What we've built.
What we're building.
Where we're going.

Ekko is a multi-church SaaS — every church's data is completely isolated. This phase established secure authentication, role-based access across the org hierarchy, and the onboarding flow that gets a church set up in minutes.

Churches plan with people, not positions. This phase built a complete picture of who's on your team, how they're wired, what they're carrying, and how they connect to each other.

Vision Foundation is the top of the planning hierarchy. Every initiative, event, and commitment in Ekko traces back here. It captures the church's mission and vision (org-wide), North Star long-range goals, and the 3-year → 1-year → quarterly cascade that turns vision into actionable timeframes.

Each ministry builds its own vision — and connects it to the church's at a single, deliberate point: its highest goal links to the one church goal it advances. Ministries connect to the church's operational goals (3-year and annual); the North Star is reached through the cascade, not linked to directly. The result is one clean line of sight from a quarterly priority all the way up to the church's North Star — no tangle of cross-links.

The Teaching Arc is a rolling multi-year sermon planning timeline. It treats the preaching calendar as one of the most strategic decisions a church makes — connecting series development to scripture coverage, seasonal rhythms, and the church's vision.

The Whiteboard is a real-time collaborative ideation space where ministry teams brainstorm together. When a session closes, Claude synthesizes the ideas into clusters, evaluates their alignment with the church's vision, and offers to route them directly into the planning system.

The Planning Hub is where a ministry leader turns vision into work. It opens on the ministry's vision goals and organizes every initiative directly under the goal it serves — across the full year, zoomable down to any single quarter.

An initiative is a meaningful piece of work with a beginning, middle, and end. It has milestones, a budget, success criteria, and can involve multiple ministries. Initiatives are the bridge between vision goals and calendar events.

The Ekko Score is a weighted health grade that evaluates six dimensions of organizational health — not just whether things are getting done, but whether the right things are getting done, the right people are being developed, and the church is collaborating well.

In Ekko, events don't start on a calendar — they start in a planning session. An initiative produces events. Events flow downward from vision through initiatives and land on the calendar with full scheduling control, including recurring series.

A retrospective is a different kind of planning session. It looks backward with honesty — what did we commit to, what did we deliver, what did we learn, and what do we carry forward? Ekko makes this a structured process, not an optional end-of-quarter conversation.

No single leader holds the whole church's vision in their head. This assistant reviews it all and proposes connections — a ministry goal that should be carrying a church goal nobody is advancing yet, or an existing connection whose two ends don't quite line up. It only ever suggests; accepting a suggestion is what creates the connection, so alignment always stays a human decision.

At year's end, a leader marks each goal achieved, partial, or missed, and the cycle locks. The next year isn't a blank page: long-horizon goals carry forward to be reviewed, annual and quarterly goals are re-set against the prior year's real outcomes, and every missed goal is surfaced for a deliberate decision — re-commit, revise, or drop. Nothing is auto-carried; nothing is silently dropped.

Most planning systems track lag measures — whether you achieved a goal. Lead measures track the behaviors that predict whether you will. This phase adds the ability to define leading indicators per initiative and check in weekly on whether the needle is moving.

Right now, Ekko's budget module and planning module are separate. This phase connects them so that initiative budget estimates roll up to ministry budgets, and creating an initiative shows its budget impact immediately.

Currently the Calendar and Whiteboard are standalone top-level navigation items. This phase moves them under Planning Hub, reinforcing that they're outputs and inputs of planning, not independent tools.

The Whiteboard is designed for broad ministry brainstorming. The Initiative Whiteboard is something different — a quick, focused session launched directly from within an initiative when a team needs to think through a specific problem: how should we execute this event, what could this program look like, what are we missing? Tighter context, faster synthesis, directly routed back to the initiative.

Planning Center Online (PCO) is the most widely used church management platform. Ekko connects to PCO via OAuth so churches keep using the tools they already know — Ekko adds the planning layer on top without replacing anything.

Once a ministry plans an initiative in Ekko, the execution often happens in Asana, Basecamp, or similar tools. This phase builds the handoff — Ekko pushes initiative details to those platforms and pulls status back.

Connecting planned targets to actual outcomes closes the planning loop. This phase builds the plan vs. actual dashboard and trend analytics that show whether a church is getting better at what it's trying to do.

Approvals is more complex than it appears. A calendar event might need facilities approval, A/V approval, and budget approval — each from a different person. This phase builds a configurable approval chain that reflects each church's actual chain of command.

A mobile experience purpose-built for the moments when church leaders are not at a desk — Sunday morning, mid-week events, staff meetings.

Volunteers are the execution layer of most church ministry. This phase adds volunteer culture, capacity, and load tracking to Ekko — built with awareness of PCO's volunteer management so Ekko complements it rather than duplicates it.

The best way to evaluate Ekko is to use it with realistic data. Invite-only sandboxes are active now — each evaluator gets their own fully isolated copy of a realistic church (Grace Community Church), pre-seeded with vision goals, initiatives, staff, series, and assessment data. Self-service trial sign-up comes next.

Most church culture tools are sold to leaders, administered by leaders, and interpreted by leaders. That's the problem. Ekko's Culture Center is built staff-first — staff see their ministry's aggregate health, leadership sees patterns (not individuals), and systemic issues reach the board and eldership independently of pastoral leadership.

Currently Ekko staff and church staff live in the same user model. This phase separates them — Ekko team members get a platform identity that spans organizations, while church staff belong only to their church. It also adds an org-level security settings module so each church controls its own permission matrix.

Between mission and goals sits a layer most churches skip: values (what we believe shapes how we act) and strategy (how we uniquely will achieve our mission). Without these, planning is goal-setting with no filter. With them, every initiative can be evaluated against whether it fits who this church is.