[consulting] RFP for Lake Street Church web site

[Jen Lawrence]

Hello, all--

I am the chair of the Outreach Committee at Lake Street Church in
Evanston, IL. We are seeking proposals for the development of our new
web site. I have pasted the RFP below (I tried attaching that along
with a site map, but was told my message wouldn't go through because
it was too large).

If you are interested in recieving a copy of the current site map
referenced in the RFP, please email me directly for that.

Email me with questions or simply reply to the address on the RFP.

Thank you!

Jen

About Lake Street Church

Lake Street Church is an open and inclusive congregation. Spiritual
seekers of all racial, sexual, and religious orientations are welcome.
People who attend this church come from more than a dozen religious
traditions, including Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Roman Catholic, and a
number of Protestant denominations. The diversity of our congregation
creates a stimulating, enriching community that fosters respect and
compassion.

Lake Street Church is an active community that offers a variety of
programs for all ages and interests.  Adult education includes Bible
study, meditation, spiritual development through prayer and ritual,
and conflict resolution. Art, music and Bible stories enrich all of
our children's classes, and our middle and high school students also
explore our wider community through service projects and interfaith
events.

We are a very unique church. We've been described as an "alternative
Christian church." We could be considered part of the "emerging
church" movement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerging_church.

Lake Street offers programs on topics such as meditation, mysticism,
creation stories, The Baghavad Gita, dreams, music, Spanish language,
"The Aramaic Jesus," Dances of Universal Peace, gender-based affinity
meetings and equinox celebrations.
History of Lake Street Church
Founded in 1858, Evanston, Illinois' Lake Street Church is best known
for its interfaith outreach and annual World Community Sunday, which
celebrates all faiths, as well as its active social justice committee
and program speakers as diverse as former President Jimmy Carter, the
Medium for the Tibetan State Oracle and antiwar activist Cindy
Sheehan.

Originally an ecumenical Christian-based Sunday school meeting in one
woman's home, with sewing machine as pulpit, the former First Baptist
Church of Evanston has always had women in leadership roles and
changed its name in 1995 to reflect its amazingly diverse spiritual
community, and distinctly non-traditional point of view.

A founding member of the Association of Welcoming & Affirming
Baptists, Lake Street is perhaps the only area church with an annual
Pride service.

Willing to take a stand on humanitarian  issues, the church lead an
effort in 1984 to create the first homeless shelter on the North
Shore, not originally welcomed by all, but ultimately accepted by the
community. The church building hosts the shelter, Connections for the
Homeless, founded by an alliance of local churches.

Lake Street pastor Rev. Robert Thompson's book, A Voluptuous God: A
Christian Heretic Speaks (CopperHouse 2007) embodies the spirit of the
community. As Thompson, an ordained Christian minister, explains, "A
heretic is someone who chooses.  A heretic is one who lives through
the heart, rather than according to a belief system provided to him or
her. Heretics know that the mystery of life cannot be shrink-wrapped,
the beauty of life cannot be limited to canvas, and that quest for
meaning requires taking risks and making sacrifices."

Goals of the web site

We would like our website to better reflect the active and lively
spirit of our community life. We'd like to do better storytelling with
photographs and, in general, would like the user to understand that we
are an active community. We would also like to provide a better hub of
activity for the community to access when we are not together—so we
can communicate about upcoming events and provide community support
online.

We currently have a public section and a private section of the
website (see existing site map). We will likely revise that structure
to better reflect our current needs. We want to move to a distributed
content model where individuals in leadership roles can easily update
content that pertains to their information areas (we have discussed
Drupal as a possible solution, but we are open to other suggestions).
We imagine having variable access for the following roles:

•	Staff Member, Full-Time
•	Staff Member, Part-Time
•	Deacon
•	Board Member
•	Committee Chair
•	Church Member
•	Registered User
•	Blog Author
•	Staff Member, Yoga Studio
•	Staff Member, Hilda's Place (we do not currently highlight the fact
that we house a homeless shelter in our building, but it would be nice
to help people understand that this is a part of our ministry)

