1. Introduction
Mutendi is church management software built in Zimbabwe for parishes, congregations and dioceses across Africa. It keeps membership rolls, sacramental registers, attendance, giving and parish accounts, and rolls those records up from the local parish to the diocese and head office.
This policy explains what information passes through the system, what we do with it, and what we do not do with it. It covers the Mutendi website and the application your church signs in to.
One distinction runs through everything below and is worth stating plainly at the start: your church owns its members’ information. We do not. The church decides what to record, who may see it, and when it is deleted. We provide the software that holds it and act on the church’s instructions.
2. Information We Collect
a) Information churches provide about their members
A church enters this because it needs it to run church life. What is held depends on what that church chooses to record, and typically includes:
- Names, and the member number the church assigns
- Contact details — phone numbers, email addresses and postal or physical addresses
- Dates of birth, and other dates the church keeps such as baptism or marriage
- Household and family relationships between members
- Attendance records for services, meetings and cell groups
- Contributions and giving history, including pledges toward projects
- Department, ministry and cell group membership
- Any custom fields the church adds for its own purposes
We do not decide what goes in these records and we do not add to them ourselves.
b) Information we collect from church staff using the system
This is about the people who sign in and use Mutendi, not about the congregation:
- Account details — name, email address, role and the church they belong to
- Login records, including the time of sign-in and whether it succeeded
- Device and browser information, and the IP address the request came from
- Usage activity — which pages were opened and what was changed, so that a record can be traced back to whoever changed it
3. How We Use Information
We use what we hold for a short list of things:
- To provide the service — to store, display and roll up the records your church keeps
- To support you — so that when someone contacts us about a problem we can see enough to help
- To keep the system secure — sign-in records and activity logs are how unauthorised access is spotted
- To detect misuse — of the platform, or of a church’s account
- To improve the product — knowing which parts are used, and where people get stuck, is how it gets better
We do not sell data. We do not share it with data brokers. We do not use church members’ information for advertising, and we do not build advertising profiles from it.
4. The Church’s Role and Ours
The church is the owner and controller of its members’ information. It decides what to collect, why, who inside the church may see it, and how long to keep it. If a member asks what is held about them, that question belongs to the church.
Mutendi is the processor. We hold and process that information on the church’s instructions in order to run the service. We do not use a church’s member data for our own purposes, and we do not move it between churches.
In practice this means the church sets the rules and we enforce them. Where a church is subject to a data protection law, the obligations of a controller under that law sit with the church, and we will help it meet them.
6. Data Security
What protects your records, in plain terms:
- Encrypted connections. Everything travelling between a device and the system is encrypted in transit.
- Access controls and role-based permissions. An usher does not see giving figures. A department head sees their department. Each church decides who holds which role, and the system enforces it on every page.
- Activity logging. Changes to records are logged with who made them and when, so a question about a figure can be answered.
- Regular backups. Taken routinely so that a mistake or a failure does not mean losing a parish register.
- Separation between churches. Each church’s data is kept apart from every other church’s. One church cannot see another’s records.
No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise. If a breach affects your church’s data we will tell you promptly and tell you what we know.
7. Data Retention
While your subscription is active we keep your data for as long as you want it kept. Records are yours and we do not delete them on our own initiative.
If a subscription lapses, the account becomes read-only rather than disappearing — you can still sign in and export. We keep the data for a retention window of 90 days after that, so that a church which has simply had a difficult few months does not lose its registers. After the window closes the data is permanently deleted, and deletion is not reversible.
You may export your data at any time, in a usable format, whether or not your subscription is current. You do not need our permission and there is no charge for it.
8. Your Rights
Depending on where you are, you may have the right to ask for access to the information held about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, and to receive a copy of it.
If you are a member of a church using Mutendi, please ask your church first. They hold the record and they are the ones who can act on it. We do not have the standing to change or delete a member’s record on our own — nor should we.
If your church needs help answering such a request, we will assist them, including locating, exporting or deleting the record. If you cannot get a response from your church, contact us and we will do what we properly can.
9. Communications
We send service and account messages to the staff who use the system — things like billing notices, security alerts and changes that affect how it works. These are part of the service and are not marketing.
SMS and email sent to church members are initiated by the church, not by us. When a parish sends an announcement or a giving statement, that message is the church’s, sent on its instruction through our delivery providers. We do not message a church’s congregation on our own account.
11. Children’s Information
Churches record information about children — Sunday school registers, children’s ministry attendance, baptism records, family relationships. This is a normal part of church life and the system supports it.
Where a church records information about a minor, the church is responsible for obtaining appropriate parental or guardian consent and for handling that information with the extra care it deserves. We provide the permissions and controls; the judgement about consent is the church’s.
12. Changes to This Policy
We will update this policy as the system changes. The date at the top always shows when it last changed.
If a change materially affects how church or member information is handled, we will notify churches directly rather than quietly amending the page and hoping it is noticed.
13. Contact Us
If anything here is unclear, or you want to talk through how this applies to your church, we would rather you asked.
Talk to us about privacy
We answer questions about data handling the same way we answer everything else — directly, and usually within one business day.