags grant specific access on top. It avoids forcing every responsible person to be a full ADMIN.

It's a printable-resource studio for Sunday-school teachers. Open a group's Kids Hub (Group → Kids Hub) and generate any of thirteen resources: word search, crossword, memory verse activity sheets (fill-the-blank, rearrange, handwriting), achievement certificates, full lesson plans, Bible quizzes, parent take-home sheets, colouring page with scene description, Story Simplifier (retell any Bible story at six reading levels including Adult ESL), Sermon → Children's Lesson (Thrive+), Escape Room puzzle pack, Bible Timeline poster and Story Order cut-out cards. Every resource saves to the group's shared library, opens a print-friendly view and emails itself to your inbox with one tap.

No. Four are purely algorithmic and use no AI at all: word search, crossword, memory verse activities and certificates. A fifth (Story Order cards) is included on Sprout as the lowest entry. The nine AI-driven ones (lesson plan, quiz, colouring, parent sheet, Story Simplifier, Sermon→Kids, Escape Room, Bible Timeline, AI curriculum drafter) sit behind a separate "Kids Hub AI" toggle in Settings, independent of the main AI toggle. A church that doesn't want AI in Sunday school can run the algorithmic generators only; the AI ones simply don't appear.

Paste or type any Bible story / topic, pick a reading level, and the Story Simplifier returns a 2-3 paragraph retelling at that level with a one-sentence key point and a discussion question. The six levels are: toddlers (1-3), pre-school (3-5), lower primary (5-7), upper primary (7-11), youth (11-18) and Adult ESL. The ESL mode uses simple-English (CEFR A2-B1) with short sentences and common words, intentionally designed for the UK multicultural church reality. Many congregations have newcomers whose first language isn't English and who want to follow along without simplified-for-kids framing.

Paste the pastor's sermon notes or outline into the generator. The AI distils the THEME (not the adult-level argument), then returns a kid-friendly lesson pack for a chosen age group: big idea (one sentence), 2-3 paragraph summary, fitting memory verse, 3-4 discussion questions, one concrete activity, prayer points and a colouring-page scene description. It's a Thrive+ feature. Pastoral hand-off to the kids team is a real selling point of that tier, and the longer structured output costs more in credits.

On every plan with Kids Hub enabled, the Teaching Planner shows your group's next 12 weeks of rota slots. Each slot already shows the assigned teacher (from the rota); the planner adds a dropdown to attach any saved Kids Hub resource so the teacher knows exactly what they're teaching. One-click prints the attached lesson. No new rota model; it wraps the existing rota system, so there's nothing extra to maintain.

A Thrive+ tool to plan a term, half-year or full year of Sunday-school lessons in advance. Each week has a topic, scripture, big idea, learning objective and notes; you can pin a saved Kids Hub resource as the lesson for that week. Optionally hit "AI draft all N weeks". It asks for your theme and age group, then fills in topics, scriptures and big ideas for the whole plan in one go. You can still edit any week by hand afterwards. The AI drafter is OFF when Kids Hub AI is off; the rest of the builder still works manually on every Thrive+ church.

Yes. Every AI generator in Kids Hub is prompted with British English spelling and theologically-careful, mainstream-Protestant framing. Worksheets are A4-sized and print cleanly from a browser. No separate PDF library, no third-party print service that sees your church's data.

Yes, every AI feature is OFF by default and admin-controlled. A church can run ChurchLinker entirely without AI: people directory, rotas, communications, events, giving, mobile app, DBS lifecycle, members register and the printable Sunday-school generators (word search, crossword, memory verse, certificate, Story Order cards) all work fully without ever turning AI on. The AI toggle is in Settings → AI & Integrations and can be switched off at any time without losing data. Within the Kids Ministry Hub there's a separate "Kids Hub AI" toggle that's independent of the main one, so you can ship the algorithmic generators to teachers without enabling AI at all. Saved AI-generated resources keep printing after AI is turned off; only new generations stop.

AI features are available on Grow and above. Every eligible plan includes a monthly AI credit allowance. Seed gets 20 credits, Sprout gets 50, Grow gets 200, Thrive gets 500, Kingdom gets 1,000 and Enterprise gets unlimited. Credits reset on the first of each month. You can see your current usage and remaining credits in Settings > AI & Integrations.

Each AI action costs credits: Sermon Q&A (1 credit), Pastoral summary (1 credit), Message generation (1 credit), Duplicate detection (1 credit), Personalised birthday messages (1 credit), Sermon summary (2 credits), Sermon transcription (3 credits). You can monitor exactly how many credits each feature is consuming from your AI usage report.

