Building a Consistent Online Presence for Your Church Network
While every church is special, each connects to a larger mission and community through your greater church network. Churches in the same network should work together—sharing resources and providing mutual support—and their websites should reflect this. While individual websites highlight what’s special about a local church and its community, each should look and feel like it belongs to its wider religious network. A member of one church should be able to visit another church in the network and feel a sense of familiarity—that same sense of belonging they have at their home church. Church websites should offer the same consistency.
Churches do a lot, often with limited resources. Luckily, websites can cost-effectively support nearly all of their outreach initiatives, providing your congregation and its prospective members vital information about service locations and logistics, special events, and news. Great websites, especially those built with Squarespace Enterprise, can offer volunteer opportunities, virtual sermons, newsletters, and more, helping newcomers discover your churches and deepening existing members’ connection to your organization. They can also be a powerful tool in collecting donations.
Streamline online communications with Squarespace Enterprise role permissions
Managing your church organization’s websites as a unit makes maintaining overall quality and monitoring network-level updates much easier. With Squarespace Enterprise, view and manage all websites from one convenient dashboard. Enterprise customers enjoy access to Design Library, an editing efficiency features hub that helps you save considerable time deploying, updating, and managing on-brand communications like news and updates across all sites.
The first step in establishing your church network’s website management workflow is determining appropriate role permissions. Designate an Enterprise team administrator to oversee all your network’s websites. Church leaders, outreach employees, and administrative staff members make great candidates for this role.
Depending on your organization’s size and resources, you may also want to use Enterprise team member role permissions to establish a small group of secondary managers who can help administrators maintain sites. Defining a network-level Enterprise administrator and team members can help you create cross-site consistency.
If your clergy and paid employees lack the bandwidth for the project, your congregation’s trusted volunteers can assist. Ensure the core team is well-versed in your organization’s messaging, core tenets, and voice.
Your management team can use the Enterprise dashboard to monitor progress and content across all your church websites. They can leverage role permissions so contributors can add new content in draft form for managers to review, edit, and approve before launch.
These guardrails may be especially useful if your congregation’s volunteers regularly update and maintain website content. You can also tag and filter your websites to track progress of particular tasks.
Structure your church website workflow with Squarespace Enterprise
Each church in your network should have its own website or landing page, tailored to its local community, that links to your organization’s main website. That site or homepage should also link to your localized church pages. Individual church sites should contain location-specific imagery and information, like service and event schedules, community news, staff bios, and contact information.
Updating your sites regularly is important for accuracy, engagement, and SEO performance. To manage these updates, each church location needs a dedicated point person—either a volunteer or staff member—assigned the website manager role permission. Website managers should report to the Enterprise team administrator at the organizational level.
With Enterprise, you can add as many contributors as needed, meaning your local website managers can oversee additional contributors at their level.
Raise money with donation blocks
Churches across your network can harness the charitable spirit of congregation members and solicit donations that benefit a specific cause or initiative. Donation blocks serve as an impactful, on-brand way to quickly, securely, and professionally collect donations from site visitors.
Perhaps your church network wants to support community members impacted by a natural disaster or raise money for families during the holidays. Or maybe you want to raise extra money to finance missions that globally promote your church network. That’s where donation blocks come in.
Place donation blocks in a prominent location on your websites, like the homepage, or on a dedicated page about the cause. By default, donation blocks use your site’s global style attributes, including buttons, fonts, and colors, giving visitors a sense of familiarity with your church network’s brand. You can customize button text and write in details like tax disclaimers and suggested donation amounts, and give donors the option to offer recurring donations. You can also set an automatic thank-you email when donors contribute that reminds them their donation makes a difference.
With a donation block set up, you have everything you need to accept and manage donations benefiting your cause. You’ll need visibility on your donations block from your congregation and prospective members. Use social media, site pop-ups, and announcement bars to request donations and inspire people to act. Learn more about asking for donations online.
Unify church website appearances with Squarespace templates
Every church in your network should have its own website—but you don’t have to build them from scratch. You can start building a website from Squarespace’s full suite of award-winning templates or create church network-specific custom Enterprise templates with approved web design starting points. Select at least one template to use across your network to unify your church sites’ feel. Building these custom templates doesn’t require coding or technical knowledge, giving your team full control over the design process no matter their skill level.
Templates create stylistic and structural consistency across your church network’s web pages, creating a stronger impression for page visitors. While imagery and content may vary across your local sites, main elements like fonts, colors, and logos should remain the same. You should also create and provide style guidelines outlining your brand “voice” to volunteers and staff writing content for your websites.
Build a consistent online presence for your church network
Congregation members may move between church locations for work, family, school, and other reasons. Knowing they’re part of a larger community can give them reassurance and increase their loyalty to your religious organization. When your church websites work together, it reflects well on your entire network, signaling greater clarity of your organization’s messages. Your websites can become a hub for community-building and outreach, engaging and expanding your congregation at the same time.
This post was originally published October 30, 2023. It has since been updated.