Your church is only as strong as its ability to serve the people who are a part of it. As a pastor or leader in your church, you understand that. And we at Digital Church will only be as strong as our ability to serve you. So we set out on a major task recently, and that was to fully custom design a support website where you can find all the help you need to build a website or app that will propel your church into digital ministry.
Instead of just copying what others have done, we took a holistic look at several different out-of-the-box support solutions. We found some things we loved about many of them, but none of these solutions could do everything we have in mind. Let’s pull back the curtain and tell you what all we have planned for this new support experience.
Chat is not going anywhere
First off, we believe that live chat is the very best way to connect with our clients and help them figure out how to do what they want to achieve. We have discussions almost every day that move our platform forward as we hear from those of you on the frontlines. You are out there pushing forward, finding new ways to do ministry and new ways to serve your people and fulfill your calling. We have zero interest in leveraging this new support area in order to move further away from those conversations. So please, continue to feel free to reach out to us via chat at any time. We don’t have a 24/7 team available, but we’ll do our very best to respond quickly as often as possible.
Documentation
We’ve imported our most important documentation articles over from our old documentation website, but we still have a lot of work to do in this area. We’ll keep writing new help articles every week. You can help us improve our documentation by hitting us up via chat and asking any questions you don’t find answers for in the documentation. We’re going to do our very best to answer every single question in an article so you’re never stuck waiting for us. But like I said, always feel free to chat with us. That’s why we are here.
Discussion Forums
This part of our support site will likely feel like more of an experiment for a while. We have a vision for the discussion forums to be a place where church leaders and thinkers could congregate and share ideas for digital ministry… a place where we collectively push forward what digital Church looks like… where we help shape the future of the Church. Who knows if this really takes off, but we’re going to just leave it here and see what happens. This won’t be a place for support, although we may also develop a private support ticket area for items that take more than a quick chat to resolve. We’ll see 🙂
Status
Uptime monitoring is one of our highest priorities at Digital Church. Our websites rely on servers with complex architectures. They leverage APIs between multiple, world-class services to manage your SSL Certificates, domain mapping, and user accounts. When all these things work together, it takes complexity away from the users and places it in the hands of technology. Luckily, they work really well the vast majority of the time. But sometimes, they don’t. So we monitor these services every 30 seconds to make sure they are up and running. If they go down, we’ll be on the job getting your site back up and running as quickly as possible. We just launched a brand new status page with a new third-party service that is more advanced than what we had been using before. We suggest that you bookmark this page separately so if your site is acting up, you can check our status page to make sure our monitors have caught it. If they have, you can rest assured that we’ve been alerted and are working to fixing it.
Roadmap
We have a very small team developing Digital Church. At the time of this writing, we have one full-time employee. That’s me. We’re talking with our very first part-time hire who should begin later this week. That said, we have a lot of work to accomplish in order to bring to market all the features we have planned. You can check our roadmap to see what we have in mind and get a rough idea of where we are on features you want. You can also vote for features to help us know how to prioritize them.
Feature Requests
Along with voting for features already on our roadmap, you can also request new features. We want to know what you want to be able to accomplish with everything related to digital ministry. We want to serve you any way we can. So take a moment to request a new feature on our feature requests page.
If you have a moment, let us know how you like the new support page by commenting on this post or reaching out to us on chat!