Reverend Billy Gets the Flock Involved Online

Challenge

While their main venue is the street and the square, the church wanted to leverage the power of the internet to get the message out, organize and put people in touch with others struggling with consumption.

Volunteer content managers had a problem updating the content quickly and conveying the highly visual and aural aspect of the church over the web.  While their existing site had some utilities that allowed them to easily post events and announcements, it was difficult to post multi-media and Revbilly.com didn't have any features typical of community websites beyond a blog.

Revbilly.com also wanted to do a better of job of relating their actions to their mission and campaigns.

Solution

We implemented Drupal 6 with a wonderfully phantasmagoric theme created by church member, Shanti Durkee.

• Home Page – Featured content in a dynamic content slideshow, touts of important messages and the most recent blog post by Reverend Billy.
• Blog – Reverned Billy's online pulpit – The Billy Pulpit – is available to him at any time.  As soon as he saves his blog post, it is available on the site and aggregated to various websites.
• Events – Actions and masses are how the church gets the word out.  A listing of their events includes a map and pinpoint marking the spot.
• Campaigns – Blog posts, events, press coverage and resources can be assocated to one of the church's stated compaigns.  Viewing a campaign page will give all of the relevant content right there.
• Forum – Church members congregate to discuss their consumer sins, current events and plans for future actions.
• Media – Whether it be a simple press release, news article covering the church, episode of the last televangelist, hour of power, or a song from the choir, all of the media is easy to post and get to.
• Monitoring – Keeping up on the activities of the website community can be challenging.  Special views have been setup to display new content to editors and high traffic alerts are sent out to admins to be sure that someone is monitoring website performance and getting an idea of the content that is getting the attention.

Notable Drupal Modules

• CCK – We rely heavily on CCK, especially FileField, ImageField and Embedded Media Field. 
• Views – Views builds our lists, our featured content slideshow, our RSS feeds
• Insert Views – A very simple input filter that allows me to insert Views right into a page.  Abosultely necessary when an editor wants to edit the text at the top of the list.  This came in very handy on the campaign pages.
• Imagecache – Editors don't have to worry about resizing images for a specific layout.  Imagecache profiles do the scaling and cropping.
• FCKeditor
• Location / GMAP
• Comment Notify
• Subscriptions

About the Organization

Reverend Billy and the Life After Shopping Gospel Choir believe that Consumerism is overwhelming our lives. The corporations want us to have experiences only through their products.

The Church of Life After Shopping is project of The Immediate Life, a New York based arts organization using theater, humor, and grassroots organizing to advance individuals and communities towards a more equitable future - starting today. The church partners with citizens, grassroots organizations and progressive visionaries to produce dynamic, informed public campaigns that enact their core values - participatory democracy, ecological sustainability, and the preservation of vibrant communities and local economies.