For Green Valley Baptist Church, utilizing the intranet has become a priority in the last year to increase ministry efforts and reach people online for Christ. Church Administrator Joel Young is in charge of the online efforts and has recently chosen to implement the ACS Extend Platform for his church’s Web site building needs.
Online Limitations. Although Green Valley had a Web site, it wasn’t meeting the church’s needs for informing the congregation and evangelism.
“The first Web site we had was only three pages. We had a volunteer who updated it once a month,” notes Young. “We found we needed to have a fresher Web site. We started using E-zekiel, but had trouble with support and the product wasn’t easy to use. We couldn’t put a lot of info on our site and our content was always outdated.”
Young decided that he would attend the 2003 ACS Annual Convention in order to get more training on ACS software that he currently used as well as find out what Web site services were being offered through the company. Since he had experienced success in his church through using ACS for managing membership, contributions, visitations, volunteer management, and church growth, he felt comfortable working with ACS and was pleased with the company’s support services.
“When I came to the 2003 ACS National Convention, I went to seminar on Extend. It was so interesting that I went to two more seminars on Extend. After sharing the information with our Senior Pastor, we made the decision to make the change to Extend,” Young states.
Speedy Success. The convention was in May. By September, Green Valley was ready to make the change to Extend. The church staff readied themselves for a heavier workload—they understood that getting the new Web site up-and-running would take additional time, but they knew that the results would be worth it.
“We changed over our site in September. After three weeks of intense work, we had it up and running,” said Young. “We ran dual sites for a few weeks, then brought in Brandon Steiger from the Web Services group for extensive one-day training.”
Green Valley understands the need for personalized training and greatly values the support services that ACS offers. By utilizing one day intensive training, the church was able to complete their Web site within a very short time period and go live within a month.
Innovative Technologies. The church is even implementing new technologies on their site such as IPIX imaging so that visitors can take a 360 degree tour of the outside of the church, the playground, worship center, foyer, library, fireside room, gym, youth room, kids church, Sunday school, preschool, and nursery rooms. This way visitors can get a clear idea of what the church facilities and programs are like before they ever step foot on the church grounds.
Because Extend is Web-based and allows anyone anywhere to access and edit the site from any internet connection, Green Valley has been able to encourage new members to get involved and help out with the Web site project.
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“We’ve been able to involve a lot of volunteers that haven’t been able to get involved before—they can work from home; can keep their part of their ministry pages updated themselves—allows us to get a lot more information out there that what we had before.”
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- Joel Young, Church Administrator
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Green Valley has 14 people that regularly upload content to the site and another 10 people that contribute from time to time. Having this many volunteers contribute yet not experiencing the headaches that go along with having that many volunteers on one program is somewhat remarkable for the church.
“We utilize workflow within Extend; everything is funneled through our Web coordinator,” Young adds. “We started by assigning very few rights and increased as their skill level increased. This gave us the ability to have people who are more technology savvy as well as those who aren’t as skilled contribute to the site with ease.”
Overall, Green Valley has experienced great success through its new Web site. The church is now able to post the weekly bulletin online and provide updated information to those who miss a service or are traveling and want to keep up with church events. They are also able to share prayer needs more effectively and reach out to their congregation in Birmingham and extend their ministry worldwide.
Green Valley values the support they have received from ACS and is thankful for the new freedom they have through their new Web site.
“We’ve been able to get support turnaround very quickly—we’ve been very pleased. Email support is great. The initial period of phone support was very helpful,” comments Young.
About Green Valley Baptist Church
Founded in 1965, Green Valley currently has over 2,200 members and focuses on teaching people how to grow in their walk with Christ through discipleship. The church offers many different events and ministry programs to help mature believers as well as new believers in Christ. Green Valley also offers a church weekday education program for children six months old to five years old. Green Valley offers a wide variety of classes for children and adults as well as missions and outreach programs to the community.
ACS Technologies Products & Services Used
People Suite: People, Contributions, Attendance, Connections, Special Mailings, Reservations
Growth Suite: Mail Modules, Church Growth Tools, Volunteer Manager, Report Designer
Web Suite: Extend Professional
Service Suite: ACS Network/Multiuser Module
Web Site
http://www.gvbc.org
