Building a Consistent Online Presence for Your Church Network
While every church is special, your greater church network connects individual churches to a larger mission and community. Churches in the same network should work together—sharing resources and providing mutual support—and their websites should reflect this. While individual websites highlight what’s special about a local church and its community, they should also look and feel like they’re part of the larger religious network they belong to. The experience of visiting different churches within your organization should be one of familiarity and belonging, and their websites need to offer the same consistency.
Churches do a lot, often with limited resources. Luckily, websites can cost-effectively support churches in almost every outreach initiative. Websites can provide your congregation and its prospective members with vital information about service locations and logistics, special events, and news. They can connect members of your community to volunteer opportunities, virtual sermons, newsletters, and more. With great websites, you can help newcomers discover your churches, and help existing members deepen their connection to your organization.
Unifying your church’s online communications with Squarespace Enterprise role permissions
When you manage the websites in your church organization as a unit, it becomes much easier to maintain quality across the board and to monitor updates at the network level. With Squarespace Enterprise, you can view all websites in your network from a single dashboard.
The first step in establishing a website management workflow for your church network is determining the appropriate role permissions. Start by designating an Enterprise team administrator to oversee all websites in your entire network. Church leaders, outreach employees, or administrative staff members all make great candidates for this role.
Depending on your organization’s size and resources, you may also want to establish a small group of secondary managers, using the Enterprise team member role permission, who can support this administrator in maintaining sites. Defining an Enterprise administrator and team members at the network level will help you create consistency across all your sites.
If your clergy and paid employees lack the bandwidth to devote to the project, you may want to tap trusted volunteers from your congregation to assist. However, every member of this core team should be well-versed in your organization’s messaging, core tenets, and voice.
Your management team can use the Enterprise dashboard to monitor progress and content across all of your church websites. They can leverage role permissions so contributors can add new content in draft form for the managers to review, edit, and approve before launch.
These guardrails may be especially useful if volunteers in your congregation update and maintain website content on an ongoing basis. You can also use tagging and filtering to track the progress of particular tasks.
Structuring your church website workflow with Squarespace Enterprise
Each church in your network should have its own website or landing page, tailored to its local community, that links to your organization’s main website. Conversely, that main site or homepage should also link out to these localized church pages. Individual church sites should contain location-specific imagery and information, like service and event schedules, community news, staff bios, and contact information.
Updating your sites regularly is important for accuracy, engagement, and SEO performance. To manage these updates, each church location should have a dedicated point person—either a volunteer or staff member—who is assigned the website manager role permission. These website managers should all report to the Enterprise team administrator at the organizational level.
With Enterprise, you can add as many contributors as needed, meaning your local website managers can each oversee additional contributors at their level.
Unify church website appearances with Squarespace templates
Each church in your network should have its own website, but that doesn’t mean building from scratch. As an Enterprise customer, you have access to the full suite of Squarespace’s award-winning templates, or you can create custom Enterprise templates just for your church network that provide approved starting points for your web designs. Settle on at least one template to use across the network, so your individual church sites will have a unified feel. Building these custom templates does not require coding or technical knowledge, so your team will have full control over the process, no matter their skill level.
Templates create stylistic and structural consistency across your web pages. While imagery and content may vary across your local sites, main elements like fonts, colors, and logos should remain the same. You will also want to provide guidelines for the style, or “voice,” of written content across your websites. Consider creating a style guide for volunteers and staff who will be contributing website content. When these stylistic elements are in harmony across your church network, they create a strong impression.
Members of your congregation may move between visiting church locations for work, family, school, and other reasons. Knowing they’re part of a larger community can give them reassurance and increase their loyalty to your religious organization. When your church websites work together, it reflects well on your entire network, signaling clarity of message. Your websites can be a hub for community building and outreach, engaging and expanding your congregation at the same time.