Episcopal Church

In March 2011, representatives of the Episcopal Church attended DrupalCon Chicago to learn more about Drupal. Ready to revamp their website, the Episcopal team heard that Drupal might be a more user-friendly software solution than RedDot, the old site’s proprietary content management system (CMS).

Drupal Satisfies Site Requirements

Building the site in Drupal would require a knowledgeable team due to certain functional requirements. At the Drupal conference, the Episcopal team met representatives of Duo Consulting. Following a series of discussions about the site requirements, in April 2011 the project was off and running—with one caveat. With a meeting for church officials across the country looming, the combined Duo & Episcopal teams needed to complete the homepage by June.

With a clear design goal in mind, Episcopal Church administrators had already completed the site design before Duo joined the project. Unfortunately, this presented a unique challenge for Duo’s project team which had to work from a different angle to reconcile the end-user experience with the current designs.

Multiple Priorities

The greatest challenge for both teams was satisfying competing objectives of the site. A two-fold purpose meant clashing priorities:

1. The site had to offer perspective for non-members: people searching for information on what the church stands for and what it means to be Episcopalian.

2. The site should meet the needs of church members by offering information on missions, feasts, fasts, sermons and doctrine.

To satisfy differing visitor expectations, the new site required a more robust search feature for finding churches—functionality the old site did not have. After searchability was improved, one question remained: how would Episcopal Church administrators update the details for each church location?

Multilingual

The site also had to be multilingual in Spanish, French and Creole — the former in order to bolster outreach to the Hispanic community and the latter two to support an already large membership based in Haiti.

Content Migration

To kick things off, Duo helped educate the Episcopal team on the advantages of content migration—the process of moving content from the old CMS to the new one, reducing costs and time related to rebuilding content from scratch. Migrating content also meant Duo could build the site much more quickly, sourcing from real content rather than “lorem ipsum” filler copy.

Episcopal quickly started exporting large chunks of content in XML format from the old site. The Duo team took the content, massaged it and pulled it into the Drupal CMS.

Unique Functionality

Keeping in mind the split purpose of the new Episcopal Church website, the Duo team helped implement four creative and useful features.

• Smells & Bells: Drawing on the rich history of the Episcopal Church, its team designed a stained glass concept, color-coded based on category. The Duo team made it functional using a JavaScript library called Isotope. Non-technical personnel can easily manage the content in each frame of stained glass.

• Find a Church: The new search feature empowers visitors with the ability to find churches based on state, diocese and parish. Search results are delivered in a style similar to Google Maps, including the viewer’s distance from the nearest parish. Each church can sign in, verify its identity and gain direct access to manage its parish’s contact information, including social media pages and websites.

• Prayer Gets Social: To add a social element, the site includes a page where visitors can submit their prayers, view other prayers and ‘like’ prayers to offer their support. Engagement has proven strong since the launch of the site, and the feature continues to grow in popularity.

• Episcopal en Español: Leveraging the multilingual capabilities of Drupal, the teams rolled out a Spanish version of the site. French and Creole versions will be implemented in later phases.

To work within the Episcopal Church’s budget, collaboration took center stage over the course of the project. Face-to-face meetings helped cement the bonds between the teams, allowing for plenty of back-and-forth and training opportunities. In fact, training was a crucial part of how Duo helped reduce billable hours to work within the budget constraints.

Objectives Achieved

The new Episcopal Church site officially launched in late December, 2011. “The Duo team worked miracles, held our hands and delivered on time,” says Barry Merer, manager of web services and social media for the Episcopal Church.

Now, with Drupal, more people have access to content management tools, regardless of their level of tech experience. Time that might have been spent contacting around 6,000 individual parishes was spent on more pressing issues. (In fact, the Episcopal Church offices received nearly 50 calls a day from churches getting in touch to update their contact information soon after the site launched.)

With Duo’s help, the Episcopal Church website reconciled its dual purposes for members and non-members alike into a seamless experience for all visitors, regardless of familiarity level.

View the Episcopal Church website >>