Brazil | Jefferson Paradello

Over the past decade, the Seventh-day Adventist Church in South America has strengthened its digital platforms. Its biggest and most complex effort in this regard was concentrated in an environment that could bring together all the information and materials from each ministry and administrative headquarters in an integrated manner. This is how the Adventist Portal was born.

Launched in 2013, it allowed members to find everything in one place: news about the work of the church in their region, projects developed at a regional, national, continental, or global level; content for downloads, videos about testimonies, an institutional area, and another specific area about the applications officially made available by the denomination.

"The Adventist Portal was a milestone in our connection with the member," details Pastor Jorge Rampogna, director of the Communications Department at the Adventist South American headquarters. This Sunday morning, May 15, he presented the new version of Adventists.org to the participants of the Plenary Directive Commission, which takes place in Brasília until Tuesday.

With a new visual identity, features such as the possibility to increase the font size and share content on social networks, and modern programming, the portal is more dynamic and optimized for mobile devices, which today represent 70 percent of all access. In the last 30 days alone, the Portuguese and Spanish versions received 402,000 users, which resulted in 1.3 million page views. 

The version released today is also in line with the standard set by the Adventist Church world office, which aims to show that everywhere on the globe, it is the same. This makes identification easier, which is already the case with our own logo.

For Carlos Magalhães, manager of the Digital Strategies Department at the South American Adventist headquarters, the goal goes far beyond just serving members. According to him, "it is a business card for those who want to know who Adventists are, what they think about the Bible, and how they work towards their mission of announcing the soon return of Christ." The Adventist Portal, he reinforces, may be the only way for some to have contact with the church. 

Structure 

This entire structure is divided into three major sub-portals: news, videos, and downloads. Under this umbrella are 161 sites for the Adventist Church's administrative headquarters in eight countries in South America: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. Each of these sites has hundreds of pages.

Today, the portal has in its database 11,307 pieces of content for download, plus 31,619 news items and 16,934 videos, totaling approximately 60,000. In 2021, the equivalent of 218,431 terabytes of information were downloaded. In 2022, just during the 10 Days of Prayer project, it was 37 terabytes.

"Everything we have there is intended to help the church fulfill its mission. There are people who approach the church after reading a news article or watching one of the videos available there, or even discovering a new application," details Rampogna. "It's not just a website. It's an evangelistic tool." 

To see everything available on the Adventist Portal, visit adventistas.org. 

This article was originally published on the South American Division’s news site

arrow-bracket-rightCommentscontact