Success Stories

The Power of Prayer

Author: Tiff Pua

Building Into the Next Generation

Planning for growth is never easy. For the community at Parkside Church in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, their growth mission was two-fold: 

1. to serve as "a launchpad for regional and global Gospel growth" and, 
2. to "foster Biblical relationships within the local church".

While Five Q couldn't help with their physical plans to expand their worship space or plant new regional campuses, we did want to assist with the web marketing for this large initiative for 2011.

Parkside Church was strategically separating the first six months of their campaign into three, 60-day increments with different focuses: Prayer, Pledging, and Thanksgiving. As the Five Q team planned for the website features and online campaign messaging, Parkside's Pastor of Communications and Connections Matt McAlvey had an idea: can we get people to be part of the prayer focus by signing up to pray online?

Now this was a challenge we were up to.

If You Build It, They Will Sign Up

The goal was simple: have people pray around-the-clock for one week. By offering half-hour time slots, participants would not feel like they were overwhelmed by their prayer commitment. By offering time throughout the day, participants could pick multiple dates and times to focus their prayer for Parkside Church. 

The technical challenges were deceptively straightforward: build an online tool that integrates with the website that allows a person to: 

1. Sign up for one or more prayer time slots
2. Receive an email confirmation of their prayer commitments
3. Allow them to easily add to or remove their commitment 

Additionally, the Matt and his staff requested that the online tool should keep administrative time to a minimum. They wanted a tool that provided the flexibility to change the dates for online prayer and time slot lengths in the back end, while participants could manage their own information on the front end.

Our team developed a "shopping cart" approach for this feature, in which participants selected their desired time slots, which where then stored in a virtual "cart" until they were ready to "check out". Participants would also be able to see at a glance which days of the week still had openings and which days were full or unavailable during a given week's span. 

Once their times were selected, participants would submit their name and email address for sign up and receive a email confirmation of their reserved times. Within the email was also a link to edit or remove the times reserved, giving participants full control over their choices and minimizing the amount of administrative intervention needed in this process.

On the website administrative back end, designated Parkside Church staff could see a participants entire record--name, email address, date(s) and time(s) reserved--from a single interface. They could also manually adjust a record as well as the overall campaign's parameters--days of the week and timeslot length--as needed.

The Power of Prayer

After launching the online prayer sign-up feature, over 110 individuals filled 239 of the 240 available prayer slots during the first available prayer week. This success can be attributed to the tool's ease of use as well as heavy promotion by the Parkside Church staff on the website, in their weekly email newsletter, in bulletins and announcements, and on the monitors within the church about this feature.

Matt and his staff were very pleased with the overall results. With the tool's flexibility, they continue to use this feature both as part of the continued 60-Days-of-Prayer focus and on other areas of the website. As part of their web marketing team, we are pleased to see how our work--and the power of prayer--continues to impact this ministry.