Archdiocese of St. Louis

Challenge

The St. Louis Archdiocese of the Catholic Church is a complex organization with a long history, made up of and supported by many ministries and offices that support the Catholic faith in St. Louis. Because of this complexity, they have struggled to find the best way to manage a single web presence for their entire organization. In 2018, the Archdiocese and their supporting ministries and organizations had separate websites, with different branding, functionality and user interfaces. Even though the organizations worked well together, it was very difficult to tell how they were related online. Externally, the Archdiocese needed a modern site that brought all their ministries together and showed that they were one community. Internally, the Archdiocese needed a complex solution for the many roles and permissions for users. At the same time, the Archdiocese was revamping their online publication, the St. Louis Review. They wanted to make sure that their digital solutions worked together. The Archdiocese’s overall goal was to grow involvement with the Catholic Church in St. Louis, which they largely measure by attendance at church events and support for church initiatives. They wanted to know if a stronger online message could help them accomplish this.

Solution

SteadyRain worked with the Archdiocese to design a website that brings together the organization’s departments and promotes Catholicism in St. Louis. The new Archdiocese website has an updated user interface with a menu that makes it easier for users to find the service they’re interested in. Each office and ministry has its own page with a standard format for banner, header, and navigation menu. The site clearly shows how the ministries are related to each other, and how each supports Catholicism in St. Louis. One of the features that was most important to the Archdiocese was that many users at many levels within the church be able to add to the site. They needed each user to only be able to publish content that was appropriate to their role in the church organization. To address this need, we built the site with robust role permissioning, so that users from each Ministry can update content about their own work, but can’t change the site’s branding, or publish content in other sections of the site. The role permissioning helps each office and ministry continue operating independently, while ensuring that the Archdiocese has a unified look, feel and structure. In order to help the Archdiocese meet their goal of increasing attendance, SteadyRain updated the site’s events tools to make it easier for parishioners to find interesting events. We centralized the Find My Parish tool and made its interface more intuitive. Additionally, we created a new way to post events to the site that all Archdiocese team members can submit supplementary events to. Together, these event interfaces help the community stay involved in the church. Additionally, we added their publication, the St. Louis Review, to the main Archdiocese domain, adding synergy between the Archdiocese site content and the content in their magazine.

Results

The St. Louis Archdiocese primarily measures the success of their website in terms of how well it promotes attendance at church events. Their new marketing site is a successful tool for them because it produces increased online interest in events. The new Find Mass Times tool saw a 2% year over year increase in users from the previous tool, and a 5% increase in new users. Additionally, the share of users who found the tool through an organic search increased by 10%. This data indicates that the website helped to attract interest of people who might not be regular churchgoers. Other events also gained increased traffic; there was a 17% increase year over year in users who interacted with community event pages on the Archdiocese website. The Archdiocese’s new website is helping them to provide services to the Catholic community in St. Louis.