Why I’m building Church Comms Dashboard
For more than 25 years, I’ve worked at the intersection of pastoral ministry, church communications, and web development.
I’ve been the pastor trying to get the word out about Sunday’s message, the ministry idea, the event that actually matters. I’ve been the web guy trying to make WordPress behave. I’ve been the communications person trying to turn scattered requests, last-minute graphics, half-written blurbs, and “can you also post this to Facebook?” into something coherent.
Over those years, I’ve watched church communications grow more powerful and more confusing at the same time.
There have never been more tools. Planning tools, design tools, email tools, social tools, livestreaming, giving, church management, calendars, website builders, form builders, automations — and now AI on top of all of it. Many of them are genuinely useful. But for the average pastor, ministry assistant, or volunteer communicator, the whole thing can start to feel like trying to conduct an orchestra where every musician is in a different building.
That’s where Church Comms Dashboard came from.
I wanted one WordPress-based hub for the core work of church communications. Not another app to check. Not another place where half the information lives. Not another tool that assumes every church has a full-time communications director and a systems administrator.
The idea is simple. Your church website is already where announcements, events, sermons, stories, registrations, and next steps eventually have to land. So the workflow that feeds the website should live close to the website too — not scattered across browser tabs, text threads, and forgotten Google Docs.
Church Comms Dashboard is my attempt to gather what a healthy communications team actually needs into one calm backend: a request inbox, a planning calendar, review and approval tools, brand resources, sermon and message planning, livestream setup, team and people visibility, feedback workflows, public request forms, and AI-assisted drafting and summarizing through Phoebe — plus a growing set of integrations for the tools churches already use.
The point isn’t to replace everything. Planning Center can stay Planning Center. Mailchimp or Constant Contact can still send the email. Canva can still be where design happens. Resi, YouTube, and Facebook can still handle the stream. Third-party tools should plug in where they’re genuinely needed. What a church shouldn’t have to do is build its entire communications system out of scattered tabs, text threads, and “wait — who was supposed to do that?”
I especially wanted this to work for smaller churches. So much church software is either too thin to actually help or too heavy for the people who need it most. My hope is that Church Comms Dashboard feels approachable to the secretary, the ministry assistant, the volunteer, or the pastor who just needs a clearer way to keep communications moving.
Security has mattered from the start. The plugin is being built on WordPress best practices: permission checks, sanitized data, safe defaults, and careful handling of the AI features. Especially in ministry, not every piece of information belongs in a communications tool — and the dashboard is meant to help churches work better without getting careless with sensitive data.
Right now, Church Comms Dashboard is moving into beta, and I’m looking for churches, nonprofits, and denominational teams willing to test real workflows and tell me the truth: what feels intuitive, what’s confusing, what breaks, what’s missing, and what would make this genuinely more useful on an ordinary Tuesday in ministry.
If that’s you, here’s how to join the beta.
This has grown out of decades of watching the same problem from three sides — the pastor’s, the communicator’s, and the developer’s. Church communications doesn’t need more chaos. It needs a calmer center.
That’s what I’m building.
By the way, if you are connected to a church or organization in need of a website, I am always happy to strategize with you. Just reach out and we can talk through what would help most.