Put a Help Finder on Your Own Church Website

Most church websites have a page called something like Community Care. It lists a phone number, an email address, and office hours.

That page is doing one job: telling someone in trouble to come back on Tuesday.

What could be there instead

A “Need help?” button. A visitor taps it, describes what is going on in their own words, and gets back a short list of local providers that fit — with hours, whether each is open right now, and a phone number they can tap.

No account. No login. No call to your office. It works at 11pm on a Saturday, which is when a person deciding whether to ask for help is most likely to be looking.

It sits on your domain, under your church’s name. It is not a redirect to a vendor’s site, and it does not look like one.

You can see a working version of this on a realistic church site at cminlink.org/demo-church-assistance.html.

Why this is the interesting feature

Every other part of a benevolence system makes your staff faster at something they already do. This one changes who the church can reach.

There is a group of people your office never hears from, and it is not small. People who work during your office hours. People who will not make a cold phone call to a church. People who asked once before and it did not go well. People who are not sure they are “the kind of person” who asks a church for anything.

A phone number reaches none of them. A page on your own site that answers the question without requiring them to identify themselves reaches quite a few.

The two levels

Level one: answers only. The widget helps the visitor find local providers. Nothing is submitted, nobody is emailed, and the church does not learn who visited. It is a public service your church is quietly providing, and it costs your staff nothing.

Most churches should start here.

Level two: requests. Turn on the request form and a visitor can ask the church to get involved. They pick the providers they are interested in, give their contact details, and agree to your church’s own consent wording. The request lands in your referral list, your nominated people are emailed, and the visitor gets a reference code.

Level two is a commitment. A request that nobody answers is worse than a page with a phone number on it. The dashboard has a web requests needing follow-up card and a badge on Referrals specifically so that does not happen quietly.

What it takes to set up

A one-line snippet pasted into your site. The widget is available on the Engage and Outreach plans.

Three things are worth knowing before you plan around it:

• Keys are per-origin. An embed key works on the site it was issued for. Creating, editing or revoking one is recorded.
• The request form is gated on anti-spam setup. It stays hidden until the Cloudflare check is configured for your site. A church that switches it on and sees nothing is waiting on that, not looking at a bug.
• It loads no third-party fonts. Every anonymous visitor to the widget used to pull a font from Google. It now uses the visitor’s own system font instead, so a person looking for help on a church website is not announced to anyone else.

The thing to sit with

Your church has spent years building local knowledge about who actually helps with what in your county. Right now that knowledge is available to anyone willing to call during office hours and ask for the right person.

This is what it looks like to put it on the front step instead.

Related

• Can People Request Help Without Calling the Church Office?
• How Do Churches Find Local Community Services?