Church Data Project

People increasingly search online for their local Methodist church, but the data we hold centrally is often out of date or incomplete. This means Church Finder can point people to the wrong place, and churches miss out on connecting with people exploring faith in their area.

The Church Data Project is working to fix this through two parallel tracks:

Track 1 - Data capture: Proactive engagement with Districts, Circuits and Local Churches to validate and improve the data we hold. This isn't about harvesting information - it's about the Connexional Team showing up to help churches be found. This would run alongside the regular online suite submission, to ensure the burden doesn't fall on Local Churches to continually be proactive in checking their data on central platforms.

Track 2 - Data foundations: Working with IT to ensure the underlying systems can support accurate, joined-up data. This includes improving how Dynamics 365 handles churches with multiple congregations, building a single reporting environment so teams aren't working from competing versions of the same data, and putting data quality tools in place.

The two tracks run in parallel and inform each other - what we learn from churches shapes the system design, and the system design shapes how data is captured and formatted.