AI features will be temporarily unavailable until your credits reset at the start of next month. There are three ways to avoid hitting the cap: upgrade to a higher plan (more credits included), add your own AI API key (unlimited; you pay the AI provider directly) or request Managed AI (ChurchLinker provisions a dedicated key for you, billed separately).

Yes. In Settings > AI & Integrations, you can connect your own OpenAI, Anthropic (Claude) or Google AI key. Once connected, all AI features run against your own account with no monthly credit limit. You pay the AI provider directly at their standard rates. Your API key is encrypted with AES-256 and never visible after saving. You can switch back to platform credits at any time.

Managed AI is an add-on where ChurchLinker provisions a dedicated API key specifically for your church. Unlike platform credits (shared infrastructure) or BYOK (you manage the key), Managed AI gives you a fully isolated key that ChurchLinker monitors and manages on your behalf, billed separately. It's ideal for churches that want unlimited AI without the hassle of managing API keys themselves. Request it from Settings > AI & Integrations.

Yes. Settings > AI Usage Report shows a full breakdown of every AI call your church has made: which feature was used, how many credits it consumed, which team member triggered it and when. You can filter by date range and export the data. This lets you see exactly where your AI credits are going and make informed decisions about upgrading or adding your own key.

OpenAI (GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini), Anthropic (Claude Sonnet and Haiku) and Google AI (Gemini 1.5 Pro and Flash). You can also specify a custom model override if you want to use a specific version. The platform automatically selects the best model for each task based on the provider you've chosen.

It's a one-tap way to produce branded materials your church can hand out or share online: a printable A4 welcome flyer, a member onboarding guide and shareable QR codes that take people straight to your church's app. All auto-branded with your church name, colours and logo. Available on every plan, including Seed.

No. The flyer and member guide are generated from your existing church profile, so once your branding is set up you click Generate and get print-ready PDFs. Reprint any time you change services, add a venue or update your welcome message.

A short, naturally-voiced MP3 that plays once for every new member the first time they log into your church's app, like a personal hello from your church. We also produce a longer comm-pack summary clip you can share on socials or WhatsApp groups. Audio is generated using ElevenLabs and cached in your church's storage so playback is instant.

Seed gets a browser-spoken preview at zero cost. Sprout includes the shareable comm-pack summary audio. Grow adds the branded welcome clip for member first-login. Thrive and above unlock the premium voice library, so you can choose between four curated voices to match your church's tone. There's a 7-day cooldown between regenerations to keep costs predictable.

On Thrive and above, yes. Pick from four curated ElevenLabs voices including warm British and natural American options. On Grow you get a single high-quality default voice. The selected voice ID is saved per church so the welcome and summary clips always match.

It's included in your plan, with no per-generation fees. Audio is cached after the first run, so members don't trigger fresh generations on every login. The 7-day regeneration cooldown stops accidental over-use.

Yes. The welcome banner has a Dismiss button and is shown only once per device per church. After dismissing it never reappears for that user.

SMS is delivered through Twilio. ChurchLinker does not mark up Twilio's rates. You pay Twilio's standard UK pricing (typically 4 to 5p per SMS) on top of your ChurchLinker plan. We use shared Twilio infrastructure by default. If you send at very high volume and want more control over costs, contact us and we can advise on connecting your own Twilio account.

WhatsApp Business messages are also delivered via Twilio at Meta's published rates. WhatsApp Business API pricing is based on conversation windows; a 24-hour window costs around 5 to 9p for utility messages in the UK. ChurchLinker does not add a mark-up. Monitor your Twilio dashboard for a real-time view of messaging costs.

Yes, each paid plan includes a monthly allowance that resets on the 1st of the month: Grow includes 500 SMS + 100 WhatsApp, Thrive 1,000 SMS + 300 WhatsApp, Kingdom 3,000 SMS + 1,000 WhatsApp and Enterprise is unlimited. If you go over, the in-app credits shop sells SMS and WhatsApp top-up packs starting at £8 for 500 WhatsApp / £35 for 2,000 SMS. For heavy senders on Thrive and above, you can also Bring Your Own Twilio: your Twilio account, your numbers, your rates, no allowance cap from us. Settings → Messaging shows your current usage and lets you switch to BYO Twilio.

Yes. Push notifications through the ChurchLinker app (iOS and Android) are included in all plans at no extra cost and with no hard cap. Fair use applies. Push notifications are intended for genuine church communications, not marketing spam. Members can opt out of specific notification types from their app settings.

Yours. Every church connects its own Stripe account from Settings → Giving (5 to 10 minutes, one-time). Donations flow directly from the giver's card into your church's Stripe balance and Stripe pays out to your church's bank on its normal payout schedule. ChurchLinker never holds, custodies or routes the funds. We just create the Checkout Session on your behalf so the gift goes straight to you.

