Seraphic Mass Association

Thousands of Mass requests a day, on a system that talks to the back office.

SMA’s donors send Mass requests and cards by the thousands. The old system couldn’t keep up, and the fulfillment system behind it had no way to connect. Lava built a platform that does both.

Visit mymassrequest.org
The Seraphic Mass Association home page Lava built, at mymassrequest.org: a priest raising the chalice under “Give the Gift of the Holy Mass” and a Request a Mass button, then “There is no greater gift.”
Client
Seraphic Mass Association
What we built
Custom ecommerce platformeCard systemMass scheduling tool
Platform
Kentico Xperience 13ASP.NET CoreReactJSMicrosoft Azure
The problem

Thousands a day, and a back office with no API.

Seraphic Mass Association handles thousands of Mass requests and donations every day. Many include a personalized eCard, a physical card, or both. The legacy system couldn’t handle the volume, the complexity, or donors who expected to do this on a phone.

The harder part was behind the scenes. SMA’s fulfillment system, the one that actually gets Masses said and cards mailed, was proprietary, with no APIs and no connectors. Any new platform had to feed it in a format it already understood.

What we did

A modern platform that speaks the old format.

Lava architected and built a custom ecommerce platform on Kentico Xperience 13, hosted on Microsoft Azure.

  1. 01Interactive product configurators, built in React, that walk a donor through a personalized Mass request.
  2. 02A custom email system for eCards, with scheduled sending and delivery tracking.
  3. 03Real-time address validation so cards go where they’re meant to.
  4. 04Donations and payments through Stripe and PayPal.
  5. 05An integration layer that translates modern orders into the legacy file-based queue the fulfillment system reads.
  6. 06A scheduling tool that assigns Masses to days automatically, based on availability, location, and daily limits.
The work

Every request, on any screen.

What Lava built, on desktop and phone.
The Seraphic Mass Association home page on desktop: the chalice hero with Request a Mass, then “There is no greater gift” and the paragraphs under it.
The Seraphic Mass Association home page on a phone: the chalice hero, Give the Gift of the Holy Mass, and the line “There is no greater gift.”
What changed

The daily volume, and no re-entry.

The platform handles SMA’s daily volume, on desktop and phone, and fulfillment runs without manual re-entry. It later became the back end for the MyMassRequest mobile app.

What made it hard

Old technology meets new.

The integration. A modern CMS had to hand data to a system built for another era without losing a single request. Combined with dynamic product logic and the need to scale, this project is the clearest example of Lava bridging old technology and new.

Lava tackled every challenge with creativity and persistence. They delivered a complex, highly customized site that exceeded our expectations and continues to deliver results.”

Seraphic Mass Association Fr. John Pfannenstiel, OFM Cap. Director, Seraphic Mass Association

Next

MyMassRequest

A standalone app for a mobile-first generation of donors.

Read the story
The myMassRequest Official App on the App Store: its icon and rating above screenshots of the app’s home screen, card picker and card preview

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