The Client
Focus on the Family began in 1977 in response to Dr. James Dobson's increasing concern for the American family. Their mission is to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in disseminating the Gospel of Jesus Christ to as many people as possible, and, specifically, to accomplish that objective by helping to preserve traditional values and the institution of the family.
Along with providing up-to-date articles and information concerning key issues in our culture, they also provide a wealth of resources available online or by contacting them directly.
There are numerous ministries incorporated within the organization, featuring a diverse offering of information, programs, projects, and outreaches. Following are just a few:
- Family Ministry
- College Student Ministry
- Church, Clergy and Medical Outreach
- Community Impact Outreach
- Business Ministry
- Government and Public Policy
- International and Cultural Ministry
- Donor Ministry
- Support Ministries
The Need Due to the number of diverse departments and the multiple audience groups (constituents) supported by the ministry, there were a number of key needs, including:
- Provide a means whereby staff of the 70+ ministries within the organization could manage their Web sites (or portions of the Focus on the Family Web site) with little or no technical skill.
- Ensure that content providers could not inadvertantly modify content they were not authorized to manage. This would entail the development of a tool that would include a security framework that would allow users to edit content only in the areas where they had authority.
- In concert with their Internet Engineering Department, provide consulting support and programming expertise necessary to meet the changing needs of the ministry organizations, based upon constituent needs and feedback.
- Development of Online Donation processing.
- Development of an Online Resource Center, allowing Web site visitors the ability to request ministry resources on a donation basis.
- Provide integration with legacy systems to enable automatic entry of orders (requests) received from the Web site(s) into the ministry's accounting and fulfillment systems.
The Solution Superlative Solutions, due to its long-term involvement with the ministry (dating back to 1992), was priviledged to work in conjunction with the various ministry teams to provide services and systems to meet the client's needs.
Content Management with Superlative's Web Site Publisher (WSP)
In 1998 Superlative Solutions created version 1.0 of the Web Site Publisher, a simplified content management system that allowed the Internet engineering team to manage the Web sites within Focus on the Family using a template and rules-based system. WSP allowed each department to manage their areas of the Web site, utilizing an easy-to-use Web-based browser interface. Content could be scheduled for publication at a future date as well as allowing an editor to define when an article should be removed from the site.
Since the system was "rules-based", content would be delivered utilizing a rudimentary programming language that would automatically update various pages based upon programmer-defined criteria.
As a result of the implementation of WSP, content creation time was typically reduced from 1 hour to 15 minutes, representing a 75% savings in the editorial costs to support the web sites.
Over the years,the WSP software has been upgraded to meet the changing needs of this diverse organization. Since much of the content for the Web sites is now stored in a Stellent document repository, Superlative Solutions created the capabilities to interface WSP to Stellent, allowing online editors to retrieve content from the Stellent system directly into WSP through abstracted CMS drivers. This capability contributes positively to the ministry by allowing them to store ministry information in Stellent while publishing it to the Web in a user-friendly format.
Superlative Solutions continues to work with Focus on the Family seeking to strengthen their ministry outreach using advanced Internet technologies.
The Focus on the Family Online Resource Center (E-Commerce)
At the time Focus on the Family began to offer their numerous resources online, there was very little in the way of robust E-Commerce software available that met the requirements of a donation-based organization.
Superlative Solutions created the Web application providing a dynamic, catalog-based system allowing them to make available resources including audio/video streaming, unlimited views of resource content, and a checkout system that allowed constituents to ship resources to multiple locations in a single request.
Due to the international scope of the ministry, as well as the complexity of their "back-end" data processing systems, Superlative Solutions designed integration interfaces allowing fulfillment personnel to import orders into their accounting and fulfillment systems through an automated process. This capability has reduced errors while increasing the speed necessary for processing online orders.
The Results The best example of the results of the numerous projects can best be summed up in the words of Focus on the Family's Sr. Director of Ministry Technical Services:
"Focus on the Family has worked with Superlative Solutions for nearly eight years. Superlative built Focus' Online Resource Center, giving Focus its first e-Commerce solution for the flagship site, family.org. This solution assisted in generating millions of dollars in donations over the years. Superlative also created a Web Site Publishing tool for our Internet Online Editors, allowing them to create and post content to the sites. As you can see, Superlative Solutions has been a key factor in the success of Focus on the Family's Web presence and dynamically interfacing with our constitutents. They have been an excellent partner for us."
|
