St. Joseph

Case Study: Non-Profit Infrastructure Modernization

Client

The Vocations Society of St Joseph

Sector

Non-Profit / Catholic religious

Services

Bespoke membership and grant management system development, legacy database migration, and web design/development

Technology

MySQL , Hosting

Project Overview

The Vocations Society of St Joseph (VSOSJ) is a Catholic religious organisation working across Ireland, supporting the formation of student priests through a network of around 60 branches and approximately 300 students at any one time. iWorks designed and developed a bespoke membership and grant management system for the organisation, along with a public-facing WordPress website.

Why AWS

Choosing Amazon Web Services rather than on-premises infrastructure or shared hosting was a deliberate decision. AWS offered resilience, managed security, automated backups, and the flexibility to scale without having to invest in physical hardware. For an organisation with a small IT team, that mattered. It meant the platform could run reliably without needing dedicated server administration, while backups and uptime were handled through a far more robust environment.For an organisation that had previously been running critical operational data on a Windows 98 virtual machine, the contrast was significant. The new platform now sits on modern cloud infrastructure designed for reliability and continuity.

Outcome

VSOSJ moved from a system that was at real risk of catastrophic failure to a stable, cloud-hosted platform on AWS. Grant tracking and financial reconciliation across all branches and students, once slow, manual processes, are now handled through a structured, far more efficient workflow. The office team has real-time visibility into every allocation across all five payment types for every student.The WordPress website, delivered alongside the platform, gave the organisation its first professionally managed public presence. Staff can now update content without technical support, and branch news, event information, and organisational updates are managed directly by the office team.

The Solution Installed

We designed and built a bespoke cloud-hosted web application tailored exactly to non-profit governance standards, focusing heavily on clear visual hierarchy and ease of use for an older target demographic:

Centralized Data Engine

Replaced scattered desktop files with a single, highly encrypted database hub.

Streamlined Workflows

Designed a simple interface that allows managers to track compliance protocols seamlessly without needing to be tech-savvy.

Role-Based Access Controls

Implemented strict security boundaries ensuring sensitive user records are only accessible by authorized personnel.

The Business Impact

The transition safely eliminated legacy infrastructure dependencies, heavily reducing daily administrative friction. Rainbows Ireland now operates on a secure, highly responsive application built to maintain compliance, absolute transparency, and long-term data preservation.

The Problem

When iWorks came on board, VSOSJ was relying on two separate legacy databases — Microsoft Access and FoxPro. The two systems had grown side by side over time, with different structures and no proper integration between them. The original developer had long since moved on, and nobody in the organisation fully understood how either system had been built or how the data was organised. By that stage, the situation had become serious. The only way to access the databases over the network was through a virtual machine running Windows 98, an operating system that has been unsupported since 2006, with no security updates and no realistic long-term future. The organisation’s IT team had put this in place as a workaround, but it was never a real solution. If the hardware failed or the virtual machine became corrupted, the organisation could have lost its core operational data for good, member records, student profiles, and years of grant allocation history.

Key Challenges

Two separate legacy databases (Access and FoxPro), each with a different structure and both needing to be replaced.
Access is limited to a Windows 98 virtual machine, leaving the organisation one failure away from total data loss.
The original developer was no longer available, and there was no internal understanding of how the systems worked.
Grant and fee tracking across 60 branches and 300 students was being managed manually across multiple sources.
There was no reporting capability and no public-facing digital presence.

The Migration Process

One of the biggest technical challenges in the project was extracting clean data from two structurally different legacy databases, Access and FoxPro. Because the systems had been maintained separately and did not communicate effectively, duplicates, inconsistencies, and missing information were unavoidable. Before any new development started, iWorks spent time understanding the existing data, mapping the relationships between the two systems, and defining what a clean, unified dataset should look like. Member records, branch associations, student profiles, and historical grant allocations were all extracted, reconciled, and imported into the new MySQL database. The work was carried out methodically: data was reviewed category by category, discrepancies were flagged, and the organisation’s office team worked closely with iWorks to resolve any ambiguities before cutover. By the time the new platform went live, the data was cleaner and more reliable than it had ever been in the old setup. The Windows 98 virtual machine was retired on go-live day. There was no phased handover, because the risks of leaving the old system running in parallel were simply too high. The migration had been planned carefully enough that a clean cutover was the right decision.

Technical Summary

Legacy systems: Microsoft Access and FoxPro (two separate databases), replaced by CI4 / MySQL.
Framework: CodeIgniter 4 (PHP).
Hosting: Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Public website: WordPress with full content management capability.
Payment types: First Fee, Second Fee, General Expenses, Theology, and Special Grant.
Scale: approximately 60 branches, around 300 students, with five payment types per student.
If your organisation is still relying on ageing database technology and needs a clear path forward, iWorks would be happy to have an initial conversation. Contact us hereor call 01

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