There are 42 Dioceses in the Church of England, and while their regional characters and outward expressions are as diverse as the people they serve, the things they need of the digital communications platform are essentially identical.
In 2015 we were approached by three diocese independently, inviting us to tender for replacing their websites. We could have tendered for each of those projects separately, but instead we decided to try and get them to talk to one another. With that spark, we started the Digital Diocese Community (DDC).
The question to answer was this: is there a way of a group of Dioceses coming together to define the needs that they share, and save money collectively in their commissioning. We worked with an initial cohort of 5 Dioceses to come up with an answer to that question. The DDC CMS was the result.
The DDC CMS is a tool which includes tools which allow communications teams in Dioceses to structure all their communications, simply and easily. It includes delivery mechanisms for pages, news and press releases, events, people and place data (driven by ACNY), downloadable resources and vacancies. It’s built on mature open source tools which free these teams from off-the-shelf solutions which force them to compromise.
From that initial group of 5, we now take care of a quarter of the CofE’s Dioceses, and that community is growing.
Want to collaborate with others on shared open source tools?
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