Dear Ascension Press

I made this for Ascension Press. Nobody asked me to. They have 1,128 products and one version of every page. Here’s what I’d do about it.

I run Giver, a marketing agency for Christian ministries. I went through ascensionpress.com from the outside, counted what’s actually there, mapped out who shows up, and built a working demo of what a personalized version would look like. Everything in this came off their public website, their sitemap and their product data. No inside information, no access. Which means I probably got some of it wrong, and I say so.

I want Ascension Press as a client. Father Mike Schmitz, if you’re watching, have your people call my people. My name is Brad and I run a marketing agency for Christian ministries called Giver. We build personalized websites and email systems that show the right message to the right person at the right time.

I believe personalization is stewardship, because it meets somebody where they are and speaks to them in their current need, and when they’re seen and heard, they support the ministry. St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 9, “To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.” Now, he’s not talking about personalized website and email journeys, but he is talking about changing how you show up and communicate the good news depending on who’s in front of you.

I love what Ascension produces, and I have for years. So I’m coming at this as someone they’ve genuinely helped form. If we worked with Ascension, here’s exactly what we’d build for them: a personalized website and email system, so that instead of 1,100 products and 25,000 pages, you’d see the handful that’s actually for you. We’d create an experience that feels like your version of Ascension is the only version of Ascension. It’s like sitting across the table speaking to only that person, but for everyone. And here’s how we do it.

How much Ascension has on its site

Speaking of resources: 1,128 products, 205 collections, 162 pages, five and a half thousand articles, and the whole site exists twice, because there’s a complete version in Español. Nearly 13,000 pages in English and nearly 13,000 in Spanish, 25,929 URLs in total. And that’s before we get into the app: the whole Bible, the whole Catechism, study plans, dozens of podcasts, and the whole YouTube channel, with Father Mike Schmitz leading the charge and Father Mark-Mary, just to name a couple of heavy hitters.

They have the media space for faith formation cornered. Their headline says “the faith formation leader,” and that would be true. Ascension has everything. Of the 162 pages, 91 of them are prayers. We’ve got novenas, litanies, the Memorare, the Divine Mercy Chaplet, the Angelus, prayers for priests, prayers for the holy souls in purgatory. Another 15 pages are for individual saints.

So two thirds of their page library isn’t selling anything. It’s free. It’s beautiful. I think these free resources are most of their search traffic, because when somebody types “Memorare” into Google at 11 at night, this is probably where they end up.

Now think about who that person is. Somebody reading the novena to St. Jude, patron of desperate cases, is in a different place than somebody reading the prayer before a crucifix, who’s in a different place than somebody reading a Marian children’s prayer. They told you something just by being on that page at that moment. And right now, every one of these pages asks the same thing of all of them.

When we have endless choices, we don’t know what to choose, and therefore our choice is nothing. What I want to be able to do is close that gap between who the person is and what they need, and put that in front of them. Maybe that’s a Bible or curriculum for kids, a specific book, a specific resource, and a specific ask. We want to provide valuable resources to the reader to help them in their formation, but in return, we also need to be able to support the ministry.

So at the end of the day, we’re asking them to buy this or donate here, but we can present that message a thousand ways, all at once. A specific ask for a specific person. And we did this for a marriage ministry. Their ads were landing on a signup page, and we changed one thing, the headline, so it matched the campaign somebody came in from. Those opt-ins went from 40% to 68%.

For another media ministry, one that helps parents connect with their teens, we built a personalized resource hub. You tell the site what you’re navigating, and it hands back a curated collection of resources for that exact thing, for that exact person. When you show somebody something relevant, they click it, they take it, they’re grateful for it.

Starting with a content audit and segments

So here’s how I’d actually go about it with Ascension. Take stock of everything that’s on the site, a complete audit of all of it, listed out and categorized, and this is it right here. 1,128 products. Every collection, every page, what category each thing belongs to, what it costs, who it’s for. Until we know what we’re working with, we can’t decide what any one person should see.

This is the non-sexy part of the work. It’s not a beautiful user interface or design or mockup. This is, however, the reason the rest of it will work really well.

