We’re a “new” church but we aren’t so new – we have a history spanning over 30 years of meeting together and reaching out into the local community. We normally meet in four separate congregations in Maidenhead, Marlow, Slough and Englefield Green, coming together on a Sunday once every two months. The active membership is around 400 households in total.

River Church seeks to be in touch with society and the issues that confront individuals today. Our vision is to respond positively in the local community, bringing care, good news and a message of hope to everyone.

We were one of the very original Endis customers – site ID 27!  We heard about ChurchInsight through someone in the Pioneer network. I am just an ordinary church member who over time has taken on the lead responsibility for the site content – in trying to make it more useful and informative for members and visitors alike.

I’d never used a Content Management System before, but I found it easy to get to grips with. Over the years I’ve come to realise what a powerful and flexible platform ChurchInsight is.

There is no way that any central single person or team could keep up with everything, with four separate congregations, each with their own set of meetings and other activities. It’s absolutely vital for the health and usefulness of the site that many people who aren’t particularly technical can be given web office access, so that they can write and publish their own events, articles and so on. The platform continues to be developed to add new features and although I wish there some features it will probably never have, it does a great job for us.

We’re heavy users of the media features – four congregations means potentially four talks from Sunday meetings being published, never mind all the additional audio files from other meetings. We’ve been embedding slideshows and youtube clips on the site since about 2005. We started publishing Sunday meeting talks from the site on iTunes almost exactly 5 years ago.

We use the mailing features extensively, including the sending of our weekly “enews” mailshot to around 350 addresses. The ability to control visibility of all the content is vital (public view or members only).

Our communication would be much less effective without the Insight platform and the range of facilities it gives, and far more time might be spent in running a multitude of disparate alternative systems to do the same range of tasks. Most members know that if they want to find out something or someone the website is probably the best place to go.

I am particularly delighted when I hear that a new member has ended up joining us after they found the website and liked what they saw enough to come along to a meeting.