Privacy Policy

Zera (“we”, “us”) provides church management and giving software at zera.church. We are based in Accra, Ghana. This policy explains how we handle personal information, in line with Ghana’s Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843).

Two roles. When a church records information about its members (names, phone numbers, giving and so on), the church decides why and how that information is used. It is the data controller, and Zera processes it on the church’s behalf. For your own Zera account (your login, and the member app that travels with you across churches), Zera is responsible.

• Your account: your name and email address, and a password only if you choose to set one. It’s stored only as a secure hash, and we can never see it. You sign in with a code we email you, with Google, or with that password. Accounts made earlier with a phone number also keep that number.
• If you continue with Google: Google tells us your name, email address and profile photo, and that it has confirmed the email. We keep your name and email for your account; we don’t keep the photo, and we never see your Google password or anything else in your Google account.
• Church records entered by church staff: member names, phone numbers, email addresses, and optional details such as date of birth, gender, marital status, occupation, town, household, groups, photos, and baptism or wedding records.
• Giving and finance: contributions, pledges, dues, expenses, welfare support and fund balances recorded by the church.
• Church life: attendance counts, event RSVPs, pastoral appointments, prayer requests, announcements and teachings.
• Mail: messages between a church and its members, letters and notices, who each was sent to, and when it was read.
• Chats (Zera Plus): the messages, photos, voice notes and files you send, and when they were delivered and read.
• Online services: who checked in to a church’s online service (members, or guests who give a name and phone number), the church’s total viewing minutes, which we measure to bill streaming, the video of services a church broadcasts on Zera, and the short clips its staff make from them.
• Your own notes on a service (Zera Plus): what you write during a service or on its replay. Only you can see them in the app. Your church and its staff can’t, and Zera’s tools have no way to open them. Like chats, they aren’t end-to-end encrypted.
• Promotions on Discover: how many times each promoted item was shown and tapped, as totals, never who saw or tapped it.
• Payments to Zera: what a church bought, the amount, who paid and when, how (Mobile Money or card, with no more than a card’s last four digits or the bank or network), and the payment reference. Full card and Mobile Money details stay with Paystack.
• Notifications: if you turn them on, the address your browser or phone gives us for sending them.
• Messages you send us through the contact form, email or WhatsApp.
• Technical data: IP address and basic request information, used to keep the service secure (for example, limiting repeated sign-in attempts) and to fix problems; and when you last used Zera, and whether on a phone, tablet or computer, so we can support churches.

• To provide Zera: storing church records, showing members their own giving and announcements, and producing statements and reports.
• To send messages you or your church ask us to send: account emails (sign-in codes, verification, password reset), Mail, SMS announcements and reminders, and notifications to your phone or browser if you turn them on.
• Emails from Zera itself: one welcome email when you create an account, on how to get started, and an email with the next steps to whoever sets up a church or another organisation. Zera’s team may also write to you about your account or your organisation, by email and, if you lead a church, in its Mail. That might be a reminder to finish setting up, or a check-in. Every email from the team has a one-tap unsubscribe link, which stops all of those messages. Emails your account needs (sign-in codes, password resets, receipts) still come.
• To keep accounts and data secure, prevent abuse and fix faults.
• To reply when you contact us.

We do not sell personal information, rent it, use it for advertising, or build profiles for anyone else. There are no ad networks and no tracking on Zera.

Promoted on Discover. A church on Zera Plus may pay to show one of its own public events, teachings or approved testimonies at the top of Discover, labelled “Promoted”. Promoted posts are shown by context, never by profiling: everyone browsing Discover sees them in turn, except the promoting church’s own members, and no other information about you decides what you see. We count only how many times each promotion was shown and tapped, in total.

We use a small number of trusted providers, only to run the service:

• Railway hosts the application and database, on servers in the European Union.
• Resend sends our emails: sign-in codes, verification and password-reset links, the welcome and set-up emails, and emails from Zera’s team.
• Google, if you choose “Continue with Google”, confirms who you are and shares your name, email address and profile photo with us. Zera doesn’t keep Google’s access to your account: we only sign you in.
• Arkesel delivers SMS messages in Ghana (the recipient’s phone number and the message text).
• Paystack processes the payments churches make to Zera, by Mobile Money or card (the payer’s email and payment details). We never see full card details.
• Cloudflare may check sign-in and sign-up forms for automated abuse, and hosts the video of online services a church broadcasts on Zera, and their replays.
• Google (Gemini): documents you send to get your church confirmed or verified may be read by Google’s Gemini AI service to help Zera’s team check them. Zera uses Google’s paid service, so they aren’t used to train its models.
• Google, Apple and Mozilla deliver notifications to your phone or browser, if you turn them on. They receive only a signal to check for news, never the content of a message.
• YouTube plays videos and livestreams that a church chooses to embed.