Then we want to learn who the primary audience is and how they break down into segments, and that means groups of people. And here’s what I found: Ascension has already done a lot of this work. Look at their product tags. 649 products tagged by language. 728 tagged by age: adult, teen, kids. And 10 were tagged with themes.

They’ve also split the whole catalogue by who buys it. 341 products tagged consumer products, 260 tagged parish products, 297 tagged small groups. So somebody at Ascension has answered the question, what is this resource for, and who is it right for? That’s half the work, and that’s the harder half. You’ve already labelled, organized and tagged your whole shop.

But here’s what’s missing. They know everything about their products, but nothing about the person looking at them at this moment on their website or in their email inbox. An offer map needs both sides. They built one side, but they left the other side blank.

Now, I want to be clear, this is not a criticism. Pretty much every organization, ministry and large publisher misses this. But this is why my agency exists, and it’s the whole reason this next part feels, dare I say, digitally miraculous.

Asking visitors three questions

We ask website visitors three or four questions. That’s it. A gentle, tasteful survey popup. And we ask, “Hey, which of these sounds most like you? A parent forming my kids. Becoming Catholic, or coming back. I lead a small group. I work at a parish or school. I’m a priest, deacon or religious.” And they click the one that resonates with them. That separates somebody buying a $20 book from somebody buying a $650 parish program.

Next question: what are you hoping to do next? Understand the Bible, learn what the Church teaches, pray better, strengthen my marriage, form my children, lead a Bible study, find my way back, get through a hard season. That’s the question that takes 1,100 products down to not seventy times seven, but seven.

And then the last question we could ask is, who are you doing this with? On your own, with your spouse, with your family, with a small group, with your parish. Same need, completely different product.

Three questions in a dynamic web survey, answered once, never asked again unless they want to update their profile, which they can do at any time. And this isn’t just a static survey that stores the data somewhere in a spreadsheet, never to be looked at again. This stores that data on their CRM record as a source of truth, which means your website, checkout pages, emails and calls to action can all be dynamically personalized on the fly for as long as they’re subscribed or have given consent for marketing, messaging and personalization.

Building the offer map and using behaviour data

Now we build the offer map, a matrix. Down one side we’ve got the people, and across the top, everything from our first step. Every cell answers one question: what should this person, who needs this thing, be shown most? And how do we change the wording they see so that it resonates with them?

Because we did step one properly, these aren’t hypothetical. These are Ascension’s actual resource collections. A parent forming their kids sees Ascension Kids. Somebody leading a study group should see starter packs. Somebody becoming Catholic sees Invited: Your Journey into the Catholic Church. A priest sees the Liturgy of the Hours and the free lifetime app subscription Ascension already offers clergy.

Then we record that on their profile in the CRM, so it follows them, and their experience gets curated, simplified and made just for them, not for everybody. Audit, segments, purpose, offer map. Then you build the machine.

Remember those 91 prayer pages? The site can see which ones you read. It can see you browse the kids collection, or the parish pricing page, or that you’ve come back to the same study program three times in the last week. Now, that’s real information, it’s already there, and it’s useful. Somebody reading a leader guide is probably leading a group, not shopping for themselves. Somebody on the parish pricing page is not a walk-in customer.

But here’s where I would draw the line. Behaviour should adjust what’s on top of the page for that visit. It shouldn’t write a permanent label about somebody on their CRM record. What I mean is, a person reading the novena to St. Jude is not getting tagged as “in crisis” in a database forever. Somebody reading prayers for the holy souls does not get a grief sequence. That would be really creepy. That’s not stewardship.

What they told us in the survey always wins. Data given in a web survey takes priority over any inferred behaviour. None of this is guesswork, because it’s what people tell you knowingly, because you asked in a smart little survey. That’s called zero-party data. It sits on their own record in their account, and they can change it or delete it whenever they want.

Ascension already runs all the machinery for that, by the way. They have the privacy policy, the separate app privacy policy, the CCPA opt-out, the privacy request flow, and a page for the Canadian and Quebec law. If somebody declines cookies, none of that behavioural stuff fires, and they just get the site they have today. Nothing breaks. No one’s the wiser. So this isn’t a workaround. It runs inside what they’ve already built.

The personalized website and email

Rather than describe it, I built it. Check this out. Version one is a parent forming their kids at home. Version two is somebody becoming Catholic. Version three is a director of religious education buying for an entire parish. This is the same site, but three different people. Now, that’s only three variations. We could keep going.

