CASE STUDY · LPI · 2024–2026
Parishes Online
I won ownership of a 15-year-old Catholic church directory with about 9 million visitors a year, then redesigned it, and its data, around the people who use it.
+70%
more engagement (events), 2024 to 2026
+98%
active users on the community version
$9M+
digital ad revenue projected for 2026, from a $3.43M goal
53,526
advertiser accounts claimed, up from 1,069
MY ROLE
Product owner (official title: Product Design Manager)
TIMEFRAME
Ownership from late 2024; roadmap from Q4 2024 into 2026
TEAM
Engineering manager and engineers, a brand designer, sales, marketing and creative services
PLATFORM
Parishes Online (POL), MassTimes.org, Google Maps, Hotjar, Figma, Adobe XD
JUMP TO:
The Problem · Strategy · Redesign · Challenges · Impact · What’s Next
WHERE IT STARTED
A directory built for bulletins, carrying a digital ad business
Parishes Online launched in 2009 as “Seek and Find,” a place to read printed church bulletins online next to the businesses advertising in them. By 2023 it carried a fast-growing digital ad business, with a $3.43M digital revenue goal for 2024.
2009
Seek and Find, the platform’s original 2009 home page.
THE PROBLEM
A 15-year-old platform with no owner
It served Catholic parishes and about 60,000 advertisers, but no one had owned it as a product for more than a decade.
Sprawl: features and ad slots added one at a time, with little shared knowledge of how they worked.
A spammy experience: visitors found the site cluttered and frustrating.
Admins locked out: church staff struggled to log in or update their listings.
Ad sales without structure: the ad setup was getting harder to support.
BEFORE THE REDESIGN
Parishes Online before the redesign.
MY ROLE
Product owner, from vision to delivery
As Product Design Manager, I owned the directory end to end: vision, research, UX design, requirements and delivery priorities.
Engineering: roadmap and bandwidth with the engineering manager; requirements and feasibility with engineers.
Design: the visual foundation with a brand designer.
Leadership: business goals, customer communication and ad design with the VPs of Sales and Marketing and the Director of Creative Services.
WHAT IT STILL HAD
A big audience worth protecting
Despite all of this, the platform still had a large, loyal audience, strong SEO and high-value nonprofit content. Breaking it would have cost real revenue, so every change had to be made carefully.
~9M
visitors a year
~500K
email subscribers
~60K
advertisers
~6K
print clients
$3.43M
2024 digital revenue goal
2009
launched as Seek and Find
STRATEGY AND PLANNING
A vision first, then ownership
Real progress needed leadership on board, so I presented the CEO a future-state vision built on three goals. It won executive buy-in, and in late 2024 I was given full ownership of the product.
The vision
A modern, cleaned-up user experience
Streamlined admin tools
Ethical, user-aligned ad placement that respects mission-driven content
The phases
Quick wins
Research and analysis
Strategy shifts and UX improvements
Positioning
The roadmap I built and maintained: a living plan of goals and timeline, Q4 2024 into 2026.
DISCOVERY AND RESEARCH
Research with every group the platform serves
Site visitors: pain points, credibility and accessibility.
Church staff: interviews and surveys on logging in and managing listings.
Advertisers: a survey on needs, behaviors and knowledge.
Internal teams: engineering, sales, support and leadership.
The 2024 research plan, with the groups and research methods for each quarter.
Decisions based on the research
SITE VISITORS
Make the link between churches and their supporters obvious.
Partner with MassTimes.org and remove unreliable data.
Go mobile-first, including the bulletin reader.
Let churches highlight special Mass times with little effort.
CHURCH STAFF
Make the admin experience more intuitive.
Add upcoming events and a display for merged parishes.
Keep archived bulletins available.
Help staff promote the site to their congregations.
ADVERTISERS
Richer listing pages with searchable keywords.
Layouts that put advertisers in front of visitors.
A message box so visitors can contact the business.
Training on claiming and editing listings.
EXECUTION
From requirements to shipped pages
Wrote feature requirements and set scope and timeline with the engineering lead.
Designed every page, state and screen size in Figma and Adobe XD.
Cleared the legacy blockers that stood in the way of bigger upgrades.
Kept engineering, ad ops and marketing aligned with acceptance criteria and weekly syncs.
THE REDESIGN
Four pages, before and after
Home page
BEFORE
ISSUES FOUND
Failed an accessibility audit, never explained the mission or the ad model, and search dropped results over small differences like “St.” and “Saint.”
AFTER
WHAT CHANGED
Community photos: nearly 1,000 church-submitted photos replaced stock images.
Advertising in the open: a home page section introduces local sponsors, with a “Search Businesses We Trust” call to action.
Accessible and clear: contrast, hierarchy and keyboard support built in, with one call to action per section.
Search results
BEFORE
ISSUES FOUND
Failed an accessibility audit. Broken buttons, empty contact fields and page-by-page browsing made finding a church slow.
