Automating a Church's Rental Workflow So Staff Could Get Back to Ministry

Christian Community Center (CCC) is a church in Turin, New York that rents portions of its building to community members for events, meetings, and gatherings. Rentals are a meaningful source of revenue and a way for the church to serve its neighbors - but managing them was quietly consuming a disproportionate share of staff time and attention.

The challenge

With roughly 30–35 rental requests a month, the assistant pastor was fielding inquiries by phone and email, checking the calendar for conflicts, tracking approvals in his head, chasing payments, and - critically - remembering to text the building access code before every single rental.

There was no shared source of truth for availability and no automated way to collect payment. The constant mental overhead of “did I send that code yet?” was, in his own words, heavier than the hours the work consumed.

What we built

We walked the full rental lifecycle with CCC’s staff - inquiry, approval, payment, access - and flagged every touchpoint where a person was doing something a system could do more reliably. The goal wasn’t to replace the pastor’s judgment on approvals; it was to make approval the only decision he still had to make. Everything downstream - pricing, payment links, confirmations, access codes - could be handled by tools the church already trusted.

The result is an end-to-end automation connecting Zapier, Trello, Google Calendar, and Twilio. Each rental flows through a single Trello board, with text messages and calendar updates triggered automatically as the card moves from column to column:

• Embedded availability calendar on the CCC website, so renters can see open slots before they ever submit a request.
• Zapier intake form that captures renter details and creates a Trello card in the approval queue with one click.
• Twilio-powered payment and confirmation texts sent automatically on approval and on payment receipt - no manual follow-up.
• Automated access-code delivery two days before every rental, pulling the current master code so it’s never stale.
• Trello as the single source of truth for rental status, replacing scattered emails, texts, and mental notes.

The outcome

Around 15 minutes of staff work per request - across roughly 30 monthly requests - is now handled without any staff intervention, reclaiming 7.5 hours of admin every month. The current master access code is texted automatically two days before every rental, so forgotten codes dropped to zero. And from inquiry to access code, renters hear back instantly instead of waiting on staff.

By the pastor’s own account, the bigger win than the hours was the mental load: no more wondering what’s outstanding. CCC didn’t need more staff - they needed the right automation. By connecting affordable, familiar tools, a labor-intensive process became a system that runs itself, and gave the pastor back something harder to measure than hours: the freedom to stop thinking about rentals entirely.