Privacy Policy

Information we collect

Depending on how you interact with us (as a member, visitor, volunteer, donor, or website visitor), we may collect:

• Contact and identity details: name, email, phone/WhatsApp number, address, date of birth.
• Household and family information, for those who register as a family unit.
• Attendance records for services and small groups.
• Giving and donation records (amount, fund, and method). Card and bank details are handled directly by our payment providers and are never stored on our systems.
• Prayer requests you submit, which may include sensitive personal information you choose to share.
• Volunteer and ministry involvement information, including background-check status where applicable.
• For children registered with our children's ministry: guardian contact details and any medical or allergy information provided by a parent/guardian, used solely for the safety of the child while in our care.
• Event registrations, group/community sign-ups, and communication preferences.
• Basic technical information (such as device push-notification tokens) if you opt in to notifications.

Why we collect it

We use this information to run church operations: maintaining membership and family records, coordinating attendance and volunteer scheduling, processing donations and issuing tax certificates, responding to prayer requests, keeping children safe during check-in, and sending communications you've asked to receive (service updates, event reminders, giving confirmations).

Who we share it with

We do not sell your personal information. We share it only with service providers who help us operate, under contract to protect it:

• Authentication and account access (Clerk).
• Secure file/photo storage (Supabase).
• Email delivery (Resend), SMS delivery (BulkSMS), WhatsApp messaging (Twilio), and push notifications (Firebase).
• Payment processing for donations (PayFast, Ozow, Yoco, or Stripe, depending on how you choose to give); these providers, not us, handle and store your card/bank details.
• Optional AI-assisted features (sermon summaries, prayer request categorization) may send the relevant text to Anthropic's Claude API. This is only used where enabled, and never for cardholder or payment data.
• Our hosting providers (Railway, Vercel), who store data on our behalf and do not use it for their own purposes.

We may also share information with our own pastoral and administrative staff on a need-to-know basis, and where required by law.

How we protect it

Access to member records is restricted by role: only staff and volunteers with a legitimate need can see particular categories of information (for example, only pastoral staff can see confidential pastoral notes). Sensitive actions are logged for audit purposes. Data is stored with our hosting providers using industry-standard security practices.

Your rights

Under POPIA, you have the right to know what personal information we hold about you, request a copy of it, ask us to correct or delete it, and object to certain uses (such as marketing communications). To exercise any of these rights, contact us using the details below.

Facebook and social media

We use Facebook's Page publishing tools to share sermons, events, and announcements from our management system to our public Facebook Page. We do not collect personal information from Facebook through this integration; it is used only to publish our own content.

Contact us

For any questions about this policy or your personal information, contact us at privacy@awakenchurch.org.za or 13b Plankenburg Road, Stellenbosch, South Africa.