AFTER
WHAT CHANGED
Scannable results: key details first, with church photos.
An interactive map for exploring an area, like a real directory.
A rebuilt ad system: one rotating skyscraper by DMA, a smaller in-list placement and matching mobile formats.
Churches and businesses, one click apart: a banner points visitors to faith-supporting businesses nearby.
Church listings
BEFORE
ISSUES FOUND
Ads boxed the page in on three sides, there was no church photo, and the Mass times people came for were buried in the bulletin.
AFTER
WHAT CHANGED
A mini-website for the parish: its photo, name, website and bulletin up front.
What visitors came for: Mass times, a map and contact details on the page.
Supporters in the spotlight: fewer, better-placed ads from the businesses that support the parish.
Advertiser listings
BEFORE
ISSUES FOUND
The page looked empty, with a blank About box and the print ad as its only image, and owners had to claim it before they could edit anything.
AFTER
WHAT CHANGED
Complete from day one: default imagery and business details filled in automatically.
Traffic to the business: clear buttons to its own website.
The church connection: a “We support your faith community” header with linked churches.
Rolling it out
Every change came with a communication plan for thousands of customers. The home page was one of the last redesigns, so it marked the new vision as fully launched.
BUMPS ALONG THE WAY
What made it hard, and what we did
-
For more than a decade the platform had no product owner, and changes were made one request at a time.
Change: I pitched a vision to the CEO and was given full ownership in late 2024, with a roadmap to work from.
-
Mass times were often out of date, and research showed visitors noticed.
Change: a partnership with MassTimes.org keeps Mass times current, and unreliable data points were removed.
-
Visitors found the site spammy, and many didn’t connect the ads to the churches they support.
Change: fewer, clearer ad units, with sponsors introduced openly on the home page and in search.
-
Every change touched thousands of churches and advertisers who depend on the platform.
Change: a communication plan for every change, telling customers what to look for.
-
Both the home page and search results failed an accessibility audit.
Change: accessibility became a requirement from the start, and ADA cleanup went on the roadmap.
-
Search ads had delivery bugs and inconsistent placements, partly because few people understood the ad system.
Change: a simpler ad hierarchy, and a deeper restructure covered in the Ad System case study.
IMPACT
A more engaged audience, and a business that grew around it
Google Analytics, January 1 to October 19, 2024 compared with the same period in 2026.
Parishes Online
+70%
events, 78.6M to 133.8M
+30%
sessions, 14.5M to 18.9M
+14%
page views, 29.0M to 33.0M
7.5M
active users, steady (7.48M to 7.53M)
Reach held steady while the existing audience became much more active: visitors come back more often and do far more on each visit.
My Community Online, the community version
+98%
active users, 420K to 829K
+89%
sessions, 731K to 1.38M
+95%
events, 4.1M to 8.1M
+62%
page views, 1.46M to 2.37M
The community audience nearly doubled in two years, and it keeps coming back.
The business
$9M+
digital ad revenue projected for 2026, up from a $3.43M goal for 2024
1.1M
active email subscribers, up from about 500K (889,804 church, 225,323 community)
$649K+
in Pub XL ads sold since the format launched in October 2024
New premium inventory. The Pub XL ad format adds higher-value placements across directory listings.
Revenue protected. The related Google Ad Manager retrafficking protected $7.5M on the path from $6.5M in 2025 to a projected $14M in 2028.
Customers taking ownership of their listings
Editing a listing used to start with a request to claim it. We gave every customer ownership automatically and built it into onboarding, so customers manage their listings from the LPi Dashboard without asking first. Over the past year:
53,526
advertiser accounts claimed, up from 1,069
5,698
parish accounts claimed, up from 2,460
1,336
customer parishes with their own profile photo, up from 860
174
customer communities with a profile photo, up from 72
Organizations with Mass times
The MassTimes.org partnership brings richer, current data to listings, and better listing pages drive adoption.
WHAT’S NEXT
The LPi Dashboard
The next phase moves advertisers and church staff into a shared, self-serve LPi Dashboard, building on the redesigned directory.
Stickiness
Higher renewal rates, self-serve Dashboard tools and recurring ACH payments to reduce churn.
Efficiency
Email invoicing and a staff Dashboard mean lower costs, less manual work and fewer collections calls.
Data growth
Logged-in visitors create richer data, which makes ad inventory more valuable to advertisers.
Direct revenue
In-context upsells show ad upgrades and open inventory when interest is highest.
LESSONS
A neglected directory became a product with an owner
Parishes Online went from a platform nobody owned to one shaped by research with the people who use it: trustworthy Mass times, listings church staff can manage, and advertisers presented as supporters of the community.
Ownership started with a vision the CEO could say yes to.
Earn the mandate: a shared vision turned a side project into formal ownership.
Research every audience: visitors, church staff and advertisers each needed different things from the same page.
Make ads part of the mission: being open about sponsors built trust and gave advertisers more value.
Bring customers along: a communication plan for every change kept a large customer base with us.