Case Study: Timeliness with Drupal

Drupal fans know that their favorite content manager affords a lot of flexibility with information - but I know from my experience in the media that flexibility is only one step toward successfully broadcasting your message. It's important to get the right information to people at the right time.

I was thinking about timeliness as Christmas approached. One of my major clients is the Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida, home to about 80 or 90 churches in a large chunk of the state. The bishop's staff gives me a great deal of latitude with the site, so I decided to make a few quick changes to the site on Dec. 20.

Even though it is mostly used for administrative purposes, the diocesan site ranks fairly well for generic searches like "Central Florida churches" and "find churches in Orlando." Knowing this -- and anticipating search volume for Christmas eve and Christmas morning services in the area -- I did the following:

• Used the ThemeKey module to use a red, Christmasish variant of the site's theme on the front page. (20 minutes)
• Set my jquery carousel on the front page to only display one item and made sure that item was a "Merry Christmas" message that pointed to the "find a church" page. (10 minutes)
• Used Views to display a list of every church in the diocese (they are all posted as nodes) with a link to the church node and homepage URL, if any. I also added this to the front page. (2 minutes)
• A friendly message on the front page informing people that newcomers and visitors are welcome in all Episcopal churches on Christmas or any day of the year. (1 minute)

Whilst this might seem like overkill, the results of less than an hour of work speak for themselves. Using Google Analytics, I estimate 300 to 400 clicks were made on church profile and church URL links between Dec. 20 and Dec. 25. In addition, search engines sent one or more persons to the site from the following keywords:

1. deland churches and christmas
2. episcopal church-christmas-florida
3. "avon park" "christmas eve" church
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Though I can't say for certain that these searchers actually made it to a Christmas service, I can say they were presented with an opportunity to attend at one of the diocese's churches. The search keywords also show that many visitors were seeking not an Episcopal Christmas service but any Christmas service - meaning that some Floridians may have had their first Episcopal experience this Christmas.

I also oversee a few parish sites and pushed their priests to post Christmas service times prominently on the front page -- each church scored hits from Google looking for any Christmas eve or Christmas morning service in their respective towns. One, the Chapel of St. John the Divine in Champaign, IL, had about a dozen Christmas-related hits. (Not bad for a college town during Christmas.)

There is a point to this, outside of my trying to help clients boost recruitment numbers. Timeliness is more imperative on the web than on any other platform, and I can't imagine a more important time than Christmas for any Christian church. In spite of this, many Episcopal parishes I know did not post a special Christmas schedule anywhere on their sites. Most dioceses didn't post anything either, including the mother Church of England. (Hats of to the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York for not only posting church links but service times directly on their site.)

A web site isn't something you can just build and let sit. Your site has to be updated frequently and appropriately. Fortunately, Drupal makes this easy, and that's why it's great for clients of all kinds.