The National Association for Lay Ministry (NALM) is dedicated to providing vision, voice, leadership, and advocacy for lay ministers and for the development of lay ministry in the Catholic Church. 2016 marks the celebration of the organization’s 40th anniversary and the members of its Board of Directors felt that that timing was right to launch NALM’s online communications initiatives in new directions.

Perisphere had worked with NALM previously on two additional separate websites related to their initiatives – a website dedicated to lay ministers’ stories and information called “Co-Workers in the Vineyard” and results of a decade-long study of changing trends in U.S. Catholic ministry on the website Emerging Models of Pastoral Leadership. However, for the 40th anniversary, NALM indicated to us that the time had come to also re-constitute and re-organize the main NALM website, while also evaluating opportunities to transition other third-party membership services. Having worked closely with NALM previously and started preliminary discussions of these website needs in advance, we were able to efficiently provide their team with a proposal for a streamlined design and development of a new site with targeted content migration to launch during the organization’s 40th anniversary annual conference which also worked with their budget.

Over the course of two months, we worked closely with the NALM team to build a new website that met their design and functionality needs and assisted with content migration, while also adjusting their third-party website and membership database setup to work with the new website.  We built out a website that is focused around ease-of-use and editing needs for end users, while providing a revamped and streamlined information architecture which allows visitors to readily find key resources and information such as conference registrations and recent newsletters. During launch we ensured that users of the old website could access needed information while transitioning that third-party service’s website to a more streamlined presentation which emphasized member services, and we provided quick link access to move back and forth between both websites as easily as possible, while also doing all we could to match branding and presentation of the the third-party site to the new NALM website.

This version of the NALM website was archived in early 2019.