What this section covers: The more powerful features of the Churchnet system — booking systems, group email management, safeguarding, service rotas, and integrations. These are all straightforward once you know where to look, but require a bit more initial setup than the basics.
The Churchnet system contains a lot more than the core content management features most parishes use day-to-day. This section covers the features that take a little more effort to set up but can make a significant difference to how the site serves your community.
If you need help with any of these, contact Adrian — these are the kind of things that are much faster to walk through in a 10-minute phone call than to describe in writing.
Booking systems
The booking system allows people to book onto events directly through the website — prayer room slots, community events, courses, retreats, or anything else that requires registration.
A booking system can be set up for any event. Once configured, visitors see a booking form, receive a confirmation email, and are added to a list that administrators can view and manage in the admin panel.
Once you've set up one booking system, you can clone it for similar events rather than starting from scratch. This is useful for recurring courses, prayer room rotas, or anything that happens on a regular cycle.
To set up a booking system, go to the relevant event under Activities in the admin panel and enable the booking option. You'll be prompted to configure capacity, confirmation messages, and any information you want to collect from bookers.
Group email management
Beyond the general email update subscription, the system allows you to set up specific email groups — useful for things like a PCC list, a Sunday school team, or a volunteer rota.
Under Groups in the admin panel, you can create a group, add members, and send targeted emails to that group. This is separate from the public-facing email update system — groups are for internal communication rather than congregation-wide updates.
You can also configure email forwarding at the benefice level — so that an email sent to, say, clerk@stmarys.org.uk is automatically forwarded to the relevant person, whoever that currently is.
Service rotas
The service rota feature allows you to populate a structured rota — assigning people to specific roles (reader, intercessor, sidesperson, chalice assistant) for each Sunday service. The rota can be made public on the site, or kept internal.
Rotas can be built from templates for regular patterns, and exported for printing or emailing. It's particularly useful for benefices with multiple churches and shared clergy — everyone can see at a glance where they're serving each week.
For each Sunday, you can also add the readings, hymns, and liturgical colour. This is optional but appreciated by readers and congregation members who like to come prepared.
Safeguarding section
Church of England requirements mean that safeguarding information needs to be clearly visible on your website — the name of your safeguarding officer, a contact method, and a statement of commitment.
Churchnet has a dedicated safeguarding section for this. Under Setup → Safeguarding, add your officer's details and any relevant documents (policy, procedures). The section appears prominently in the site navigation, ensuring it's always easy to find.
Safeguarding officer details are among the most important to keep current. If your officer changes, update the site immediately — ideally on the same day.
Embedding video
Videos from YouTube or Vimeo can be embedded in news items or pages. When editing an article, use the HTML editor to paste in the embed code from YouTube (available under Share → Embed on any YouTube video). The video will display inline within your content.
This is useful for recording and sharing sermons, services, or community events — particularly for congregation members who can't always attend in person.
Third-party integrations
The system includes a few useful integrations:
- Google Maps — each church's location page automatically generates a map from the postcode you've provided. No configuration needed.
- MP3 audio — audio files uploaded to the system (sermons, music) are automatically available to play directly in the browser, without needing a separate player plugin.
- Analytics — administrative users can access visitor analytics to see which pages are being visited, how people are finding the site, and which content is most popular.
A quick look at the analytics every month or two can be surprisingly revealing. It often shows that the most-visited pages are not what you'd expect — and that some content nobody ever sees could be improved or removed.
Need help with anything here?
These features are all included as standard — you don't need to pay extra to use any of them. If you'd like help getting any of them set up, get in touch. Most things can be sorted in a short phone call.