Because some providers are outside Ghana, information may be stored or processed abroad; we choose providers with strong security and data-protection commitments. We may also disclose information when the law requires it, or to protect people’s safety.

• Every connection is encrypted (HTTPS).
• Each church’s records are separated at the database level, so one church can never read another’s.
• Access inside a church follows roles. For example, who gave what is visible only to the church’s finance team (owner, admins and finance) and the giver, and that includes a funeral’s acknowledgement list. A family sees only the total given to support them, and only if the church chooses.
• Passwords are stored as secure hashes. Every account is confirmed through its email address, by a code or link we email you or by Google. The few accounts made earlier with a phone number are confirmed by a code texted to them. Sign-in codes work once, for a few minutes, and only a few are sent to any address.

• Chats are private to the people in them. Church leaders, including the owner, can’t read them. Zera’s tools have no way to open them either, and technical access to our database is limited to the few people who keep the service running. Chats are not end-to-end encrypted, so we can be required by law to disclose them.
• If you report a message, a copy goes to your church’s owner and admins, never to the person you reported. If nobody else at the church can review it, Zera gets the copy instead. The copy is kept even if the message is later deleted.
• Anonymous posts hide your name from other members; your church’s owner and admins can still see who wrote them. Anonymous messages in Mail hide your name from the church; Zera keeps the link so replies can reach you.
• Mail you write to your church is seen by you and the church’s pastoral team. “Seen by the church” tells you someone on the team has read it, never who.
• Reports about a church go to Zera only, never to the church.
• Joining a church: if you have left two or more churches on Zera in the past year, the people who approve your request see how many, never which churches or why.

• To keep people safe, Zera’s team may look at anything posted on Zera: posts, prayer requests, testimonies, comments, replies, teachings and messages in a live service’s chat, members-only and ministry posts included. Chats aren’t part of this.
• Every look is logged. Each time someone at Zera opens a members-only or ministry post, or sees one in Zera’s list, we record who, which post and when. A church’s owner can see in Settings how many of its items Zera reviewed this month.
• When we act, we explain. Zera may hide a post (then only its writer still sees it, and its photos and videos stop opening from their links), remove it (people see “Removed by Zera for breaking the rules” in its place, and we keep a copy for our records for up to 12 months, longer only while its writer’s request to look again is waiting), or delete it for good. We may also pause someone from posting anywhere on Zera, or suspend an account. Every step needs a reason. The writer is told why in their Mail, with a way to ask us to look again, and the church’s owner is told when it’s their church’s content.
• When we delete something for good, its words, photos and videos go, and so do any copies of its words in its church’s moderation records. We keep only who deleted it, when, why, and a fingerprint of what it said: a code made with a key only Zera holds, which shows whether a copy is the same and can’t be turned back into the words.

We keep your account while it is open, and a church’s records for as long as the church uses Zera. When a church or person asks us to delete information, we remove it from our active systems within 30 days, unless the law requires us to keep some records (for example, financial records) for longer. Some things are deleted automatically: sign-in sessions (with their IP address) a week after they end, notifications after 12 months, the IP address and browser noted with each change to a church’s finances after 12 months (the record of the change itself stays with the church’s books), visit counts for public pages after 13 months, replays of services broadcast on Zera after 90 days, a request to be reminded when a service goes live 30 days after that service, a clip of a service once its post is deleted or 90 days after the church leaves Zera Plus, and the words of a care request two years after it was closed. Those words are what was asked, how to reach you, where, and the care team’s notes. The fact that care was given stays on the church’s record.

Under the Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843), you can ask to:

• see the personal information held about you;
• correct information that is wrong or out of date;
• have information deleted, or its use restricted;
• object to a use of your information, or withdraw consent you gave (for example, to receive SMS).

You can download a copy of your own data at any time: in the app, go to Profile, then Download my data. We confirm it’s you with a code to your email, and delete the file 7 days after it’s ready.

For records your church keeps about you, please contact your church first. It controls those records, and we will help it respond. For your Zera account, contact us at hello@zera.church. If you are not satisfied, you may complain to the Data Protection Commission of Ghana.

Zera accounts are for people aged 13 and over. Churches may record information about younger children (for example, in Sunday school or baptism records); a church that does so is responsible for having the consent of a parent or guardian.

Zera uses only what it needs to work. There are no advertising, analytics or tracking cookies.

To know how many people visit our public pages, Zera counts visits without cookies: we record the page, the kind of device (phone, tablet or computer), the site or campaign link that sent you, and a code that changes every day so a visit isn’t counted twice. We don’t store your IP address, and the counts can’t be tied back to you. Pages inside your church account aren’t counted.

Pages with an embedded YouTube video may let YouTube set its own cookies when the video loads. Blocking cookies in your browser will sign you out of Zera.

If we make important changes, we will update the date above and let account holders know by email or in the app before the changes take effect.