The Effective Parish Website Part 1

January 14, 2020Sr. Susan Wolf, SND

Someday parish leaders will view their online parish presence as an essential professional pastoral ministry. Members and visitors already expect that. Unfortunately, they are often disappointed.

The measure of the effectiveness of the parish website is a combination of quality of design, the usefulness of content, and the overall message.

A professional pastoral website design invites visitors in and facilitates easy access to their interest points. This is done through:

Organized and logical structure which facilitates easy access to the information visitors are seeking
Artistic use of color and inclusion of engaging images especially photos of members engaged in prayer, service and or community activities. Smiling faces are always a plus!
Economy of text—less is more when it comes to text on the home page. Short descriptions with headlines that link to more information are better than long paragraphs of content.

Content has to useful to the visitor. It has to be clear, complete and concise.

Visitors to parish websites usually are not regular church goers unless they have been directed to the website for a specific purpose such as to download a form or sign up for an activity. In the case of the church goers, they logon, do their thing and get off the website. They rarely look at anything else.

The majority of visitors are looking for:

Mass Schedule (ordinary Sunday and weekday schedules and also the special schedules for holidays and holy days as they occur during the year)
Times for confession
Complete contact Information (zip code and area codes included), emails and phone numbers
How to join the parish
How to access sacraments for themselves or family members
How to return to the practice of their faith if they have been away
How to enroll children in religious education classes or the parish school
A copy of the Sunday bulletin
Information, times, dates, locations of special events

The overall message of the effective, mission-based parish website, is that all visitors are welcome and that their questions and needs have priority.

Your comments are welcome!

Comments (9)

Ruth

January 14, 2020 at 7:48 am

Great information as usual! Wanted to let you know that I just tried that link you provided at the bottom of your email for creating a video. It does seem to be quite easy as you said. I just did a little with it for now but will go back to it later when I have more time.
Sr. Susan Wolf, SND

January 14, 2020 at 8:50 am

Thanks, Ruth. Let me know how your video work progresses. Videos are a great asset to online communications.
Tom Drez

January 14, 2020 at 9:27 am

Nice post, Sr. Susan. Certainly, we agree with your thoughts to the point where we created our Parish Place website-in-a-box essentially. In our research with a couple of dioceses, we found that one third of parish sites in a diocese had websites that were kept up to date, one third had sites but were slightly out of date – and may have included ads, and one third had no site at all. Our Parish Place is easily deployed to a Parish as a base template that allows them to be able to make some design choices on their own, a template with the standard features parishes should have. $200 one time setup fee and $99/year with no ads. The parish is their own administrator with not need for any ongoing web master fees to be paid. Certainly, custom development is always available.

The Diocese of Erie PA rolled out ParishPlace to all their parishes at the same time we redesigned their site almost two years ago. http://www.eriercd.org. You can find their parish sites here: https://www.eriercd.org/find-parish-school.php.

If you know of any parish looking for a site, we are pleased to talk with them. Thanks. Tom
Sr. Susan Wolf, SND

January 14, 2020 at 10:09 am

Thanks for the comment, Tom. Your efforts are appreciated. I just want readers to know that I have not reviewed the websites using ParishPlace, so I cannot critique or endorse them.
Paul Steinbrueck

January 14, 2020 at 3:08 pm

Hi Susan, good post. I agree… “The overall message of the effective, mission-based parish website, is that all visitors are welcome and that their questions and needs have priority.” Looking forward to Part 2.
Sr. Susan Wolf, SND

January 14, 2020 at 3:30 pm

Thank you, Paul.
Joe Luedtke

January 16, 2020 at 12:57 pm

Sr. Susan,

You described the “effectiveness of a parish website” as being comprised of 3 components. I agree with those but want to expand on your “usefulness of the content” further. I would expand that to be more the “maintenance of the content” as being one of those critical components. At LPi, we print about 4100 church bulletins and host approximately 1200 parish websites. I’m always amazed at the quality, accuracy, and timeliness of the content in the typical bulletin versus the typical parish website. I believe it has actually very little to do with the product’s design, the technology used, or even its CURRENT message. What it has to do with is one medium (the printed bulletin) is typically very well maintained and updated weekly where the other one (parish website) is updated rather infrequently. If you ask any parish who their bulletin editor is, you will typically get an immediate answer, but if you ask the same parish who their website administer is the answer isn’t always clear. Is it a committee? A former volunteer long gone? A staff member who was assigned it but isn’t passionate about it or has the requisite skills?

Formalizing the responsibility for managing the website content just like a parish does their bulletin editing responsibility would be key to improving the overall effectiveness of many church websites regardless of the technology solution used or its initial design.

The other thing I think about is how can we help? Parishes don’t think of it this way, but the vast majority of parishes in the US have outsourced their printed communication to LPi or one of the other church bulletin companies around. We don’t just print and ship bulletins, but we ensure they get updated weekly, every week, and the content get delivers to the parishioners and we typically do so for free (through advertising support). If there was a model that had someone nudging every parish every week to update their website, calling them if they haven’t, and offering to help just imagine how better the average parish website would be!

I see the issue. I can see the opportunity for the parishes. I’m just struggling with the solution. Do you agree? If so, any ideas?

Sincerely,

Joe Luedtke
CEO
LPi
http://www.4lpi.com
Sr. Susan Wolf, SND

January 16, 2020 at 1:51 pm

Joe,
I agree with you wholeheartedly that content and management of the website is a major issue. I began my post with this sentence: “Someday parish leaders will view their online parish presence as an essential professional pastoral ministry.” When they believe that there will be quality control. Each of the last four words are critical to to an effective mission-based website. I plan to address content and website management in future posts. I certainly can add “management of the content” to my points above. Your words encourage me to keep exploring this issue. It is in the “struggle” that solutions will appear. One of our problems is that many don’t think the parish website is that important.

I will also say this: while bulletin content is usually current and accurate–it is “in-house news.” A mission based website is also addressed to the non-church going (who visit websites more than the church-going) and unfortunately we are not very practiced in evangelizing messaging.

Thank you very much for your thoughtful comment.
Joe Luedtke

January 18, 2020 at 10:36 am

Sr. Susan,

I agree wholeheartedly with your response. The one thing I would encourage you to think about is to get to evangelizing messaging we need to push the content to the non-church going. Is email marketing the solution? Social media promotion? Print mailing? Push notifications via an App or Text? Even the best website with fantastic content still relies on the user going to it. How do we get them to go to it?

Sincerely,

Joe