You’ve heard the adage since you were a kid: “Many hands make light work.” You learned in a job setting that this doesn’t just apply to people. There are so many types of software and tools out there that make communicating a heck of a lot easier: social media schedulers, email applications, and even project management systems. These many hands do make lighter work of the many tasks they manage––but managing the hands themselves can take a lot of time.
To simplify how these tools play together with your church content, developers have created seamless church website integrations. These are points of contact between the two tools that help them talk to one another so you can access the data in just one place. Your church website, for example, can be integrated with your Google Analytics, Constant Contact list, your online giving solution, or even with your church’s app. The whole point is so that you don’t have to manually process information in two separate places. To put it bluntly, it can cut your work in half.
Sometimes integration is a simple embed, where the code from one tool lives in the other. Other times, it’s more complex back-end integration that seamlessly shares data. Either way, communicators often have 3 main concerns about integrating their software tools.
As you try to streamline your software, make sure to keep the following three questions in mind.
Most likely, yes! Make sure your tech team can help you find the process to make your tools work together. The whole idea behind integrating is that you shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel. You shouldn’t have to learn an entirely new system––it’s just a matter of making two tools talk to each other automatically.
But instead of focusing on keeping your current tools, think about it this way: What is the information you want from those tools? How to do want it displayed? What are you actually trying to do, regardless of the specific tool? There might be other options for getting that information that are an even simpler integration than what you’re currently attempting. For instance, if you use The City for your small group management and data, you’ll most likely need to use an integration with your website calendar tool and the small group finder. But some content management systems (CMS) will already have a small group module that will be worth the switch because the integration process will be that much more seamless.
There will always be some cases where an integration is more complicated to do (which increases cost). Stay open to your options, and keep focused on what you really want in the long-run.
There’s a lot of crossover in your CMS (like Ekklesia 360) and your options for other tools. A comforting thing to remember here is that other churches have usually come before you, and if they haven’t, custom solutions can be created. No matter what arrangement is right for you, a truly helpful integrations team will help you find it. You may need 10 different third-party services with great church website integrations. Or maybe your answer is to use one main ChMS, like Fellowship One or Church Community Builder, for your database. You should be able to do your job using the tools that work best for you––it’s just a matter of finding what those are. Sometimes that involves testing with free trials to find an alternative to the tool you currently have.
If you don't like what you're currently using, that’s a sign that you need to reexamine your needs and the best ways to meet them. Your church’s website design and strategy venture is a great time to reevaluate the way your ministry operates both externally and internally. In addition to integrating your tools, you should know whether or not that tool is the right fit for your ministry. This can also lead to a conversation about refreshing your website, CMS, or even a complete rebrand. Even if you can't tackle it right now from a budget standpoint, if you find yourself hesitant about some of your tools, that means you should make time for a deeper analysis in the coming year.
Speaking of budget, this is one of the most common questions we hear from church communicators. Not all integrations come with identical price tags––simply because they each require unique time to process. Depending on the integration you need, it could take a developer between 2 and 50 hours to complete (best practice is to figure out what you want and get a quote). A 6-hour integration will likely cost around $900, and the more a developer works with a third-party code or API, the faster they can work. Working with a team of ministry experts who understand the tools a church communicator needs, versus a local agency, can increase efficiencies. This ultimately reduces your cost.
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Dollar signs aren’t the only thing you should consider when determining how to set up an integration. How important is streamlining these two tools for your role in the ministry? How much easier will it make your work––freeing up more time to focus on the essential communications within your church? If your use of the tools is suddenly 100% easier, then the integration cost is a major investment in your job. |
The user experience (UX) of your community should also be a factor in how beneficial this investment would be for your church. If you want to use MailChimp for newsletters and to keep your congregation in-the-know, then this church website integration would be a wise venture. A seamless integration would give them virtually invisible use of both tools, while no integration would mean you would have to manually embed the MailChimp signup on your website, or manually enter email addresses. If you want your church to have an easy user experience, integration is a time-saver for you and simplifies and streamlines your church’s online experience.