I also want to say that this is just a mockup. I didn’t actually hack their site and change anything. The website can act not just as a giant index of resources, but as a curated version just for you. And they can obviously access everything else. We’re not hiding it from them. It’s just that everything they need is prioritized.

Now, here’s the thing that gets me. When you sign into the Ascension web app or iPhone app, you can save your progress, bookmark favourites, create notes. That’s what we’ve come to expect with app accounts. But websites don’t get that same treatment, and it’s more than possible. And it works because that’s where people come. That’s where all the traffic is. That’s your front door. That’s where they find you, where they buy resources, where they share resources, where they donate.

Websites can behave just like apps do, without all the two-factor authentication, password resets, login credentials and account settings. All we have to do is a smart survey: ask a few questions, listen to what they say, and do all the work in the background. So the website just feels, as many readers will say, like it was made just for me. Because it was.

Look, you’re going to get traffic that comes in with a purpose. They have intent. They get in there, they’re looking for a gift, they buy a book or a Bible for a friend or a loved one, and they get out. Just get out of their way and let them do that. But if somebody’s visiting, poking around and browsing, guess what most of that traffic will do? Bounce. It’s a signal that they’re not convinced and don’t want to be here anymore.

So they come, they see, and they bounce. Pretty sure Jesus didn’t say come and see and bounce. In John chapter 1, he says come and see. And then it says they came, they saw, and they stayed with him that day. That’s the difference. Come and see and stay.

So they shouldn’t leave without a clear opportunity to stay, to join the email list. And nobody joins an email list that says “Join the newsletter.” Nobody needs a newsletter. But they do need you in their inbox, continuing the message, their version of the message, because the newsletter experience should be absolutely incredible.

That’s where the segmentation data goes even further: what they told us in the survey, what they did on the site. So you can recommend and suggest precisely what they need, rather than putting anything and everything in the email editor, hitting broadcast, and doing what so many organizations do, which is just pray that one of those is going to stick. Appeals, Giving Tuesday, year-end, seasonal campaigns, app features, merchandise, those are all still there. But the messaging and the asks and the emails and the next steps are personalized just to that person.

That increases retention, that increases opens and clicks, and it reduces spam and reduces unsubscribes. Websites like this that are done well all have data: analytics, clicks, purchases, subscriptions, interest. It’s already all there, but nobody’s doing anything remotely stewardly with that data. That’s why we like to call it digital stewardship, because you can read the room and create an experience for the person sitting across the table, or in this case, on the other side of the screen.

Stewardship of attention

But there’s a second kind of stewardship in here, and it’s the one I care about even more: stewardship of attention. Don’t show me everything all at once. Show me what I need, where I am in my life, in my faith, and how I want to support you. You get data, you get better results, and the person on the other side of that screen gets a better version of Ascension that was curated just for them.

Imagine seventy times seven unique variations of the Ascension website and email, all at once, without you having to change anything. It just changes itself. Ascension is doing the work that serves the people. If we’re trying to be faith formation leaders here, let’s create a personalized version and lead them the way they need to be led.

So when you ask me to donate, become a monthly giver, or buy something, it’s because you know something about me. You’ve listened. You’ve read the room. You sat across the table, and you’ve asked me something I needed to be asked.

See, I’ve done this in the secular industry for years: digital email marketing, sales funnels, personalization. But now I’m applying it to digital stewardship for ministries like yours. I did my homework on Ascension. There’s a content audit, a segment map, an offer matrix. Plus, I get all their emails.

And I probably got a lot of this wrong. I’m on the outside looking in. Everything you just watched came off of the public website, the sitemap and the product data. This is stuff that anybody with an internet connection can pull. I’m not claiming that I nailed this, but if we’re working together, I get to look from the inside, and then we can do this properly.

So, Ascension, if you’re watching, let’s talk. Let’s make your website and email program all things to all people, so that by all means we could save some. And if you’re a Christian media ministry or a nonprofit and you want to see what a personalized system could actually be worth for you, we built a calculator for that. The link’s in the description, and you can try it out for free. No email required. And if you want to work with us, give us a shout.