FI
The Lutheran Church in Helsinki and the use of Snoobi Analytics
The Lutheran Church in Helsinki is a customer of Snoobi and we are pleased with the opportunity to interview our main contact there: Eeva Silin.
Eeva is the Web Communications Designer at the Lutheran Church in Helsinki. She is responsible for the choices made regarding any software, publishing systems, and information architecture used by the church. With the right decisions, it is possible to achieve the goals set by the church’s leaders, parishes, and pastors.
The organization of the Lutheran Church in Helsinki is extensive, as there are 20 parishes in Helsinki, three of which are in Swedish and the rest in Finnish. In addition to the official Finnish and Swedish languages, the organization works in many other languages. The church is also an important event organizer, with 50 to 60 worship services every Sunday. In total there are hundreds of events a week.
Why Snoobi Analytics?
The Lutheran Church in Helsinki is a long-term user of Snoobi Analytics, Eeva explains the reasons for choosing Snoobi: “Snoobi analyzes the routes of visitors within a site and this is the kind of information that we use. Snoobi also has a very useful interface to retrieve this information, and it can be used to build systems where that data is used to help us predict which page a visitor may end up on. The fact that Snoobi operates in the EU is a clear advantage for us. We pay for the service instead of giving our customers’ data for free to a company to sell it on to third parties. This of course is a clear image issue for us. After all, we are not a commercial organization.”
She adds: “With Snoobi, I get to talk directly the people working there and the service is in Finnish. It is also a customer-supplier relationship in a completely different way than if I take some free software and try to request a service. Now I can also influence the development of Snoobi based on my experience.”
Analytics in a large and fragmented organization
Eeva says that Snoobi is able to find information on how visitors on the site perceive the organization, which is very fragmented and complex. With the help of the site’s analytics, Eeva has noticed, for example, that good transport connections affect which parish churches are visited more often. When it comes to the content of the site, it is important to keep track on how much event details and news stories are read. The seasons also have an impact, as the period from All Saints’ Day to Christmas and also Easter are reflected in clear increases in the statistics.
“With Snoobi, it is possible to perform complex analyzes or create extensive segments. As an example: it is interesting for us to see if any unifying factors are found in site visits. It would be hard to find these, because we do not have centralized content production” says Eeva. “We have over a hundred content producers who make content for the site. The information masses are huge and the organization is fragmented. In order to make decisions about it, you need to be able to extract the metadata afterwards. Using Snoobi we can do this.”
Experimentation and flexibility
“I think the role of analytics is ultimately to serve the core business, to help it achieve its goals. Another aspect is to bring signals from the outside world: what’s interesting right now and what seems to be attracting people? Analytics yields hard data, but you have to be able to apply it, analyse it. I would say you have to experiment with analytics; you have to do all sorts of things and see what happens.”
“As a congregation we need a flexible tool with which we can also do things retrospectively and then decide if there was something that we need to take into account. In this I have experienced Snoobi Analytics as a good tool – you can do special things with it afterwards” says Eeva.
