The Brethren Church National Office wanted a way to increase communications with their network of churches worldwide and to raise awareness of their many missions. They choose Hinutech to develop a solution that would provide them with a powerful, easy-to-use system which would allow their staff, network of pastors and their congregations to contribute content to their site while taking advantage of the Hinutech Collaborate Portal's included social networking capabilities.
In order to address those needs, we worked closely with the Brethren Church to establish a strategy to optimize their technology investment. We wished to establish 4 key goals with their site:
- Easy access to information
- Easy management of content for the Brethren staff and content contributors
- Information and content sharing with other Hinutech Collaborate sites
- Social networking
Easy Access To Information
We designed a compelling, modern user interface for their site with the intent of making information easy to find for their visitors. The home page for the site aggregates content from around various sections so that visitors are able to see recently updated information quickly.
Additionally, we logically structured their content making it more accessible for visitors.
Content Management
Most of our customers come to us with the need of allowing multiple contributors to commit updates to their site's content. The days of only a few people having the ability to update a site's content are long gone, and the Brethren Church National Office wanted to take this one step further -- they wanted their entire network of churches, missions, staff and congregations to contribute to their portal. Thus creating a communication ecosystem that is continually updated and continually shows the current state of their larger organization.
To accomplish that goal, they needed a very powerful system that was not only able to manage content -- but they also needed a framework to harness content from various sources and users with differing roles in the system.
Utilizing the Liferay Enterprise Portal as the basis for their site, we gave the Brethren Church an enterprise-class method of creating, editing and managing their content. Some of the key features that are utilized in their solution are:
Content Creation With The Asset Publisher
The Asset Publisher allows the content contributors to create content from within the confines of a site's page while simultaneously making content viewable for all users. For example, the Asset Publisher on the "Missions" page publishes all content that is tagged as a mission. Visitors of the site have this view of the content:
While users with proper permissions have this view:
Clicking on the "Add New" selection box allows content contributors to create web content in our Microsoft Word-like editor which will then appear in the proper section of the site.
Inline Content Editing
While the Asset Publisher allows for easy creation of tagged content, we have provided an interface that allows for easy editing of existing content. Users with the proper permissions can just click the "Edit" button at the bottom of any article and the content editor appears allowing them to modify content.
Document Library and Image Gallery
The Brethren Church manages hundreds of documents and images. Images range from logos to site-specific images and documents can be their bi-monthly magazinge "The Brethren Evangelist" or forms that should only be seen by church leaders. With our advanced document library and image galleries, the Brethren staff can host all of these content types online and make them available in particular content areas. If they have a need to update a document or image, they only have to change it in one place, and everywhere that resource is included is updated with this new version. With this capability, the Brethren Church staff does not need to worry about making numerous updates to the site whenever something changes. It's only done once.
The permissioning system that we have provided, though, takes this one step further. The Brethren Church can choose who has permissions to view individual content pieces, documents, pages, whatever. If there is something that only certain users should be able to see, Brethren staff can limit those permissions on a case-by-case basis. This allows for the ultimate in flexibility when it comes to content sharing.
Content and Information Sharing
With the advanced content management system features in place, we, then, super-charged the Brethren Church's portal by taking advantage of the content and information sharing features. The Brethren Church wished to increase their level of communication among their churches and pastors. To accommodate this, we have the ability to dynamically display content and information across different domains.
For example, The Center is a Brethren Church Plant based out of northeastern Ohio. They have included the Brethren Belief Statement on their site at http://www.my-center.net/beliefs. Note that this is the same content that is found on the Brethren Church National Office's site at http://www.brethrenchurch.org/web/brethren/belief-statement. This allows for the Brethren Church to ensure that content hosted by them is accurate and updated, while it allows for their churches to not have to worry about creating and updating content. It's a win-win for everyone.
Additionally, though, The Center has included blog entries from the Brethren Church National Office Staff in its Resources area. This increases the level of communication from the National Office to its churches while letting The Center benefit from having updates applied to their site with no effort.
The communication is two-way! The Brethren Church's site benefits from blog updates and articles from The Center and its members. This allows for the Brethren Church's site to benefit from external content updates and The Center is then exposed to a wider audience of potential visitors. This scenario let's both sites benefit from shared traffic, shared content and shared resources.
Social Networking
The final piece of the puzzle was to increase organizational involvement through social networking. When visitors to the Brethren Church create an account, they are immediately given a profile page and the ability to have "Friends" in the system. They are able to comment on other users' blogs and also chat with their friends through our integrated instant messaging system.
Below are some screen shots and details of the key features of the Brethren Social Network.
Profile Pages
The Social Network allows for increased user interaction through personalized profile pages, friend requests and activity tracking.
Friend Activity Tracking
Users are able to keep tabs on what their friends are doing in the system through the Friend Activities screen. It's easy to see when a friend has added a blog entry, updated a document or even commented on another user's blog.
Blog Commenting and Sharing
Registered users have the ability to comment on each others' blogs and share those entries on the larger social networks like Facebook and Digg. This allows the Brethren Church to let its users assist them in generating traffic and interest in their messages.
Instant Messaging
Our integrated Instant Messaging system allows friends to chat with each other online. It dynamically updates to let users know when friends are online, and lets them chat with each other on any site included in the Brethren portal.
Summary
These are just the highlights of the system that we put in place for the Brethren Church. There are many more features and capabilities that are either not discussed here or have not been turned on for them yet. If you would like to learn more about the system and see if something like this could be beneficial for your organization, let us know by emailing us or contacting us via our handy web form.
The Brethren Church National Office