Parish news moves weekly and waits for nobody.
We turned an hour of copy-and-paste into a five-minute job.
Where they started
The Catholic parishes of Aylesbury run three churches on the energy of a small administration team working part time, and a community that wants its information the way everyone now wants it: current, online, and findable on a phone. The parish newsletter carries everything that matters in a given week, Mass times, notices, baptisms, funerals, collections, events, the sick list, and it is produced as a document for printing, because that is what works for the volunteers who produce it and the parishioners who like paper.
The gap was between the two worlds. Getting each week's newsletter onto the website meant somebody copying it across by hand, item by item, the best part of an hour, every week, on top of everything else three churches ask of a small team. When time ran short, the website slipped behind, and a parish website that is behind is worse than none: wrong Mass times let people down at the door.
This is work we do for the Catholic Church without charge. The brief we set ourselves was the one we would give any client: respect how the team actually works, and take the repetition away without taking away the control.
What we did
Phase 1 · A website the parish can run.
The foundation was a site built for the people who operate it: clear structure for three churches, pages the team edit themselves, and the parish's real rhythms, weekly news, seasonal services, community events, reflected in how it is organised. No developer needed for the everyday.
Phase 2 · The newsletter, read for them.
We built a system that takes the weekly newsletter exactly as the parish already produces it. The team upload the finished document, and AI reads it and sorts every item into the right place: Mass times into the Mass times table, notices to notices, baptisms, funerals, collections, and events each to their own home, with the awkward formatting handled on the way through.
Phase 3 · A person stays in charge.
Nothing publishes itself. Every extracted item lands on a single review screen where a team member checks it, edits anything that needs it, and unticks anything that should not go through. The system even spots when an announcement is a repeat from a previous week and says so. Approval takes a couple of minutes; then, and only then, the website updates.
“I am still blown away by what it does!!”
Elaine, Parish Administrator
What it changed
The weekly website job went from the best part of an hour to about five minutes: upload, review, approve.
The Mass times page stays right without anyone editing it directly, which is the page that matters most to a visitor standing outside a church door.
Time-sensitive community news goes out while it is still news, duplicates are caught before they publish, and the running cost of the whole system is pennies a week.
Most importantly, the balance is correct: the machine does the copying, and a person makes every decision.
The team kept the control; they lost the hour.
Drowning in a weekly job a machine should be doing?
If your team loses hours every week moving information from one place to another, that is exactly the work we automate, with a person kept in charge. A thirty-minute call before any work starts. Sean takes the call.
