Awana

Awana is a world-wide nonprofit ministry focused on providing Bible-based evangelism and discipleship solutions for ages 2-18. As the global leader in child and youth discipleship, Awana gives children the opportunity to know, love and serve Jesus, no matter their background.

The global Awana staff serves in over 120 countries, empowering local leaders in churches and communities worldwide. Whether shaping curriculum at our US headquarters, connecting with partners in the field or serving churches internationally, the Awana staff embodies one mission – to equip leaders to reach kids with the Gospel and discipleship.

The Challenge

Awana serves over 62,000 churches across the globe, and when they approached me they were in desperate need of a better content strategy and ecommerce system. Since their primary revenue stream was selling physical resources to these 62,000 churches, they needed a solid Ecommerce system to better manage this.

My challenge was to redesign the website, move to a better ecommerce system and setup Awana for the future.

My Solution

I proposed moving Awana.org to a WordPress multisite environment while using a custom developed WooCommerce system inside WordPress. This would allow the internal Awana team to add products, add content, and easily manage their digital library all from one central location.

Since they were on a different CMS, the hardest part of the project was migrating their massive product catalog into the new ecommerce system. I ended up writing my own importer to scrape through their catalog and add the products into the new system automatically. Then we manually looked at each product and adjusted anything that we needed to.

I created a custom WordPress theme that loads fast, and looks beautiful, creating a premium brand that has allowed Awana to stay at the forefront of the Biblical Resource ministry space for the foreseeable future.