As you better understand how your audience interacts with your online presence, you’ll be able to smooth their paths to engagement…and ultimately get them to embrace your mission. As such, it’s time to think beyond the isolated steps users take on your site—like purchasing a book, donating to your organization, or signing up for a devotional series.
Of course these steps are each critical, but they’re single steps a user takes in the midst of a longer journey. Considering the user journey holistically is therefore the only way to uncover opportunities to meet users where they are and communicate your mission more effectively.
That’s where journey mapping comes in. While journey maps are a tool nearly every industry employs, there are unique considerations—and benefits—to journey maps for ministries. Let’s explore.
What Is a Journey Map?
A journey map describes the steps users take as they interact with your ministry’s services and/or products—from the first touch to the call to action and (hopefully) beyond.
Journey maps also chart users’ emotions or feelings while completing each step on their journeys. Are they enthusiastic as they’re reading your “About Us” page, learning about your mission? Are they frustrated as they wait for their book order to process, wishing you had integrated a payment app with your website? Noting trends in these emotions can tell you so much about your ministry’s user experience (UX). More on that below.
What does a journey map actually look like? Typically, the user’s interactions are documented in chronological order on a line graph, and the emotions appear as a sine wave overlaying the steps.
How Agathon Approaches Journey Mapping
In Agathon’s process, journey mapping occurs during the Discovery phase of an engagement, when we’re getting the right stakeholders in the room to solidify what needs to happen to accomplish your project and conducting foundational work.
Specifically, journey mapping happens after we’ve finalized your ministry’s personas—profiles describing specific, like-minded groups within your target audience. Why? After personas, journey maps are the next logical process point for understanding your users. We use your personas to imagine users’ paths.
Say we decide during persona development that Ruth is an archetype for a stay-at-home mother interested in Christian-based volunteer opportunities. We’ll then use her characteristics to surmise what her journey looks like and map it.
The Benefits of Journey Maps for Ministries
Journey maps are worth their weight in gold because they help you grasp what your constituents are going through as they navigate your ministry’s offerings. You’re able to walk the path with them by reviewing your completed journey map, seeing user touchpoints you might otherwise overlook.
Only when you (figuratively) spend time in your users’ shoes can you spot gaps in your UX design. Then work to improve it. With a journey map in hand, you have the power to optimize your constituents’ paths. Consequently, they experience your ministry just as you need them to—so your mission comes across loud and clear.
Journey Map Considerations Unique to Ministries
As mentioned, lots of industries leverage journey maps to better their UX. But it’s especially important for ministries to create journey maps because there’s a higher probability that you’re missing something about your constituents’ experience.
Think about it this way. Your organization doesn’t have the backstop of financial incentive that corporations do. You’re not out merely to maximize profit, so you might not analyze every single user step. Or invest indiscreetly in of-the-moment UX design.
But, to be frank, it’s more vital for you to get your mission across than it is for businesses to make money. So it’s arguably more important for you to get your user experience right. To meet your users where they are. To do that, you must start with journey mapping.
Get Started on Your Ministry’s Journey Map
Agathon works with ministries, so we’re well-versed in the importance and nuance of completing journey maps just for organizations like yours. We’d be honored to help you spread the word that is your mission.