Hello from OrgFire

We're OrgFire, and we've built a people-management solution for the Catholic Church. This is our first post, so we wanted to introduce ourselves and share where we're headed.

Many parishes and dioceses run on a patchwork of apps. One tool for giving, another for events, and a lot of spreadsheets in between. The tools don't always talk to each other, the same family gets entered four times, and every annual reporting season is a scramble. Slowly the data degrades, duplicates grow, and work slows down.

We think we can do better. The Church has kept careful records for centuries, of baptisms and marriages, of members and gifts, because those records matter. So we started from one conviction: the data should be first-class, kept the way the Church keeps records, and it should be connected.

That last word is the whole idea. A parish is a web of relationships. A person belongs to a family or multiple families. They have friends, godparents, and emergency contacts. They sing in the choir or coach the CYO team. They are tied to other organizations: the Catholic school their children attend, the St. Vincent de Paul conference they volunteer with, the youth group down the street. Those connections are what distinguishes a community from a list of people.

So we built OrgFire to hold the relationships themselves. Every person, family, group, and organization is its own record, entered once and used everywhere, and the links between them are first-class too. They carry real meaning: this person is the godparent of that child, this household worships together, this volunteer leads that ministry, which partners with the parish school. The records are the foundation. The relationships are the point. Understanding them helps a parish cultivate new ones and strengthen old ones.

To start, we're focusing on the foundational organization types and relationships: Parishes and their worship sites, Dioceses and their connections. Soon we'll add other types of organizations, non-profits, schools, and others to create an even larger community of relationships that reflect our real world.

What's next

We're in public beta now for Parishes and Dioceses. Free trials open in July, with no payment method required to start. After that we'll keep building in the open and writing here about what's in the works and when you'll see it.

If you'd like to be there when trials open, sign up and we'll let you know when it's ready. We'd love to have you. If you have questions or feedback, we'd love to hear from you.