Client story
ELCA Set Out to Create an Excellent
User Experience
By Insight Editor / 11 Nov 2017 / Topics: Customer experience Software
Facts at a glance
Organization:
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA)
Size of company:
4 million members, 10,000 congregations
Challenge:
ELCA wanted to create a more engaging user experience by streamlining web search capabilities to intuitively provide the most relevant results based on the user's intentions.
Solution:
SharePoint search
Results
- Consolidated, simplified search with auto-completion
- Responsive design
- Customer relationship management & Google Maps integration
- YouTube channel search
Solution area:
Insight’s Digital Innovation solutions help clients incorporate emerging tech into their business operations to improve the customer experience.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) supports the needs of more than 4 million members within 10,000 congregations through its public-facing website, elca.org. When ELCA decided to redesign its site to deliver an improved user experience, it enlisted the help of Insight's Digital Innovation team.
ELCA wanted to build an excellent user experience that focused on enabling members and seekers of the church to search, find and use disparate information and multimedia materials. The goal was to streamline and simplify search to intuitively provide the most relevant results based on the user's intentions.
In search of simplified search
ELCA had multiple legacy applications that were developed separately from one another, with their own databases, search capabilities and page layouts. This resulted in a sub-optimal user experience, necessitating several separate custom search solutions.
For the previous version of the website, ELCA had used a Google appliance with minimal functionality. According to ELCA, the Google appliance was expensive to maintain and was eventually phased out.
Key requirements for the new search experience included the abilities to:
- Search multiple sources of structured and unstructured information
- Allow site administrators to apply flexible metadata to SiteCore 6.6 content and have the metadata used by the search solution
- Search database-driven content — specifically Blackbaud CRM data for people, organizations and places
- Crawl ELCA's six affiliated sites and return results within a single result set
- Search multimedia files, PDFs, Microsoft Office files and images
- Consolidate multiple search screens into a single search experience for locations, people and content
- Allow users to refine the search results to create more relevant results
- Provide mapping capabilities and directions to locations in the search results
Wanted: Heightened efficiency
ELCA envisioned the new site would improve the quality of the experience for both end users and administrators of the site. For new and prospective church members, the website would be as much of a "catalyst, convener and bridge builder" as the church itself, attracting new members and providing consistency across the experience.
The administration process would be more efficient, and the manual effort required to update content would be replaced by a fully dynamic content delivery system.
Bringing it all together
ELCA asked Insight to deliver a solution that would improve the user's ability to find the most relevant information based on the intent of their search, including immediate auto-completion within the search box using search index terms. The simplified search solution needed to be device-aware, providing mobile search via a fully responsive design, with the ability to search from the most common mobile devices.
Integration with the church's customer relationship management databases and Google Maps was also critical in order to visualize geographical data and provide location mapping for all ELCA locations. Finally, a federated search on the organization's YouTube channel was essential to enable users to find, view and download the desired YouTube content.
Sharing results
Insight “delivered the framework and vision that I had in mind and even expanded on the initial scope in several areas,” says ELCA Chief Information Officer Jonathan Beyer. “They seamlessly integrated SharePoint into the look and feel of our site, giving a common interface to all users.”
The SharePoint search solution has improved interactions with members and potential members of ELCA through enhanced search capabilities and an excellent user experience.
