Case Study: St Paul's Church achieves streamlined member and activity management with CiviCRM

Co-ordinating Church Activities with CiviCRM

St Paul's Church, a large Anglican parish in St Albans with around 600 regular attendees and a staff team of 10, needed to replace an old in‑house Access database to improve administration, record family relationships, manage events and communicate more effectively. They chose CiviCRM (deployed on WordPress) for its built‑in contacts, events, email and reporting features and for its extensible architecture to address gaps like family editing and age‑based searches.

Using CiviCRM, implementation and data migration (carried out by Aidan Saunders of Squiffle Consulting with church staff leadership) delivered a single, shared system. Custom webforms and extensions filled the family‑editor gap and a contributed code change added age‑range search (released in CiviCRM 4.7.0), enabling family‑grouped address lists, targeted mailings and improved reporting — helping the church manage growth, streamline administration and better target communications.

St Paul's Church

Canon Tony Hurle

Vicar