Recently, we interviewed valued customer, Darla Teslow, the facility
coordinator at
Westwood Community Church in Excelsior, Minnesota, to find out
how her church is using EventU’s online calendar features for outreach.
Darla was able to candidly answer a few questions to help shed light
on how her church views technology as a great means to reach out
to one’s community and beyond.
How do you view technology as a tool to assist Westwood
with outreach, to the church community, and beyond?
More and more we realize that technology is a valuable resource
to our congregation with their over busy lives. We realize that
our website is now the new front door of our church. People will
go there for information before they come here. Linking maps, podcasts,
and online registrations are a great way to assist people who have
never been to our church and is a wonderful convenience to congregants
who may not make it here every Sunday for services.
Does Westwood use the online calendar as a means of outreach
to the community?
We have opened our facility to a number of outside ministries including
AA groups, a Hispanic congregation, and community Bible Study Groups.
The EventU calendar allows them to conveniently see their event
information as well as updates such as weather cancellations. This
helps us reach out to the community in ways that we weren’t able
to before using this type of technology.
Can you share a few tangible examples of people in the community
that have been affected by your online outreach?
Sure. Our congregation regularly reaches out to their friends, co-workers,
neighbors, and relatives and invites them to worship services and
special events at Westwood, which is wonderful. In addition to print
invitations, they use their website, e-newsletters, and the EventU
calendar to extend the invitations. Many have expressed their appreciation
at the convenience of these technologies. Last Christmas a woman
came to a Holiday dessert as a result of receiving an invitation
and found Christ as her Savior! Online tickets and registrations
help prevent lines on Sundays, and are a great convenience to those
who live some distance away or don't regularly attend our church.
The calendar page and our special events pages are the most visited
pages of our website, indicating how helpful this information is.
What are some of your favorite EventU features?
I love how clean the calendar looks. I like the fact that we can
customize the look so that it looks like our website. I like the
flexibility of the registration process so that it can accommodate
simple events and complicated ones.
Is the online calendar feature within EventU easy to
use?
After four years of being a ServiceU client, I can say that the
online calendar—as well as other features within EventU—is easy-to-use
and keep-up-to date.