North Way Christian Community (Pittsburgh, PA)

North Way Christian Community is non-denominational church that is home to people from a wide spectrum of church backgrounds. It currently has 6 locations across greater Pittsburgh region. All campuses are aligned from a mission, branding, teaching, and church-wide initiatives standpoint but tailor their approach to reaching, serving, and gathering with their local communities.

AT A GLANCE

Year Founded: 1981
Industry: Nonprofit (Church)
Employees: 75+
Locations: 6+
Average Weekly Attendance: 3-3.5K

VISIT SITE

Mission Lab is solutions oriented and communicative. Our team feels empowered by our new site and raved about the process. Our congregation can find content and register for events easily. Mission accomplished!

- Dave D'Angelo
Lead Pastor, North Way Christian Church

How We Helped North Way Contextualize Their Entire Online Experience To Better Showcase the Campus a User Selected.

North Way was looking for a new website that better represented the church's mission and ethos. Their old site only had single pages for each campus and was challenging to navigate and use. For the new site, they still wanted to have a generalized version of the site for prospective visitors who hadn't yet selected a campus but wanted to expand the experience once a campus is selected. The goal was to allow the church to better highlight the local expressions of the organization in a way that both empowers the campuses and creates a more transparent experience for visitors, while avoiding the need for too much additional content creation.

The Solution: A Context-Switching Site

Mission Lab was initially asked to create a site that leveraged campus pages with sub-pages, but after an in-depth discovery process was completed the team decided to instead focus on a context switching model. This model was built upon our location functionality that allows us to dynamically transform the site into a campus specific context. When a visitor first visits the site, they see a generalized version that generalized information with multiple paths towards selecting a campus page. Once they do, the entire site, including the navigation are now contextualized to that campus.

Starting with User Centered Design

Just prior to this project, Mission Lab's team invested hundreds of hours into an in-depth UX study focused on understanding the pros and cons of the different multisite church websites. This deep understanding of end user needs and pain points, paired with a close working relationship with the North Way team created exciting results.

For this project, we leverage a site-wide design system that limits customizing of individual components, instead focusing on adjusting the design a global and class level. This allowed us to rapidly rough out the design so content creation could begin and then continue to fine tune the system in parallel as we tested and grew out the applications in a real world context.

Removing the friction from selecting a campus

One of the most common pain points prospective visitors experience when visiting a multisite church's website is selecting the right campus. For example, North Way uses a city/township naming convention for their campuses, which likely mean something to people from the area, but are not immediately clear to people new to the region. For this reason we provide multiple paths to selecting a campus that include options to view on a map.

Campus Selector in Header - In addition to showing campus name in this dropdown, we also included a small thumbnail, relative compass direction within the metro area, and service times. Users can also opt to view these locations on an interactive map.
Interactive Map - Our locations page defaults to an interactive map paired with a compact list of campus cards which can be sorted based on distance. In this case, the client chose for map pins to take users directly to the campus page when clicked instead of opening an in-map card.
Minimalist Locations Map - For the main homepage, we designed a minimalist map paired with campus links to provide easy access to the geographical context of each campus
In-page Campus Switcher - Key pages (e.g. Visit) have a campus switcher below the page title that allows users who have not yet selected a campus, or who are weighing multiple campuses the ability to move directly between versions of this page.
Detailed campus cards on the general visit page, or by selecting card view from the interactive map screen.

Maximizing contextualization, while minimizing extra work on the North Way team.

We developed a unique approach to dynamic content built around our locations functionality that makes it easy for the client to manage if a page is unique, shared with one or more other campuses, global, or not applicable to a campus.

Shared pages with dynamic links and components: The vast majority of pages are shared between campuses, but in-page components for events, ministries, groups, staff, posts, and latest sermons modules automatically apply campus filter when the campus is selected.
Static General Pages with a single shared dynamic page for campuses: This allowed the ministries page to resize to only show ministries and partners for the selected campus but avoids a scenario where duplicate ministries showed in the general view (when no campus is selected).
General Site only pages - There are a few pages that we only want to live on the general version of the site. For example, since the site automatically applies the campus filter to dynamic content, including staff, the All Staff page cannot live at the campus level as it would filter out the staff not associated with that campus. In this case, a visitor can only view the "All Staff" page in the general (non-campus) context. We give admins and editors an easy way to override the dynamic links and hard link to a specific URL.
Selectively relevant pages. North Way's City Campus is the only location that offers a formal "College Ministry," so there is only one version of this page, and it only exists inside the City Campus context.
Unique pages for one or two locations but shared for the rest. The main campus has a much larger team which they wanted broken down into departments. For this reason, it has its own staff page, while the other campuses share a single dynamic campus page with each other (but not Wexford), which automatically resizes to just show that campus's team (e.g., Dormont and Sewickley Valley)
Truly Unique Pages: Only four essential pages were all made as truly unique pages, but even here we leverage a shared template and some global (shared) rows and components to reduce the effort of creating the unique pages.
- General and Campus Specific Homepages
- General and Campus Specific Visit Pages
- General and Campus Specific Kids Pages
- General and Campus Specific Students Pages

Handling a Hybrid of Broadcast and Live Sermons

Most of the time, North Way broadcasts the same sermon to all campuses. On around 15% of weekends, however, each campus offers live in-person preaching. Historically, they didn't have a clean way to incorporate these additional in-person sermons into the site, but Mission Lab's sermon manager was designed to handle this use case. North Way can now add the sermon audio and/or video from individual campus(es) so these show instead of (or in addition to) the main campus broadcast when viewing Sermons from within that campus context.

Integration with Ministry Platform

Ministry Platform Groups Integration

We developed a custom groups interface and then wired up an API to automatically pull these records from the church's ChMS system, Ministry Platform. This allows us to automatically show/hide groups based on the campus selected, as well as incorporate on-page group modules within the context of another page.

Ministry Platform Events Integration

We modified Event Calendar Pro to work with our campus switching logic we then performed an API integration to pull and sync events from Ministry Platform, North Way's Church Management System. This system creates a single version of the truth for the church, while allowing website visitors to stay within not only the website, but the campus context while exploring and interacting with groups.

Church websites built smart.

Get a beautiful site tailored to your mission and created on a system of best practices.

GET STARTED