Designing InterVarsity’s Web Strategy
First, a definition:
Often ‘web strategy’ gets conflated with online marketing, social media, etc. Throughout this case study, ‘web strategy’ refers specifically to InterVarsity’s 42 websites built on Drupal, InterVarsity’s content management system.
Discover
What is going on with 42-sites?
The Data
First we could clearly see that sites that with a variety of resources were increasing in usage compared to sites that had one type of resource.
Student Soul
The Ministry Playbook
Only 25% of the 42 sites were getting any kind of update at least 4x / year
Only 36% of site owners were satisfied with their site.
Only 36% of the 42 sites were being actively promoted.
The People
Myself, our consultant, our VP of Tech, VP of Communications, and Director of Web completed 60 interviews across every department that had its own site, and 4 listening sessions/surveys with users to get an understanding of what was currently happening.
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When our users did a search, they were overwhelmed by all the results. Yet, when shown them sites we thought they might find useful, they were grateful for a new set of resources at their fingertips.
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We had a typical set that a non-profit might use: donors, volunteers, staff, constituent, etc.
But when you have a person is a former leader, an alumni, giving to a their local chapter and is considering coming on staff, they needed to visit 7 different sites to make all those labels 'happen'. Oof.
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As years passed, the grew increasingly more frustrated that the system they had to use was complex and confusing alongside in comparison to other platforms they used in other contexts (Weebly, Wix, etc.)
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We were fairly certain coming in that we would be building some sort of web system that would churn out a website for every InterVarsity community.
It turns out we were too late and staff were pretty happy with a combination of Instagram and Linktree - why bother with domains and hosting?
I guess they didn’t find the other 37…
“I wish there weren’t like 5 sites.”
“I just want to do my job. Why should I use your system when I can jump into weebly and do in 15 minutes what takes me 15 hours in Drupal?”
“It’s crazy to me that I have to go to one site to give, another to get training for my volunteer work, and another to get resources for my bible study, and yet one more to find the gospel diagram.”
Our executives (and really everyone) were looking forward to a simple, streamlined, web strategy that enhances ministry, leverages the unique capabilities of technology, matches what we can actually support, and has demonstrable impact on the ministry.
Something else was nagging at me.
We could have updated Drupal to be more usable, cleaned outdated content, and installed a new multi-side navigation menu so that users could browse the whole ecosystem. ✨ Ta-da! ✨
But there was an underlying problem.
Do you see the problem?
The reason we had such as a mess was the unspoken website strategy:
You have department goals to achieve.
The web is a wonderful way to communicate and share your resources.
You provide a web manager and we’ll give you your own site to achieve your goals.
In other words, with a handful of exceptions:
It was about department goals, not what users needed from InterVarsity’s web presence.
Define
At the risk of over-simplifying, the ‘jobs to be done’ across all of the sites fit into one of four functions
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To know what opportunities were available to students and faculty through InterVarsity:
what was an InterVarsity is community like
how they could involved
how they could grow in faith
what conferences were happening, etc.
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Learn how to and gather resources for:
Making compelling invitations
Sharing the gospel
Running a Bible study
Answering hard questions
etc.
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With the barrage of non-profits asking people to give, occasionally I forget that alumni, family and friends of staff, and others deeply want to and in our current system they were working really hard to do so!
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Help staff find information specific to them like:
What our HR policies are
How to resolve conflict
What our theology statements are
How to file an expense report
How to fundraise
etc.
You could sum up our audiences like this:
📖 Ministry Participants
Anyone participating in campus ministry – undergrad students, grad students, faculty, etc.
🙏 Ministry Leaders
Anyone leading campus ministry – student leaders, campus staff, faculty, volunteers, as well as college student pastors, youth pastors, etc
p.s. did you see what I did here!? This was a big deal to say that we needed to drop hard line distinctions between staff, volunteers, and student leaders in resources for ministry.
🧡 Ministry Partners
Anyone who financially partner with InterVarsity to advance the overall mission – donors, churches, etc.
INTRODUCING:
InterVarsity’s New Web Strategy
Share the Invitation
Tell God’s story of InterVarsity and share invitation into the new yew with God and with InterVarsity – whatever that may be.
Equip the Called
Equip God’s people – whoever they are – to do campus ministry with a best-in-class learning center.
Serve Staff
Equip those who need support with organization provided functions like finances, human resources, technology, fundraising, etc.
Design
I’ll admit, I was pretty ready to start bulldozing and start big redesigns – I had been dreaming about this for half a decade. But if we didn’t design the key web journeys before jumping into a re-design, our organizational tendency to keep everything and smush it up in a new way would haunt us.
I depicted the marketing + engagement cycle for each of our audiences and key segments: a person becoming aware of InterVarsity, enticed by what they saw, taking a first step to explore, encountering different parts of InterVarsity, and then joining the yearly rhythm of being involved.
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From these, we could ideate about what our web experience could be like!
Like most non-profits, it’s too simplistic to think of an individual person as having a singular journey. InterVarsity has certainly had people participate in ministry, come on staff, give a gift, go to graduate school, and then leave staff but stay on as a volunteer!
So I also charted a ‘master journey’ to help us think through some of the transitions that often are opportunity moments (see Kristen Goodwin’s talk on UX Silos).
Ok, now we could pull it together!
Taking the ideas, I worked with each audience representative to describe the before & after of what we envisioned our new web experience to be like.
Vision → Strategy → Structure
Our consultant from our first phase encouraged us to follow this process:
We had our vision: We envision a simple, streamlined, web strategy that enhances ministry, leverages the unique capabilities of technology, matches what we can actually support, and has demonstrable impact on the ministry.
We had our strategy: to do that, we were needed to share the invitation, equip the called, and serve staff.
Now, we needed to start building our structure, one of which being the web ecosystem architecture.
With the strategy and journeys in place, we could design our web ecosystem’s architecture!
InterVarsity.org
Prospective Participants
Learn about InterVarsity experience
Find a Chapter
Campus Participants
Grow in faith
See national opportunities like global trips, conferencing, national leadership institute
Ministry Partners
Give to their local community
See what’s happening in InterVarsity
Alumni & general public
Give to former community
Consider volunteering
Consider coming on staff
and other needs like PR, Campus ministry thought leadership, Church resourcing on engaging college students, etc.
Equipping Center
Staff, Student Leaders, Volunteers
Take courses on core campus activities
Access ministry tools like the logo and landing page generator
Manage chapter information
Download Bible studies
Download retreat guides for leaders
Grow in their own discipleship
Download resources for navigating conflict, discipling others, etc.
Staff in sensitive areas
Locked content in serving senistive areas
Staff
New and recently piloted resources and courses
Staff submitted content & resourcing
Staff Hub
Organizational communications
HR policies, benefits
Spiritual resourcing for staff
Theology resourcing
Finance management
Chapter data
Fundraising resourcing
Staff support & services
Is it simple and streamlined? Yes! ✅
Will it enhance ministry? Yes! ✅
Does it leverage the capabilities of technology? Yes! ✅
Is it supportable by our team? I think so! ✅
Will it have demonstrable impact on the ministry? 😁
To be continued…
While the 50,000 foot view of our web strategy has been delivered with the newly agreed upon journeys, to our users and web managers, to them it still feels like very little has been ‘delivered’.
We are actively working on the next layer of detail that makes the strategy feel more real.
What will content governance look like?
How will we evaluate current content for what needs to be moved, revised, and refreshed?
What technical needs does this new strategy require that our current content management system can or can’t do? Will we need a new platform?
How do we setup our theming to better handle a family brand?
and a lot more!