How We'd Personalize Ascension Press: A Public Case Study

Why Personalization Is Stewardship of Attention

Auditing a website sounds boring. Counting products, sorting tags, building taxonomies. None of that is the point.

All of it serves one purpose: to have an ordered collection of everything, so we can tell who should see which piece. Who should read which resource. Who should watch which video. Who should buy which product. And who's ready to give.

One of my favourite books is Don't Make Me Think. It's about user experience, and the argument is in the title. We shouldn't make somebody sift through sections and categories and tags and search results, hunting for what they came for. We should be able to put it in front of them.

That's stewardship of attention. Somebody gave you theirs. Maybe they're considering becoming Christian, or becoming Catholic. Maybe they're in a hard season. Don't hand them the whole catalogue and make them dig.

Do it well and they find what they were looking for, or what they didn't know they were looking for. It may be a book. It may be the book. And hopefully it's Jesus.

That's what we're trying to do here.

What's on Ascensionpress.com: 1,128 Products and 162 Pages

1,128 products. Over 200 collections. 162 pages. More than five thousand articles.

Then the whole thing exists twice, because there's a complete version in Spanish. Nearly thirteen thousand URLs in English and nearly thirteen thousand in Spanish, more than twenty-five thousand in total.

That's before the app, which carries the whole Bible, the whole Catechism, study plans and dozens of podcasts. Before the YouTube channel.

"The Faith Formation Leader" sits in their logo, and after going through all of this, it holds up.

The homepage itself doesn't say anything like that. It opens on a carousel cycling through the latest releases. Right now that's an Advent resource with Fr. Mike Schmitz, then An Hour with Christ, seven meditations with Blessed Fulton Sheen, available to pre-order. Under that, New and Noteworthy. Under that, Best Selling.

It's a well-run Shopify store. What it isn't is a page that knows who just showed up. Land there cold and you're looking at a library of books, podcasts and programs, and it's on you to work out which part of it is for you.

It's also a lot to walk into.

The 91 Prayer Pages Are the Biggest Intent Signal on the Site

Of those 162 pages, 91 are prayers. Novenas, litanies, the Memorare, the Divine Mercy Chaplet, the Angelus. Prayers for priests. Prayers for the holy souls in purgatory. Another 15 are pages for individual saints.

So roughly two thirds of their page library is free. I'd expect that's where a lot of their search traffic lands, because when somebody types "memorare" into Google at eleven at night, that's where they end up.

Think about who that person is. Somebody reading the novena to Saint Jude, patron of desperate cases, is in a different place than somebody reading the prayer before a crucifix, who is in a different place again from somebody reading a Marian children's prayer.

Each of them told you something true just by being on that page at that moment.

Right now every one of those pages ends the same way for all of them.

Their Product Tags Are Already a Segmentation Taxonomy

This is the part that got my attention.

Look at their product tags. 649 products tagged English, 42 tagged Spanish. 720 tagged by age: adult, teen, kids. Ten themes, with The Bible alone on 183 products, plus Catholic Living, Prayer and Meditation, Love and Sexuality, Marriage and Family, the Catechism and Church History.

They've also split the catalogue by who buys it. 341 products tagged Consumer Products. 260 tagged Parish Products. 297 tagged Small Groups.

Somebody at Ascension sat down and answered, across an eleven hundred product catalogue, what is this product and who is it right for. That is half the work of personalization and it's the harder half.

What's missing is the other side. They know everything about their products and nothing about the person looking at them.

Nearly every ministry and publisher I look at is in the same position, and there's a reason for it. We wrote a whole piece on it, when your best content is impossible to find. Product data is yours. You own it, you control it, you can sit down on a Tuesday and finish it. Audience data is something you have to go and ask a person for, and most organizations never get to the asking.

Or they hire a research agency. It surveys a sample of a thousand people from your audience, asks them a set of questions, and comes back with a summary that's well-written and well-meaning. But it's a snapshot, and it becomes stale next week. That's the difference between strategy and a study, and we've written about why the strategy has to come before the software.

What we build runs every day. The questions sit on the site, people answer them as they arrive, and what you know about somebody stays current.

How We'd Personalize Ascension Press in Four Steps

This is the G.I.V.E.R. Method applied to their site. Same four steps we run on every build.

1. Audit Every Product, Collection and Page

A complete audit of every product, collection, page and resource. A spreadsheet, listed out and categorized. The numbers at the top of this article are that audit.

This is the unglamorous part and it's the part people skip. Until you know what you have, you can't decide what any one person should see.

2. Map the Audience Segments

Ascension's own tags do most of this. The catalogue is already sorted by language, age, theme and buyer type. The gap is the visitor, not the products.

3. Ask What They Came For With an Adaptive On-Site Survey

Three questions, on the site or in an email.

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 a school
• I'm a priest, deacon or religious

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

And who are you doing this with?

• On my own
• With my spouse
• With my family
• With a small group
• With my parish

That third question matters more than it looks. Same need, completely different product. A book, a study set, or a starter pack.

