Ellel

Wonderful met Ellel Ministries at a time of pivotal change. After 36 years of global impact they wanted to widen their reach, engage a younger audience, while providing an immersive spiritual journey that was accessible virtually and through their physical events.

Unlocking Potential for Ellel Ministries
Although Ellel Ministries had established incredible global growth, their operations and systems had not kept pace, resulting in fragmented data sets, manual processes, printed spreadsheets and no clear picture between the various platforms and locations. With subscriptions, fundraising, product sales, bookings and courses all managed in this way the opportunity to improve efficiency and generate greater income was clear.

Along with the commercial opportunity was the opportunity to provide long term, well connected digital journeys. Despite the growing impact of the ministry, there was little connection between services and further engagement was not being nurtured into a journey that could be seen over time. Turning individual interactions, resources, training and events into a digital customer journey is a challenge that many organisations are facing to show long term value and engage loyal users.

The opportunity was clear from the start, to not only transform the digital customer experience, but the entire Ellel operation through one easy to use system that answers this modern challenge.

Workshop insights
The Wonderful project began with a workshop at Ellel Grange in Lancashire, where the team observed and studied the organisation’s operations. This helped them identify bottlenecks, manual tasks, and challenges faced by the team. The next step involved conducting calls with stakeholders from various markets worldwide, including Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. Through these conversations, the team gained a clear understanding of the operational needs of Ellel’s different teams. Their proposed solutions included a central dashboard for easy event and course setup, seamless communication with delegates via email, user management, donation and subscription management, inventory and delivery management for the online shop, and the ability to add new content such as news and information.
Redefining the Customer Experience
Ellel’s old site was disjointed, confusing and overwhelming. It certainly did not represent Ellel’s calming and empowering culture. To fully understand the customer journey we had to strip back the noise to distinguish the core levels of navigation. Through extensive UX and UI mapping sessions, we defined the user's persona, navigation for an international audience, e-commerce functionality, and bespoke CRM to capture the user's data.

Now our challenge was to develop a customer experience that was personal and informative, so we divided the customer experience into two core areas.

1. AN INTERNATIONAL WEBSITE ACCESSIBLE BY ALL USERS
The main interface would provide the generic information about Ellel Ministries by region, including; available courses, retreats, free resources, online shop and donation functionality for one-off and regular giving.

2. PERSONAL PORTAL 'MY ELLEL'
When developing the customer’s digital experience, it was important to remember the users of the site are seeking a very spiritual and personal transformation, involving deep healing, restoration and freedom.

The solution was to create a customer portal, called ‘My Ellel’, where the user can book courses, events, purchase products, make donations and enjoy personalised recommendations on courses and resources based on their historic data.

The personal portal also provides a subscription to the ‘Journey of Freedom’, a course of daily readings split over 52 weeks. The programme can be paused at any time, and users can add personal notes and bookmarks for their favourite readings.
Delivering impressive results
This all-new immersive and personal customer experience appeals to users of all ages, giving them the opportunity to explore relevant guidance via a virtual platform and access to physical events easily.

For Ellel, the central CRM system allows the operations teams to personalise the content each user receives through a simple filtering criteria.  Through this digital transformation, the complexity of Ellel’s entire operation has certainly been removed and replaced with a Wonderfully simple solution that is already delivering impressive results.