Customer stories
Bridgeway Community Church
Launching a digital community experience for the future
Challenge
Building bridges and unifying people is at the heart of the mission for Bridgeway Community Church (BCC) – one of the largest non-denominational fellowships in the community of Columbia, Maryland. Ranked as one of the Best Christian Workplaces of 2017, Bridgeway was experiencing rapid growth across the board. Communicating with their parishioners was increasingly more important, and having a central platform for sharing their message was critical. They also wanted to reflect the multicultural dynamics of their congregation in every single element of their brand
To reach more people with their message of hope, BCC knew that it needed a modern website that supported their mission. They wanted their new web experience to be the online embodiment of open church doors and welcoming faces, a resource for local residents to feel loved, accepted and safe. But Columbia was only part of their service story. Even with 2,000 weekly attendees at their facility, BCC sought a next-level platform that reached beyond the walls of their church and connected with thousands of other loyal worshippers around the country – providing secure access to online giving platforms while enabling real-time video streaming of their services. They also wanted a website that helped manage, automate and schedule their content without the complexity of code.
Solution
To meet these challenges, Bridgeway Community Church (BCC) turned to Solodev to deliver a comprehensive approach – from design through development. Solodev understood BCC’s emphasis on community, and set out to craft customizable experiences that made it easy for BCC to connect and manage its relationships through the website. BCC wanted a platform to showcase the powerful stories of its congregation; to that end, Solodev created a dynamic testimonials section called the “Story Room” to give members the opportunity to share their experiences with BCC’s diverse congregation and the world. BCC also needed an effective way to promote their services and deliver the right message to the right person – especially at a time when they needed it most. In order to support that mission, Solodev built a custom landing page manager that empowered the Bridgeway team to become completely self-sufficient. Rather than paying a third-party vendor to build these assets, BCC could build custom marketing campaigns and convert leads on their own landing pages, quickly and easily.
For any church, fundraising is a critical requirement for the continued growth and vitality of the congregation. While Sunday morning collections were a staple, BCC wanted a safe and reliable platform to facilitate giving at any time through their website. Solodev equipped BCC with a secure donation portal that does more than accommodate cash donations – it integrates with BCC’s Donate account, allowing community members to give alternative donations such as cars, boats, assets, gift cards and more.
BCC also sought a more uniform method for managing and delivering their library of multimedia assets. Solodev delivered a custom homepage scheduler that gives BCC full control over when and what content reaches their audience, allowing their team to schedule different background videos and images to the website. Because Bridgeway’s church members span the globe, they wanted to share their weekly televised services with a geographically diverse audience in real time. To achieve this vision, Solodev built an impressive integration with BCC’s broadcast and API services, so anyone – anywhere in the world – could tune into their live broadcast with an Internet-connected device.
Solodev also designed the new BCC website with simple, straightforward navigation, so anyone who sought out a particular resource or feature about the organization could quickly find it. Solodev also crafted an infrastructure focused on quality user experiences and a strategy for training and maintaining it – giving BCC the best framework possible to share content that everyone, regardless of age or disability.
To optimize their hosting capabilities, BCC harnessed the power of the AWS Cloud by leveraging Solodev’s expertise as an AWS Advanced Technology Partner. Solodev utilized AWS CloudFront, an extremely powerful CDN that drastically increased the delivery speed of BCC’s website, from content to imagery to videos. The church also tapped the AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), giving them the ability to quickly auto-scale capacity and serve instances of heavy, unexpected loads without worrying about a crash. BCC can rest easier with best-of-breed security provided by Solodev and AWS Shield, providing increased privacy, strong network access control and powerful firewalls built into the AWS infrastructure.
Results
Bridgeway Community Church now has a beautiful, intuitive, scalable web experience that truly reflects the spirit and mission of the congregation. Thanks to the new website’s mobile responsive design, anyone in the local community and beyond can experience their life-changing messages and resources, including expanded access to their robust multimedia and video library. BCC can tap its new modules to offer rich resources tailored to the needs of its congregation and community – empowering their team to create custom landing pages that connect seamlessly to their marketing campaigns, all without complex coding or development. Leveraging the Solodev Web Experience Platform and the power of the AWS Cloud, BCC also has the confidence to swiftly scale as their congregation grows. With a powerful new platform as their foundation, BCC has widened its reach – and opened its arms far beyond its church walls.