The ICF Church previously used a WordPress-based website with numerous plugins to manage content such as podcasts, groups, events and sermons. However, this architecture was confusing, difficult to maintain and created numerous dependencies. It also lacked a central data source (a single source of truth), which made data maintenance and consistency difficult. Conventional enterprise content hub solutions were not suitable for ICF Church due to the high license costs and the sheer overkill of functions. At the same time, internal resources were limited and developing a custom solution in-house proved to be too complex. What's more, their only developer to date would be leaving the company in the near future.
Benni and his team therefore opted for a completely different approach: the development of a no-code content hub with Xano as the backend and Weweb as the frontend. This combination offered the necessary flexibility and enabled the central management of all content, which could be adapted to the different locations and languages.
Our developers at VisualMakers turned ICF's vision into reality. The result is a modern, centralized software solution that can scale with ICF's growth.
The functions include the creation of new organizations, the publication of events in various languages, the creation of groups as well as individual sermons and series of sermons. Within each organization, you can assign roles to people - admin, editor, reader - and thus also set permissions for reading, publishing, editing and creating content.
These were all features that a few SaaS solutions also offered, but also dozens of other features that ICF did not need. Of course, SaaS companies pay well for this range of features and over time, it was more profitable to have a customized no-code solution developed than to take out an enterprise SaaS subscription.
Another aspect that was important to Benni is the independence of the no-code approach. ICF is not dependent on external developers or SaaS solutions and can manage and develop the content hub itself - as a non-developer - and even export the code and database if necessary.
Benny Amann advises other organizations to consider low-code/no-code as a legitimate strategy and to include it in the evaluation of projects. He recommends checking projects for simplification potential and experimenting with prototypes and MVPs. Even if no-code/low-code cannot cover all the requirements of custom development, it offers a valuable alternative, especially for non-profit organizations with limited resources. Courage and openness to new technologies are crucial for success.
ICF Church plans to expand the hub further and add functions such as a KPI dashboard and interfaces to other systems such as CRM. The aim is to establish the hub as a central data source and interface for all locations in the long term.
With its no-code content hub, the ICF Church has shown how non-profit organizations can master complex challenges with innovative technologies. The no-code approach offers a cost-efficient, flexible and scalable solution that drives the digitalization of organizations.
