EBENEZER CHURCH
Throughout the pandemic, many churches turned to online streaming to reach their congregations. Ebenezer Church did the same. On a regular Sunday, they found that an average of 15 viewers were in attendance every week.
Then all at once, more than 100 viewers were tuning in a week which begged the following questions: Where are these viewers coming from? How can we learn more about these users?
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Once we were able to identify these users as significant, we wanted to figure out how to bring them into the greater church community.
Ebenezer AME Church
UX Consultant
DL Rankins - Project Manager
When I was first brought on to consult on the website, it was quite chaotic. There were lots of pages with overlapping information and it was difficult to navigate.
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I was brought on to make suggestions about a pipeline for streamers become church members, but found that the entire website would be optimized.
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Once I made a few suggestions for learning more about streamers and design changes, I passed my suggestions off to the project manager.
Make independent service streamers a part of the church communnity.
Assist in the optimization of the church website design and create ways for service streamers to join the church.
To learn more about streamers to get them to join the church, I made a few suggestions.
My first suggestion was creating pop ups on the streaming page to get users name and email before view the stream. It should have the option to be exited out of so as not to deter users, but just create a friendly invitation to share more information with the church.
My second suggestion was using the information from the pop up (First name, Last name and email) to add them to the existing mailing list. That was these users can be given information about the church and over time receiving emails find more ways they would like to get involved.
My third suggestion was to offer the option of leaving ratings of the livestream after it is finished and when a user clicks to leave the page. The pop up can rate the overall video, audio and sermon. This will give streamers the opportunity to give feedback and take an active role in their viewing experience.
My final suggestion was to create more option for the growing online community. Turning streamers into in person church members is ideal, but all streamers may not need or what to go to church in person. What the church can do to accomadate them would be to give them more options to interact virtually so that they can be full members of the church in their own right.
In addition to livestream suggestions, I made some suggestions for improving the website.
With these suggestions, I left the Ebenezer team to get to the work of deciding which ones fit with their mission and implementing those changes. I consulted occasionally throughout the process. Full access to the original site edits can be seen here.
Since the site redesign guided by my suggestions, the site is increasingly more accessible to the church's parishioners. The sleek, streamlined designs has yielded lots of quantitative results.
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15%+ in site traffic
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5%+ in online donations
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8%+ user feedback through surveys
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30%+ in mobile site visits.
