System Overview
Ekklesia was created by church planters who saw a need. The existing 'off the shelf' products and third party applications reached a point of diminishing returns. This group of pastors and lay-leaders decided to build a system that tackled the challenges they faced.
Many churches fail to use their website to gather new visitors and continually provide valuable or current information to their congregation. These two areas are often the primary goals of why churches create a website in the first place. Ekklesia addresses both of these challenges:
Challenge # 1 Most church websites provide little value to their congregation. A recent humorous poll asked people the question, How Useful is your Church Website? The response was telling:
12% of congregants sarcastically selected what church website?
35% of congregants considered their church's website as current as a 1980 hymnal.
A website can be an effective tool to communicate the vision of your church, provide needed information and equip your congregation for the work of the ministry. This was the motivation behind Ekklesia System's creation of an easy-to-use, web-based tool to manage, update and create new content for your church website. Ekklesia allows Ministry Leaders, Pastors and other contributors to ensure your website is updated consistently with events, sermons and articles for your people to view. These contributors are able to login to the system anywhere they have access to the internet. Churches now can bring numerous people into a participating role for the work of the web ministry.
Challenge # 2 most church websites miss opportunities to gather new people. There are simple ways a church can bring in numerous visitors each month. For most church-plants, being able to gather 10 to 20+ additional visitors a month can make a big difference. Ekklesia is designed based on web-standards and incorporates the latest Search Engine Optimization methodologies to position your church's website highly on search engines. This means, people who search for a church in your city are more likely to find your church. Example 'Gathering New People' [Read: Gathering People when they need Your Church]
Our Solution
Ekklesia is a total church web-based solution. Ekklesia gives churches the tools to manage complex functions, through one easy system. Ekklesia makes it easy to…
Upload Sermons and communicate through email, html, documents, mp3s, bitorrents, podcasts, rss.
Manage people, from new visitors to members and centralize communication with them.
Lead new visitors towards greater community participation and take a hands on approach to the assimilation process.
Gather new visitors through search engine optimization.
Keep your site current with new content, allow multiple (non-technical) users to input events, announcements and articles for visitors to read.
Add events, allow people to rsvp, process payments for events and track who plans to attend.
These are just a few of the benefits of Ekklesia. Ekklesia is easy to implement, here's how your church can get started today.
Design
Great CSS driven design
Use your current design - Use our system if you already have a great design but want to add in our functionality.
Use one of our award-winning design partners to design your website.
Architecture
Built based on Web Standards (W3C)
-Separation of Content and Web Features : Modify navigation and website tools without disrupting content.
-Separation of Content and Presentation : Maintain consistency in design for all new content created with style-based content authoring.
One central database Instead of running several third party applications, with different sets of databases, churches can have all these solutions in one location.
Integrates powerful Technologies – (mp3, rss, podcasting)
Easy to Use Administration
1 Church Marketing Sucks! Website Poll
