The Dutch Protestant Church: Member Registration System & Funds Administration Solution

The Dutch Protestant Church consists of 2.1 million members, more than 3000 ministers and tens of thousands of volunteers. The church required a Member Registration System that would centralize membership, financial and pastoral administration, while facilitating 1800 local congregations with unique requirements and integration points. After a costly failure to customize a Human Resources Management system (HRM), Mendix was chosen to build a custom solution.

• Membership data required more flexibility than what a commercial HRM could offer
• The application would need to support 10,000 concurrent users at peak times
• Multi-level, award winning security was required to protect highly sensitive data
• Configured for over 1,200 local congregations, including the integration of data from hundreds of local used software systems

The Agile Approach

The Mendix platform enabled the church to use an agile methodology to implement the project. The project team delivered weekly iterations and were given consistent input and feedback that would continually shape the project.

Results

The solution enables the Protestant Church to manage activities related to its membership, pastoral, and financial administration effectively. The project has resulted in a significant improvement in the quality of member registration and support of pastoral visit work.

• User friendly, efficient and intuitive application supports unique user-base with an average age of 65
• Maintenance costs reduced by over $1 Million per year
• Disparate administrative staff are now directly connected, providing increased speed and efficiency

To protect members’ privacy, information in the new system is extensively safeguarded by multiple firewalls, constant back up, and user role-based data availability. The Dutch Protestant Church has been awarded the iCMG Architecture Excellence Award due to the level of security that the solution provides.