Industry

Faith Based

Team

Scott Logan
Project Lead / Architect

Lauren Lopez
Content Strategy

Alex Van Rossum
Development

Shannon Smith
Designer

// Content Strategy

Johnson Ferry is a super active church with a diverse congregation spanning generations. They also have a very active sports outreach that includes both youth and adult sports leagues, fitness classes and coaching. Their site needed to effectively serve at least three distinct audiences, which can be challenging. They needed to have easily accessible, targeted and well crafted content for first time visitors and guests. They also needed to serve their existing congregation well with access to events, sermons, ministry content and other functional content such as online giving. Lastly, their sports outreach was a major community focus and information on leagues, classes and schedules had to all be quickly accessible. Our team worked alongside TJ and his team to create a brand new content strategy and site outline that met all of these unique goals. We then wireframed all key pages to ensure that the content flowed well and that everything felt very easily accessible. We landed on a site that is not only beautiful and on-brand but highly functional and supports their ministry.

// Design

Having just gone through a brand refresh and in the middle of a campus renovation project, it was important to ensure that Johnson Ferry’s new site reflected their updated brand values and the in-person experience that a visitor might have on their campus. Our team spent considerable time with their designer to understand the ins and outs of their new brand standards as well as on their campus. Being on campus with them, talking to their staff and members and experiencing the space was so helpful in reproducing that feeling digitally.

// Custom Development

Collaborating with TJ and his team has always been a fun experience. It’s one of those unique relationships where we feed off of each other, ultimately creating some of the most fun and helpful tools for the church. Two examples of that partnership are the “Hub” and the “Plan Your Visit” application. Both tools were built prior to Johnson Ferry’s implementation of MinistryPlatform but were built with future integration in mind.

// The Hub

The Hub is a unique spot on the Johnson Ferry website that can include a collection of all the announcements and events for the church (an important distinction between announcements and events are that announcements may have no date associated with – they are simply announcements that need to be known). We created a custom section within their site that includes both types of content in a way that is filterable and searchable. It’s also super easy to administrate, making quick postings easy to manage. In the future this section could be fed by MinistryPlatform content.

// Plan Your Visit

Johnson Ferry has a number of services at different times, targeted at different demographics. They also have a large campus with multiple entrances. This made it important to help first time visitors easily find their way and plan which service they might want to attend. Built natively into their site, we created a form and a landing page. The content on the landing page is 100% dependent on their responses to the form, making it a custom planning sheet for their visit. We also chose to include the page variables in the URL to ensure they could bookmark or share the page and come back to it later with all of their custom information still present.

// Church Management via MinistryPlatform

When we first met with TJ and his team, it was obvious that Johnson Ferry was a very active church. It also became quickly obvious that managing all of the events and opportunities at their church was somewhat of a pain point for their team. Their current church management system didn’t offer any native integrations with their website and content often required double if not triple entry. Our team has worked alongside the team at MinistryPlatform (now part of ACST) for over a decade, and this seemed like an obvious solution to make that management easier. We made an introduction and worked alongside the Johnson Ferry team throughout their implementation to ensure everything went smoothly and that the site supported their new ChMS well. Additionally, we’re currently in development of a number of custom applications that will display MinistryPlatform content such as events, opportunities, groups, and sermons all integrated with our custom passwordless login on their website in a way that matches their church’s unique ethos.

// Online Giving via Vision2

Lastly, we helped wrap up a fully-integrated ecosystem for Johnson Ferry with a quick introduction to the team at Vision2. Vision2 is a very unique giving provider that provides a full integration with MinistryPlatform and a natively embeddable giving widget to ensure a seamless giving experience for the donor as well as reporting and tracking for the church administration as well. Our team was fortunate enough to not only be able to make an introduction but also do the implementation for Vision2 to ensure that it integrated perfectly with Johnson Ferry’s site.