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Learn moreAll churches are struggling with declining membership; one strategy to address this is digitalization. The relaunch of the EKKW’s website is an important step toward remaining relevant, especially to young people.
The EKKW approached us about the relaunch, and our concept won them over; we went live with a new TYPO3-based website right on schedule for Easter 2024.
Learn more about this project and why workshops and the conceptual phase are so important for projects like this in this case study.
The Evangelical Church of Kurhessen-Waldeck (EKKW) is one of the largest regional churches in Germany and is divided into three main regions, known as “Sprengel.” These are Hanau-Hersfeld, Kassel, and Marburg. The provosts are appointed to support the bishop in her office and to lead the Sprengel, in consultation with the bishop, through pastoral counsel, guidance, and assistance.
The deaneries are in turn divided into a total of 14 church districts, which are led by deans. The respective parishes, which are led by parish councils, are located within the church districts.
In the fall of 2022, the EKKW approached us with a request to prepare a proposal for the relaunch of its website, www.ekkw.de.
The key challenges of the project were to develop a new communication strategy, upgrade the technical foundation and infrastructure, and successfully migrate all data and content.
The EKKW’s media division had already drawn up a list of requirements and had thus given the relaunch some thought in advance.
The previous proprietary “Open Text” system was to be replaced with TYPO3, and the entire website was to be given a modern design. A content guide had also already been created and was provided to us along with the requirements.
After reviewing the requirements, it quickly became clear to us that the EKKW had chosen TYPO3 as the right CMS. This was especially true since the permissions model—which involves various departments within the church—would be a key element of the project.
One of the most significant challenges in this project is to leverage the groundwork that has already been laid and translate it into a modern design system with a suitable information architecture.
As with all churches, declining membership is a central issue. Remaining relevant to young people while not losing existing members is a complex balancing act.
Reaching people on the new website with the right design and content—and enabling them to quickly find the right articles—is another challenge in this project.
Workshops are always an important part of our project work, especially at the start of a project. Together with our partner for design, UI, and UX—the agency made in —we have been standardizing our workshops extensively for years and tailoring them to our clients’ needs.
In the case of EKKW, it quickly became clear to us that, in addition to our standard kick-off meeting, dedicated workshops on navigation, page structure, and information architecture were necessary to meaningfully further develop the content guidelines that had already been created.
This initial concept phase is crucial for facilitating further development. It’s important to us that, in this process, both designers and developers work together with the client from the very beginning. The interplay between content and structured data requires close coordination, for example, when articles need to be delivered to the right target audiences.
The fact that we at made in and punkt.de understand faith and the church helped us greatly in making rapid progress during the conceptual phase with our contacts on the client side.
The EKKW had already established the framework for the technical implementation of the relaunch, and we were able to align with those technical decisions.
TYPO3, a future-proof CMS that offers everything needed for simple access control, SEO, and responsive optimization—and is license-free—has been used by us in many projects for over 20 years.
We also integrated Cleverreach for newsletters and Matomo for web analytics. These are applications that we use in many of our projects as well. Of course, we were also able to handle the hosting and operation requested by EKKW using our proServers.
From this perspective, the project was less of a technical challenge and more about implementing the information architecture for the individual service areas.
Another key part of the implementation was the search function, which was designed not only to deliver high-performance, well-structured results but also to allow the EKKW to specify keywords in advance. The end result was a Solr-based search with weighting and keyword assignment.
As in many projects, the migration of data and content played a major role in the EKKW relaunch. For example, old articles and the “Lektorenpredigten” were to be transferred.
The lay preacher sermons are available as a service on the new EKKW website and can be used by members as templates for worship services. Members can download the lay preacher sermons after logging in; older sermons are freely available. We also incorporated the daily devotional and events into the new site as features.
After we began the design and development phase in August 2023, the new website went live on March 26, 2024, just in time for Easter. Of course, our collaboration with EKKW doesn’t end with the launch. Here, too, we continued to follow the “continuous relaunch” approach, in which adjustments are made incrementally.
In addition to further development, it’s naturally important to us to get the client’s editors on board, so we conducted both an in-person and a remote workshop to explain how to work with the Backend to the approximately 80 editors in the service departments. Even though the editors have only very limited permissions for their respective areas, an introduction to the new system is, of course, essential.
Even beyond the scope of this project, we continue to collaborate with the EKKW in various workshops—for example, in the field of adult education—and are shaping the future together.
