DURATION
3 - 6 months
MY ROLE
Strategic Designer & Engagement Facilitator
CLIENT
Wesley Methodist Church
TAGS
Stakeholder Engagement, Digital Transformation, Strategic Design, Change Management
As playing the role of UX Strategist and Service Designer, I owned multiple aspects of this transformation:
Stakeholder Engagement & Co-Creation
Orchestrated 6 co-creation workshops with 200+ participants across all ministries, fostering ownership and buy-in.
Conducted deep-dive interviews with pastoral staff and key volunteers (e.g., Missions, Children’s Ministries) to uncover complex workflows and compliance considerations.
System Architecture & User-Centric Design
Defined 4 core user archetypes and mapped 15 critical workflows (e.g., event registration, volunteer onboarding) to align technical solutions with real-world use cases.
Designed a scalable permission hierarchy balancing data security with ministry autonomy.
Insight Synthesis & Strategic Prioritisation
Consolidated and prioritised needs from 30+ ministries, translating them into a unified product roadmap.
Identified optimisation opportunities for legacy workarounds, demonstrating tangible benefits of migration (e.g., reduced duplicate data entry by 60%).
Led alignment on must-have vs. nice-to-have features and integration points (e.g., worship planning tools ↔ member database).
Through stakeholder workshops, deep-dive sessions, and brainstorming activities conducted in March 2024, the church defined success across 3 key perspectives:
Leadership & Administration:
A seamless, user-friendly platform that excites staff and volunteers.
Clear prioritisation of must-have features (e.g., simplified data capture) versus nice-to-haves.
Phased implementation (staff rollout by end of 2024, full church adoption by 2025) within budget.
Ministry Leaders:
A customisable system that meets unique ministry needs and scales with growth.
Empowerment to train volunteers, generate insights from data, and make informed decisions.
Secure ownership of relevant modules while maintaining cross-ministry visibility.
Members & Volunteers:
Intuitive self-service features (e.g., event registration, profile updates).
Transparent tracking of involvement (e.g., courses, service history).
Key Strategic Shifts
The transformation required a fundamental shift in mindset:
From data collected for compliance → to data leveraged for actionable ministry insights.
From siloed, inconsistent records → to a single source of truth for member engagement.
Through 30+ hours of stakeholder interviews, contextual inquiry, and workflow system audits, we quantified critical friction points across 4 dimensions:
Data Fragmentation
5 siloed systems (Excel, CMSs, paper forms, etc.) created conflicting "truths" about members
73% of staff time spent on manual data reconciliation
1 in 3 family records contained linkage errors (e.g., children not connected to parents), causing pastoral care gaps
Example: Children's ministry couldn’t identify at-risk kids because parent marital statuses hadn’t been updated across 4 systems.
Impact: Led to 6-month delays in pastoral care interventions
"We didn't fail to care - we failed to connect the dots." - Pastoral Ministry Coordinator
Volunteer Management Bottlenecks
Average 14 hours/week spent on manual rostering
No centralised view of volunteer skills/availability
42% of volunteers reported frustration with scheduling
Example: Live streaming volunteers missed Sunday services because schedule changes were scattered across email, Planning Center, and multiple WhatsApp groups with no automated reminders or easy shift-swapping.
Impact: This caused 4 Sundays of poor single-camera streams, a 12% drop in online engagement.
Communication Breakdowns
Parents reported missing 28% of critical ministry updates
19 parallel WhatsApp groups caused information asymmetry - 67% of leaders reported giving conflicting answers
31% of elderly members disengaged from digital communications, creating pastoral isolation
Example:
Teachers had to monitor 3 different platforms (WhatsApp groups, email, Taidii) just to get basic class information, resulting in some missed updates about allergies, schedule changes, and safety protocols.
Impact:
Emergency incidents where teachers weren’t informed about student allergies
40% of volunteers reported spending 2+ hours/week just consolidating information
Transition Challenges
62% of youth reported "falling through cracks" when moving between ministries
No systematic handoff process for pastoral care cases
Example: Graduating students didn’t receive young adult outreach because their "youth member" status auto-expired without handoff.
Impact: New mentors wasted 6 months rebuilding foundational discipleship work.
How might we create a unified management system that reduces administrative burden while deepening member engagement and volunteer satisfaction across all ministries, respecting the diverse needs of our multigenerational congregation?
Process
1. Comprehensive Stakeholder Engagement:
Engaged over 200 participants from all 20 ministries through 3 User Needs Workshops to gather diverse perspectives.
Generated artefacts:
Stakeholder and Activities Map visualising key relationships and processes.
Ideal Future System vision providing a shared target for development.
Consolidated User Insights and Opportunity Areas identifying key pain points and potential improvements.
2. Collaborative Feature Definition & Prioritisation:
Co-facilitated 3 Co-Creation Workshop to collaboratively define and prioritise system features.
Developed actionable deliverables:
User Experience Blueprints tailored to the specific needs of each ministry.
Prioritised list of features and corresponding performance metrics to guide development.
3. In-Depth User Understanding:
Conducted 2 targeted deep-dive interviews with pastoral staff and key volunteers (e.g., Missions, Children’s Ministries) to uncover nuanced workflows and critical compliance requirements.
4. User-Centered System Design:
Established a robust user-centered design foundation:
Defined 4 core user archetypes to represent distinct user needs and behaviours.
Mapped 15 critical workflows (e.g., volunteer onboarding, event registration) to optimize user journeys.
Designed a balanced permission hierarchy ensuring appropriate control and operational flexibility.
5. Strategic Roadmap Development:
Synthesised user and ministry needs gathered from over 30 ministries into a strategic roadmap for system development.
Quantified potential benefits:
- Identified significant efficiency gains, including an estimated 60% reduction in data duplication.
Achieved cross-functional alignment on key integration points and the overall feature scope.
