Partner Spotlight: Compassion By Design Website Launch is January 1st
In 2006, Compassion By Design was brought into existence to equip church leaders with the best tools to lead their congregations deeper into ministries of compassion. “As modern American Christians we tend to see the mission field as primarily international, while our unsaved neighbors are desperate for the love of Christ,” said David Mills, founder, Compassion by Design.
To bridge that gap on a practical level Compassion By Design offers a Needs Assessment Kit which allows leaders to connect their community’s needs with their congregation’s gifts and abilities. Founder David Mills summed up the purpose of Compassion By Design: “Helping ministries find effective ways to serve their communities.”
Another Compassion By Design service began as a way to meet a need in the faith community. Mills saw a lack of government and grant aids being secured by churches and faith-based nonprofits. His response was to use his personal grant writing expertise to pass along the skills to others in conferences and training sessions.
How Nonprofit Expressions is Using Technology to Help
Nonprofit Expressions was able to take Mills’ ideas and vision and incorporate them into the Compassion By Design website. The site needed to have a crisp, attractive feel that quickly directs visitors to the right information. The initial marketing strategy of the site is opt-in email campaigns. Mills also blogs regularly which Nonprofit Expressions made available through Wordpress.
The next step in effectively marketing Compassion By Design was the addition of e-commerce, using the OS Commerce Solutions package (an open source application available online). Podcasting software is installed and are coming soon! The website design is easily read by search engine spiders because everything, down to the tabs at the top, is CSS based. The site is coded in XHTML 1.0 transitional and CSS 1.0. The site is also Secure Socket Layer capable for secure credit card transactions.
The New Concept
Currently, the entire website is in a state of transition as we are implementing AJAX type technologies to give the site a Web 2.0 interface and a highly user friendly information structure. When we re-envisioned website we wanted to take the process a church leader goes through in the Compassion by Design system and make it very easy to understand.
Our most important goal in the process was to make sure a new visitor and potential client can understand the grander scheme of why Compassion By Design’s system is a new, smart way to both plant churches and increase an existing churches impact in the community. We want the new site to have the “fresh” and “polished” look essential to the web 2.0 transition the web is making. Behind this new look is a new array of technologies that will make diverse information easier to connect and digest, while giving the visitor an experience that looks and feels very simple.
The site has many surprises in store for the new year on the site re-launch date of January 1, 2008. The new feature list will include a collaborative community network enabling teams to work in unison via file and document sharing, communication tools, and members only restricted areas all tying into the existing email marketing and ecommerce software. We are proud to be helping Compassion By Design bridge the web 2.0 gap and step into the forefront of the web revolution in information sharing and ownership.
Look for the new and improved Compassion by Design Website and Internet community on January 1st at: www.compassionbydesign.org
