We’ve had the pleasure of working with Callan Crossland for a few years now. He’s genuinely nice, easygoing, and loves supporting his church team in sharing the love of Jesus. When he’s not busy working as the Director of Operations & Communications for Countryside Community Church, you’ll find he and his wife taking care of horses, chickens, ducks, and goats on their farm in Newberg, OR.
When we spoke to Callan, he told us why he chose Ekklesia 360 to be their website provider and what benefits he enjoys the most about Ekklesia 360. Callan was not only the decision maker in choosing E360 for CCC’s website, online donations, and church management system, but he also single handedly created and set up a beautiful website for Countryside. We appreciate the great insights he’s shared with us about his experience with Ekklesia 360 and wanted to share them with the E360 community too!
When Callan took over the role at the church, the frustration he had was that the church was using separate systems for their website, online giving, calendar, and databases, and none of the systems were integrated to be working together.
“If I was creating an event and we needed to charge for that event, I had to enter the event five times just to get everything up and going. I was so frustrated that I started to emphasize the importance of integration. I didn’t want to use three different products, I wanted to use just one.”
Callan loves technology and finding the best ways to streamline the church’s operations, so when choosing their website provider he also wanted to choose a company that would integrate their website, events, online donations, and church database. He investigated several other companies in the church technology space, but mentioned that Ekklesia 360 was an easy decision because of the power to integrate the website CMS, E360 Giving, and E360 ChMS.
“I thought mostly everything was done better by you guys. As a church we don’t do anything extraordinarily weird, so I feel like everything we need to do, you guys have encountered. We’re not a super mega church with 19 campuses. We’re a pretty simple church that’s middle of the road, and you guys have anticipated our needs pretty well. I’m a little uncertain of how integrations work, but I’m confident they do work, so that’s a big deal.”
The Ekklesia CMS has ‘been a blessing’ to Callan because of the capability to empower each of the ministry leaders to edit their respective ministry pages. By adding his team as site administrators and training them on editing the website, each ministry leader can update their ministry web page with fresh content, new events, photos, videos, and ministry happenings. He’s comfortable handing over the wheel to his team because he appreciates the powerful revisions feature in the CMS. With revisions, each person editing the site can easily return back to previously saved versions of their page if it’s needed.
“The advantage that I’ve had and I think is key to your clients, is being able to give specific editing access to ministry leaders who feel comfortable working in that environment to go in and make their own updates to their ministry web page and to events. That makes me happy, and it makes them happy.”
It can be difficult for Callan alone to keep up with all the ministry’s current events and updating the website, so the Countryside team works together to lighten the load. Callan really appreciates the High School Ministries page and the job well done by Troy Duppenthaler, the Associate Pastor of Student Ministries.
Callan knows his church and it’s members very well. To best serve their needs when it comes to the website he has strategically set up their home page with sections that clearly present the most upcoming events. He understands that some of their users may find navigating through several pages to find an event can be difficult, so the home page serves as a digital bulletin that presents their most upcoming event information.
“One thing I've strived to do for our older congregants is to make upcoming events that we want them to know about on the home page. They don’t have to navigate to another spot. I would like every user to know if there's an upcoming event that we’ve extended an invitation to, that it's going to be right on the home page. I keep those sections pretty up to date.”