Case study · Saint Paul's Outreach
A phone app for SPO's missionaries, built around the work they already do.
Saint Paul's Outreach needed a way for its missionaries to keep track of the people they walk with, and for leaders to see how the mission is moving without adding a reporting chore. We built the SPO Missionary App. SPO owns it; we build and run it for them.
The problem
Every missionary carries a crowd of names.
An SPO missionary is responsible for many people at once: the student they just met, the one who has started coming around, the one they are forming as a leader. Each is at a different place on the road, and most of that lived in memory.
Leaders need honest answers to simple questions. Is the mission moving? Who on the team needs help? SPO keeps those numbers in Google Sheets, and filling them in was one more task on top of the ministry itself.
What we built
Made for the sidewalk, not the office.
- Works offline
- Missionaries are on campus, in dorms, and between meetings. The app works without a signal and syncs when the phone reconnects.
- Stages and next steps
- Each person a missionary walks with has a stage and a clear next step, so follow-up doesn't depend on remembering.
- Weekly MRBM numbers
- Each week missionaries log the four numbers SPO leads by: Meet, Rally, Bring, Move. Their goals are on the home screen.
- Syncs into SPO's Google Sheets
- The app writes into the spreadsheets SPO already uses, so nobody had to give up the reports they rely on.
- Views for chapter leaders and supervisors
- Chapter leaders see who has reported this week and how their chapter is doing. Mission supervisors see the same across their region.
Who owns it
SPO's app, not ours.
The SPO Missionary App belongs to Saint Paul's Outreach. It is shaped around their chapters, their roles, and the way they measure the mission, and it isn't something we offer to other organizations.
Better Portion built it and keeps it running: updates, fixes, and changes as SPO's needs shift.
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