Nothing. 0%. We take no application fee, no transaction fee, no platform cut. Stripe's standard UK card rate (around 1.5% + 25p at the time of writing; the current rate is published live at stripe.com/gb/pricing) is the only deduction on each gift, and that goes to Stripe, not us. On a typical £20 gift that's about 50p, and with Gift Aid added back the church typically nets more per pound than cash or bank transfer with none of the counting, banking or claim-form admin.

Once your Stripe is connected, members give one-off or recurring through their member portal (web or the white-label app). They choose a fund such as General, Building Fund or Missions, and tap Apple Pay, Google Pay or a card. Recurring gifts renew on Stripe; members can cancel any time from their portal. Admins see a real-time giving dashboard, run reports by fund or date range and track outstanding pledges.

Yes. Members submit a one-click Gift Aid declaration through their portal. ChurchLinker tracks declarations, calculates claimable amounts and generates an HMRC-ready R68 submission report, replacing the manual spreadsheet work most churches do today. Gift Aid recovers 25p per £1 donated by UK taxpayers, and 100% of every reclaim goes to your church.

Built in. Record cash collections under Giving → GASDS with date, amount, location and method. ChurchLinker tracks the £8,000-per-tax-year cap and your matched-donations ratio, and produces a HMRC schedule when you're ready to claim. Like Gift Aid, the funds come direct from HMRC into your church account.

Giving data is stored encrypted and access is role-gated. Only admins with explicit Finance/Treasurer permission can see individual giving records. Card details are never stored on ChurchLinker's servers. Stripe handles all PCI-compliant payment processing inside your church's own Stripe account. We are fully UK GDPR compliant.

Yes. The native iOS and Android app includes a giving screen that opens a secure Stripe Checkout in the browser. This keeps payment handling fully PCI-compliant while staying within the app experience, and the gift lands in the same Stripe account whether the member gave on the app, on the website or via a QR code.

Yes, the Giving Momentum view at Dashboard → Giving → Momentum surfaces regular givers whose 90-day pattern has shifted: lapsed (no gift in 90+ days when they used to give regularly) or dropping (recent total under half of the previous 90 days). We only flag people with at least three completed gifts in the last twelve months, so once-a-year donors don’t trigger false alerts. The list is intentionally pastoral, not commercial. No top-giver rankings, no chase prompts, so a pastor can quietly check in to ask how the person is doing.

Yes. ChurchLinker has a native iOS and Android app (built with Expo React Native) available on the App Store and Google Play. It includes the member portal, sermon library, giving, events, groups and push notifications for service reminders and announcements.

Yes. The white-label mobile app is available as a paid add-on on any plan from Sprout upwards. £79/month Standard (£790/year if paid annually) or £149/month Premium (£1,490/year), plus a one-off launch fee of £499 paid in full or £170/month spread over 3 months. Your church's name, icon and colours appear on the App Store and Google Play; members download your church's app and it connects directly with your ChurchLinker account. Enterprise plan can include a fully custom App Store listing with dedicated app IDs.

Yes to both. The £499 one-off launch fee can be paid in full or split into 3 monthly payments of £170 (auto-charged each month and then stops automatically, with no rolling commitment). The £79/month Standard and £149/month Premium subscriptions can be paid annually for the price of 10 months (£790/year and £1,490/year respectively), saving two months. You choose at the point of subscribing from Settings → Billing.

The shared 'ChurchLinker' app works for any church. Members search for or enter their church code when they first open the app. A white-label app is pre-configured to your church specifically, so members just sign in without any search step. White-label apps also show your church's branding throughout rather than ChurchLinker's.

The app caches recently viewed content so members can read sermons and event details without a connection. Giving, registrations and profile updates require an internet connection to process securely.

Yes. From the ChurchLinker dashboard, admins can send push notifications to all app users or specific groups. Members can choose which types of notifications they receive from their profile settings in the app. Push notifications are included in all plans with no hard cap; fair use applies to prevent spam.

Each paid plan includes a monthly messaging allowance (Grow 500 SMS + 100 WhatsApp, Thrive 1,000 SMS + 300 WhatsApp, Kingdom 3,000 SMS + 1,000 WhatsApp) using our shared Twilio account, no extra fees from us. Allowances reset on the 1st of each month. If you go over, you can buy a top-up pack in-app (£8 for 500 WhatsApp credits, £35 for 2,000 SMS), or on Thrive and above you can switch to Bring Your Own Twilio, where you bring your own Twilio account and there's no allowance cap. Settings → Messaging shows live usage and the BYO toggle.