The "Committee Chair" role above will have access to content regarding
one or more of the committee sections of the site. These may be
accessible only to registered site users, depending on decisions we
will make with the chosen vendor as we develop the site map. We should
note that the system should allow us the flexibility to create new
committees or change the names of the committees as the need arises.
Current list of committees includes:

Deacon Committee
Peace and Justice Committee
Wednesday Recharge Dinner
Christian Education Committee
Grounds/Gardening Committee
Interfaith Committee
Nursery Committee

We would like to create a structure within which these various users
can create and update content about events and activities going on at
church, using both text and images. It is important that our website
have the following characteristics:

•	Easy to find Information
•	Easy to Navigate
•	Clean and Professional
•	Allow for quick updates and news
•	Promote events/educational opportunities
•	Easy maintenance across a distributed content network

Our audience

Lake Street Church primary constituencies/audiences are the following:
•	Members
•	Regular Attendees (it is our policy to not be overly persuasive
regarding membership)
•	Former Members/Attendees
•	Potential Members/Attendees
•	Media

Our time line

We will begin reviewing proposals immediately. We would like to begin
work on the site by the end of May, 2008. Ideally, we would have a
completed site by the fall.

Our feature set

The included site map reflects current structure and content. We would
like to revise that approach, and we imagine the following sections.

•	Calendar of Events: This will be the central hub of the site,
pulling content from all over the site. Upcoming events and
recaps/photo galleries of past events should be prominently
positioned. The calendar should display events that many different
user types enter, but there will be a staff member role assigned to
approving each event before it displays on the site. Users from a
variety of roles should also be able to publish event recaps and photo
albums that are then approved by a staff member.
•	News section:  Ability to quickly add press releases, news items,
and/or announcements easily and have them highly visible from the main
page.
•	Sermons section: We would like to post and archive sermons in a
variety of media (text/html, mp3, video). This feature should have
some ability to archive, and provide some ability to search (by date,
pastor, etc.). We would also like to be able to feature church members
and other invited speakers who give talks at church.
•	History section: 2008 marks our 150th year of existence in the
Evanston community. We have done a lot of research, and we recently
published a book about the history of the church. We would like to
dedicate a section of the site to an online history exhibit.
•	Capacity to hold photos/large media files: While the majority of our
information is primarily reports and text, it is important to have the
ability to easily post and store pictures, logos, and audio reports.
•	Search feature: A strong search process/feature.
•	Online forms/responses:  We'd like the site to be as interactive as
possible so users can ask questions about the church, submit prayer
requests, provide mailing information, etc. We'd like to be able to
variably direct how that information comes in to the organization and
is distributed.
•	Online Donations:  We must have an easy online method for
individuals and organizations to donate to the organization. Having
capacity to do online financial transactions is also helpful for our
annual fundraisers and or/registrations for particular events at Lake
Street Church.
•	Mass e-mailing capability:  We would like the vendor to recommend a
service for mass emailing that can be linked to our web site.
•	Newsletter:  We would like to archive PDF copies of our print
newsletter, The Spire, with the thought of one day going completely
electronic.
•	Links to partner sites and resources:  Much of the work we do is in
partnership with other community and national organizations. Being
able to promote these partner organizations and allies is important to
the work we are doing.
•	Discussion Groups/Blog: We would like to discuss how to incorporate
our pastor's blog (www.avoluptuousgod.com) and possibly use blogging
as a broader mechanism for promoting online community.
•	We would like to explore some kind of social networking
functionality such that users could upload information about
themselves and find others within the LSC community. This may replace
the existing photo directory (but if we publish address information
online, there will have to be both a private and a public portion of a
user's profile).

Site map

Included is a map of the existing site, to provide a sense for current
content. This is not to be taken as a recommendation for the new site
structure, which we expect will be very different.

Reply to

Ann-Louise Haak, Associate Minister
alhaak at lakestreet.org
607 Lake Street
Evanston, IL 60201
Ph: (847) 864-2181
Fax: (847) 864-3376







-- 
::

Jen Lawrence
jen.lawrence at gmail.com