An Update From Good Grain Creative On Our New Website
Over the past couple of months, Good Grain Creative has partnered with Bethlehem United Methodist Church to rethink and redesign your digital communications ecosystem and content development practices.
My name is Asher Segelken, I'm the founder of Good Grain Creative and I've been the project lead on the digital overhaul.
I hope you are enjoying your new site and checking in on it frequently, we still have so many exciting features and updates we are preparing to roll out and share with you in the coming weeks and months.
Right now you are reading a blog post, that you became aware of from the New "This Week At Bethlehem Email".
This revised format empowers leadership, members and visitors to have a more streamlined communications ecosystem. It allows for unlimited content, but is formatted as a shorter email that is less persistent in the day to day life of your inbox.
Previously, This Week at Bethlehem, Along the Way, other weekend updates and reminders were sent out as separate emails, under this new system, we are consolidating all posting to the website and sending you a weekly summary of content for you to explore on your own time starting every Friday at 11am.
Like reading Along The Way every day? Flag the weekly email and refer back to the devotional content or when you open the link the first time, keep the webpage open on a separate tab for you to refer back to throughout the week.
Our hope in overhauling the weekly email is three fold.
First, it's to get you everything you need from Bethlehem United Methodist in a simple weekly package, that you can use as a digital resource throughout the week.
Second, we know that hosting this information on our new site is going to help Bethlehem grow its audience and get the word out about Bethlehem United Methodist Church better. You visiting the site on a regular basis helps us achieve this goal.
Thirdly, we hope that this email gives members a chance to enjoy a new kind of balance. A break from the sometimes overwhelming amounts of communications material, while still being kept well informed. We hope that as we simplify and streamline our communications you will begin to see the weekly email as your weekly informational care package from us via the website sharing with you all of the resources and materials produced by the church as you continue to deepen your spiritual formation and community engagement.
We believe that these changes will allow for more traffic to be driven to the site, while still allowing all content and church resources to be available to anyone that needs it.
Additionally, it has been such a joy to work with your church, you have an exceptional leadership team that is forward thinking, creative and collaborative, and that's rare in any organization. I could write an entire blog post about how great your staff is and how much I look forward to working with them every week.
Lastly, we are actively exploring ways to make the new digital experience better fit your church. If you have an idea, or a question please get in contact with Pat Smith or Ron Whittler and they will be able to bring your feedback into our meetings and that dialogue will make the site better as we continue to roll out new features and establish new workflows.
I look forward to writing you again as we wrap up the digital overhaul but as of now, at the halfway point, we are in great shape and I hope you all are as excited as I am for what God will do through your new website from Good Grain Creative.
