Seacoast Church has over a dozen physical campuses in the South and North Carolina regions as well as a robust online presence. It has experienced phenomenal growth, opening two new campuses this year. 

The only problem? The church’s website couldn’t keep up with the ministry’s sprawling, intensifying digital needs. Apollos helped organize, focus, and carry a new website project through to completion with incredible feedback from front and end-users alike.

The Client: Meet Seacoast Church

Seacoast Church has been around for nearly four decades. Founded in 1988, its vision was and continues to be providing a more accessible and engaging church experience to unchurched or dechurched people. 

Their mission is to help people find God, grow in their faith, discover their purpose, and make a difference.

Over 37 years, that vision has grown with the church to include over a dozen physical campuses throughout the Carolinas. It has also turned into a vibrant and bustling online community centered on the multi-campus organization’s website. 

The Challenge: An Outdated and Clunky Website

One of the growing pains of a successful 21st-century ministry was scaling the website to meet the needs of Seacoast’s vibrant community. As the church grew and spread out, the old site became a sticking point. It was perfect for the church’s needs once upon a time. 

Now, it had become clunky with disorganized, dated, or non-relevant content. It wasn’t succeeding at the things it needed to do well and was in desperate need of a rebuild. This needed to address a few key pain points:

• Provide a cleaner structure that could service multiple campuses.

• Streamline the site’s utility and increase its value for users.

• Create a more enjoyable and desirable user experience.

Hoey’s supervisor, Margaret Little, connected with Apollos to find a solution.

The Apollos Answer: Efficient Processes and Clear Vision

When Apollos was brought on to help with Seacoast Church’s website, our team immediately saw the importance of the project. The complexities of purpose and function meant the project would need more than your average website. It required deep insights and understanding of the organization as well as a confident but empathetic collaborative approach to shepherd the project through to completion.

We started with what mattered most: the Seacoast Church team. It’s difficult to build something on this scale and with this amount of nuance if all you have to go on is a mission statement and some online photos. The Apollos team dug in deep. We wanted to connect with the Seacoast staff and took the time to make sure we understood what mattered most to them as an organization.

From there, we worked with Jack Hoey to figure out who should be involved in the process. Multisite churches can easily have dozens of figures in top leadership, and that doesn’t even consider all of the other staff members and volunteers who could contribute. The problem isn’t a lack of vision or opinions. It’s figuring out what voices should be in the room to make clear, effective decisions.

Once we identified the internal Seacoast team members who should be involved, we began building out a new site using Webflow (rather than WordPress, as was the case with the previous site). 

Throughout this process, we maintained clear communication. Apollos’ team had a dedicated point of contact who worked to establish a process that included fast responses and thorough sharing of information. This kept everyone in the loop as we went along.

The Result: An Incredible Experience and an Amplified Digital Ministry

The result of this thorough and thoughtful collaboration was a new website created with targeted intention. 

For end-users (i.e., members of the church and its surrounding community), the new site was simple, clean, and easy to use. It had clear calls to action and helped people take the next step in their faith journey, whether they were planning their first visit or longtime attenders checking on this year’s Christmas Eve service times.

On the back end, things were easier for internal staff, as well. The admin setup was particularly popular, as it provided easy access and an understandable dashboard to track results, pull stats, and generally watch over the new site as it hummed along.

Just as important as the end product was the feedback we got from the Seacoast team. Hoey reported that there was universally positive feedback. On the one side, attendees liked visiting the new site. 

The Apollos process was exactly what we needed to create. The time they took to get to know our team and to appreciate and encourage us was also important, and had a distinct positive impact on the project. — Jack Hoey III, Director of Creative at Seacoast Church

Seacoast Church’s website continues to serve the ministry, amplifying its mission across the digital world. The internal team is set up with a tool that genuinely enhances their efforts, too, and the staff is even in the midst of a giant visual overhaul using new imagery and photos from every campus. 

If more complex digital ministry needs arise in the future, they are ready to work with Apollos again, and we look forward to helping them however we can.