Privacy Policy (POPIA Notice)

Last updated: 20 October 2026

Who We Are

ChurchMatters ("we", "us", "our") operates the website and software platform churchmatters.co.za. We provide software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools to manage church members, donations, and records. For all member and donor personal data handled within the app, your church organization acts as the Responsible Party, and ChurchMatters acts as an Operator processing data under your written mandate in accordance with the South African Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA).

What Data We Collect

• Account Info: Name, email address, phone number, and physical or postal details of church administrators.
• Member & Donor Data: Names, contact details, giving history, attendance logs, and family records uploaded or entered by your administrators.
• Payment Information: Unique transaction identifiers, payout history, and billing tokens. Please note: Card and instant EFT details are entered on the payment gateway's own secure pages and are never processed or stored on our servers. Subscription payments to ChurchMatters go through PayFast. Donations to a church go through the gateway that church has chosen: PayFast, iKhokha or Yoco.
• Activity Records (Audit Logs): When an administrator or a ChurchMatters staff member makes a significant change to a church's account, we record who made it (their email address), when, from which IP address, and what changed. See Audit Logs & Record Retention below.

Why We Process Your Data

• To operate, maintain, and deliver the functions of the ChurchMatters platform (Contractual Necessity).
• To securely track tithes, offerings, and donations, and to run authentication layers (Legitimate Interests).
• To comply with statutory legal requirements under South African law, including accounting regulations and SARS tax compliance (Legal Compliance).
• To keep a reliable record of changes to each church's account, so that we and your church can investigate security incidents, prevent fraud, and resolve billing or access disputes (Legitimate Interests).

Cross-Border Processing

To provide our automated sermon notes and transcription features, audio recordings uploaded to the platform, and any text that an administrator chooses to send from the editor to an AI-assisted feature (such as heading suggestions), are processed using cloud-based artificial intelligence infrastructure via Amazon Web Services (AWS) Bedrock. This processing takes place securely in the AWS EU (Ireland) region (eu-west-1). In accordance with Section 72 of POPIA, this cross-border transfer is lawful because the recipient jurisdiction (Ireland/European Union) is subject to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which guarantees data protection principles substantially similar to or stricter than POPIA. Furthermore:

• Your audio data and generated text are encrypted both in transit and at rest.
• Under our enterprise security framework with AWS, your inputs (audio or text) and outputs (sermon notes or editor suggestions) are strictly confidential—they are never shared with third-party model providers and are never used to train base machine learning models.

Audit Logs & Record Retention

ChurchMatters keeps an audit log of significant actions on each church's account. This covers changes to administrators and invitations, church and payment settings, subscriptions and payments, and the creation, deletion and restoration of content. Each entry records the time, the action, the email address of the person who performed it, and the IP address it came from. Where an action concerns another administrator (for example, an invitation), that person's email address is recorded too.

• What is not recorded: Audit entries never contain passwords, payment-gateway keys, card details, or the names of church members or people profiles. For most settings we record only which fields changed, not their values.
• Who can see it: A church's administrators can see the audit log for their own church. Actions taken by ChurchMatters staff on a church's account appear to that church as "ChurchMatters support". Our platform staff can see all audit logs.
• How long it is kept: Audit entries cannot be edited or deleted once written. They are kept for as long as ChurchMatters operates the platform, including after a church closes its account, because a complete and tamper-proof record is reasonably required for security, fraud prevention and dispute resolution (section 14(1)(b) of POPIA).

Data Sharing & Security

We do not sell, rent, or trade your data. We share data only with trusted infrastructure providers (cloud hosting), the payment gateway that processes a payment (PayFast for ChurchMatters subscriptions, and PayFast, iKhokha or Yoco for donations, depending on which one the church uses). We only share what that gateway needs to process the payment, such as the amount and a payment reference (PayFast also receives the donor's name and email address), or law enforcement and SARS if strictly required under South African legal proceedings. We implement industry-standard encryption protocols and administrative safeguards to protect your personal data from unauthorized access or destruction.

Your Rights

You or your church members retain the right to access, correct, or request the deletion of their personal information. All such requests can be directed to our Information Officer through the contact form, or submitted using the request forms on our PAIA Manual page.

Deletion requests do not extend to existing audit log entries, which we retain as described under Audit Logs & Record Retention. You may still request a copy of the audit entries that relate to you, and we will restrict their use to the purposes set out above.