St. John's Cathedral
Membership Vision enables the Cathedral in Jacksonville, Florida to connect and more fluidly communicate with its various communities and to better tell the Cathedral's story in the downtown core district and beyond. And in the process, Membership Vision helped the cathedral save a lot of money.
Background
St. John's Cathedral is a vibrant community with a constant flow of activity. They wanted to update their digital presence, hoping to make it easier to keep content fresh on the website as well as to begin featuring social media updates, audio and video. They were also eager to broadcast their services live to an even greater audience.
Challenges
Online, St. John's ministry information was available but sometimes outdated. Efforts to keep the front page content fresh and dynamic didn’t extend to deeper pages. Sermon audio was hosted separately by a parish volunteer, taking users off-site. Videos from the cathedral were largely not available nor was social media integrated into the website. Email communications with the cathedral’s various communities was time-consuming and repetitive. Event registration forms were created through a separate paid service.
Additionally, St. John's property had poor internet service from local utilities. Their top available speed was only 25 percent of DSL speeds available. This impacted their ability to offer internet connection to visitors, to communicate via video chat, to run classes and more.
Solutions
Membership Vision allowed St. John's to immediately begin featuring sermon audio on the site as well as in the iTunes podcast center. The ability to assign social media hashtags to pages meant that the cathedral could add content to a ministry's page just by hashtagging their Facebook, Twitter or Instagram posts. The ability to connect posts to pages, and even to set expiration dates on posts, allowed the cathedral to ensure information was fresh throughout the site.
Now, when website visitors look into a ministry at St. John’s Cathedral, they see not only the ministry's "evergreen text" but also the latest blog and social media posts and photos: an active, living ministry.
Cathedral staff were able to use Membership Vision's Mailchimp connectivity to build newsletters from those posts, eliminating the redundant effort required to share information in multiple newsletters and on the website. Now, an update to the website can be tagged to be included in newsletters. By building newsletters from website content, the cathedral not only keeps parishioners informed and engaged but reaches an unsubscribed audience beyond their walls.
Finally, by utilizing Membership Vision consulting services, the cathedral was able to achieve live video and a video archive of sermons. Membership Vision negotiated with a local utility, which agreed to deliver top-tier service to the cathedral at the utility's own expense, increasing internet speeds 40 times and allowing St. John's to upgrade to a modern phone system in the process. WIth training from MV, the cathedral began broadcasting live on Sundays and for special occasions at no additional cost. In fact, internet service costs and telephone service costs were both reduced greatly in this process
Results
St. John's Cathedral has a digital presence that is active and growing. Each week, live video is streamed on its site, and sermons audio podcast and video podcast are both automatically updated. All of this is achieved while utilizing an easy-to-use system that allows multiple volunteers to perform specific, limited roles. The cathedral’s social media presence extends over different platforms and also serves to update the website. The cathedral website updates automatically several times per day from calendar event entries and social media updates, requiring no interaction from an administrator for the site to stay current. Mobile and desktop users alike have an informative, interactive experience.
View the St. John's Cathedral website here.
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