“Over the past few years, the ELCA had the opportunity to engage with Fair North Digital (FND) on several projects. Kevin and his team delivered the framework and vision that the ELCA team had in mind on time, as promised, and beyond satisfaction.
The team’s depth of technical knowledge in designing and developing digital platforms and UI/UX was exceptional! During these projects, FND quickly developed a solid understanding of ELCA mission and delivered value that you would only expect from partners, not vendors. This trust and partnership has allowed the ELCA to continuously leverage FND to augment the work of ELCA’s development and design teams on a regular basis.“
The ELCA is the parent body of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the USA, supporting roughly 3.8 million members across nearly 10,000 congregations. Fair North Digital has been engaged with ELCA since 2015, working primarily on their publication website livinglutheran.org, but also contributing in many other areas as well.
The ELCA was rebranding their flagship magazine, The Lutheran, but they knew they needed to reach a new, younger audience. Their in-house design team needed a partner to help them think through the strategy, UX, and then build it from their designs.
We not only devised the right strategy to engage their target audiences, we created a platform for their writers and content contributors, as well as an integrated content publishing and governance model to ensure that the content strategy is followed and the editorial team is empowered.
The new site was launched in March 2016, with features that include advanced publishing editorial workflow, contextual related story suggestions, advertising, and integrated services with third parties such as Azure and Amazon Web Services.
When developing the livinglutheran.org website, it was important to consolidate and build upon the services provided to website subscribers. We developed a personalized email digest that sends recent articles to subscribers according to their defined areas of interest and desired email frequency. Articles matching their interest are further filtered by popularity based on near real-time data from Google Analyics.
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In 2017, while planning was underway for the 2018 gathering of 31,000 youths and adults in the Lutheran community, Fair North Digital was asked to help adapt the program designs for a youthful and engaging website experience. Website layouts, loading animations, interactive timelines and program information were created for integration into the program website.
When the ELCA needed to create a website dedicated to the financial wellbeing of parishioners and congregations, they called upon Fair North Digital to design and build a site for them. Because of the nature of the site, we opted to begin with a commercial Wordpress theme and customize it to their requirements. This provided the solution with the greatest value, and delivered a website with all of the style and function that was required.
Go To WebsiteThe ELCA wanted to create a more engaging donation form within a legacy system that lends itself to very static forms. Fair North Digital was challenged to build a layer of customization over the standard form functionality that brought interactivity and a clean, simple user experience to the process. We developed a solution that was very well received, and which will be serving as a model for similar functions throughout the network of ELCA websites and programs.
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