Yes. GDPR compliance is built into the platform's architecture. Member data is stored in EU data centres. You have full data export and deletion tools. Members can access and update their own data through the portal. We act as a Data Processor under your church's Data Controller role, and we provide a Data Processing Agreement (DPA) upon request.

All data is stored in the European Union (AWS eu-west-2, London region). Data never leaves the EU. Backups are encrypted and retained for 30 days.

Only your church's admins, along with ChurchLinker support staff for troubleshooting purposes (with a logged access trail). We never sell, share or use your congregation data for any third-party purpose. We make this promise unconditionally.

ChurchLinker includes safeguarding-aware features: children's records can be linked to parent/guardian contacts, DBS check fields and expiry tracking, with access to children's data restricted to specific admin roles. We recommend consulting your church's safeguarding policy when configuring access.

ChurchLinker uses HTTPS everywhere (TLS 1.3), AES-256 encryption at rest and bcrypt-hashed credentials. Our infrastructure runs on AWS with SOC 2 certification. We undergo annual penetration testing and follow OWASP security guidelines. Authentication is handled by Clerk, which is SOC 2 Type II certified.

Yes. A DPA is available to all paid plan customers. Email hello@churchlinker.com with your church name and it will be sent within one business day. The DPA meets all UK GDPR and EU GDPR requirements.

Yes, full self-service. From /member/profile a member can: download a complete ZIP of every record we hold on them (Art. 15 Subject Access Request, no admin approval needed); toggle email / SMS / WhatsApp / push consent independently per channel (Art. 7, so you can withdraw consent as easily as you gave it; every change writes a GdprConsent audit row showing date and method); file a right-to-erasure request that lands in the admin's review queue at /dashboard/settings/data-requests (Art. 17). On approve the church runs the irreversible anonymisation (Donations + Gift Aid stay in anonymised form for the 6 years HMRC requires); decline requires a documented reason that's shown to the member so they retain the ICO complaint route.

Because ChurchLinker is built by a data person. Ben Sonoiki, the founder, is a business intelligence analyst and database / report writer, someone whose default question on any data feature is 'who can read this, what's the audit trail, when does it have to be deleted and what does a regulator want to see?'. The GdprConsent audit history, the PlatformAuditLog on every admin action, the field-encrypted pastoral notes, the HMRC retention carve-out baked into the erasure helper, the tenant-scoped cross-tenant guards on every API: they're there because someone who builds queries against this data for a living knew they'd need to be.

All plans include email support, with our aim to respond within one UK business day. Grow plan and above get priority responses, typically within four working hours during UK business hours. Enterprise includes a dedicated point of contact and a custom SLA agreed with your church. There's also a real-time live-chat option whenever a ChurchLinker team member is online — see the next question.

Yes. The 'Ask Ben' widget on churchlinker.com and the in-product Help Assistant both have a 'Talk to a human' button. When a ChurchLinker team member is online (you'll see a green 'agent online now' dot), the button opens an instant chat inside the same panel — no extra app, no email round-trip. When nobody's online, the same button still opens a chat that we'll reply to by email within one UK working day, and the conversation re-opens in the same widget next time you visit, so you don't lose the thread.

Yes. Every plan includes our written documentation and step-by-step guides in the help centre. Kingdom plan includes a one-hour personalised onboarding call. Enterprise plan includes bespoke training sessions agreed with your admin team. We're also building out group onboarding webinars, so get in touch if you'd like to be invited to the next one.

Yes. CSV imports cover contacts, groups and giving history from any system that can export data. Kingdom and Enterprise plans include assisted migration where we'll help map your existing fields to ChurchLinker. Just get in touch with your current export and we'll plan the move with you.

Yes. ChurchLinker exposes a chrome-free /embed surface for the main member-facing features (upcoming events, Sunday notices, sermons, giving) that drops into your own website with a one-line iframe snippet, or into your existing iOS/Android app with a WebView. Manage allowed parent domains and copy the snippet at Settings → Embed widgets. Included on every plan. Full step-by-step guide at /docs/embed-widgets.

Yes. ADMIN-level users have a Member usage analytics page at Settings → Member usage analytics showing how many distinct people have signed in over the past 24 hours, week and month, plus a per-month breakdown for the last 13 months and per-year for the last 4 years. Aggregate counts are always available; per-member detail ('when did Mary last sign in?') is off by default and only shown after you opt in via the in-page privacy toggle. Every view of the detailed table is audit-logged for transparency.

Our interface is in English. We're actively working on Welsh language support and hope to have it available by end of 2026. If your church primarily operates in Welsh, please contact us. We'd love to work with you on this.