Now the part that does the real work. This isn't a static three-question form. It branches, so what somebody sees depends on what we already know about them.

Those are the full lists. Nobody sees all of them. Every answer takes options off the next question, so what's left fits the person answering.

Say somebody picks "I'm a priest, deacon or religious" on the first question.

Question three as written now makes no sense for him. A Latin rite priest doesn't have a spouse, and he isn't doing this with his family. So the survey doesn't ask who he's doing this with. It asks who he's forming:

• The whole parish
• My OCIA group
• My school

And if he picks "Pray better" it doesn't ask a third question at all. That answer already told us who: his own prayer life.

Question two shifts as well. "Strengthen my marriage", "Form my children" and "Find my way back" come off the list, and so does most of the rest. "Preach better", "Form my parish" and "Form my parish staff" go on. He sees four options, not eight.

A parent gets the same treatment. She never sees "Find my way back" or "Lead a Bible study". Her second question is down to three: form my children, pray together as a family, strengthen my marriage. And the third question stops asking who she's doing this with, because the first answer already said her family. It asks how old her kids are instead.

The wording moves too. A parent gets "What are you hoping to do next?" A DRE buying for two hundred families gets "What are you planning for your parish this year?" Same slot in the survey, different question, because the first answer already told us who's asking.

Behaviour can set the angle before anybody answers anything. Somebody who's read three pages about coming into the Church sees "Becoming Catholic, or coming back" at the top of the first question instead of fourth down the list.

So a visitor sees two to four questions. Underneath there are more, and the survey picks which ones to use. When an earlier answer already settles the next question, it doesn't get asked.

It also remembers. Answer one question and leave, and tomorrow it doesn't start over. It asks the next thing it doesn't know yet. Nobody gets asked the same question twice.

When they give an email address, everything they've told us maps to a persona, a set of offers and a next step, and it syncs to the email platform. From there you can test different offers and different asks against the same segment and keep what works.

What three answers produce

A parent forming my kids x Form my children x Under 8

The map reads that as one person: a parent doing formation at home. Not a group leader buying for a parish, not somebody shopping for a gift.

So the words on the page change for her. Not once, and not for everybody. Every time she comes back, the site uses what she told us to decide what to say. Instead of the carousel everyone else gets, the top of the page talks about forming kids at home, and the shelf underneath is Ascension Kids, Read Together and Worship Together instead of the whole catalogue.

Her email changes the same way. The next one isn't the weekly everything-newsletter. It's about forming kids at home, and the ask at the bottom is something she might actually buy.

Change one answer and the whole thing shifts. I'm a priest, deacon or religious x Pray better. Two answers, and no third question needed. Now the page leads with the Liturgy of the Hours and the free lifetime app subscription Ascension already gives clergy, and the words talk about his prayer life instead of her family.

Try it below. Pick an answer and watch the homepage change with it, then start over and pick something else.

We build these with RightMessage, where we're a preferred agency partner. It integrates with most major platforms, including the Shopify setup Ascension already runs, so none of this needs a rebuild. We've also built custom versions of the same thing when a client's stack called for it.

4. Build the Offer Matrix

A matrix. People down one side, everything from step one across the top. Every cell answers what this person, with this need, should be shown first, and how the wording changes so it lands.

Because step one was done properly, these aren't hypothetical. They're Ascension's real collections.

A parent forming their kids sees Ascension Kids, Read Together, Worship Together, Rosary Resources for Families. Four collections, dozens of products, already built.

Somebody leading a study sees Starter Packs, the largest collection on the site.

Somebody becoming Catholic sees Invited: Your Journey Into the Catholic Church. It exists, it's built, and right now it's buried.

A priest sees the Liturgy of the Hours, and the free lifetime app subscription Ascension already offers clergy, which almost nobody seems to know about.

Audit, segments, purpose, offer map. Then you build the machine.

Start With the Homepage, Because It's the Fastest Win

The four steps above are the build. The order you roll them out in matters just as much, and it doesn't start with the survey.

Read where they came from

Somebody lands on the Memorare at eleven at night. Somebody else arrives from a Fr. Mike video about Advent. Somebody else searches a book title and lands on the product page.

Three people, three completely different reasons for being there, and right now all three get the same carousel. Nobody had to fill anything in for you to know that much. They told you by showing up.

Change the words at the top of the page

This is the fastest win on the site. The hero section and the headline are one block on one page, they can change per visitor, and nothing has to be installed anywhere else for it to work.

Whatever brought somebody in is enough to change what the top of the homepage says and what the main button offers. Same goes for the footer, the slide-out and the sticky bar.

Use those words to get them on the email list

The job of the changed headline isn't to sell a book. It's to get that person on the list.

That's the first real step, because the inbox is where a relationship gets built. Without it you're hoping they wander back through a YouTube recommendation or a podcast episode or something on social. With it you show up every week, on purpose.

Ask the three questions right after they opt in

The natural place is the thank you page, when they've just said yes and they're still paying attention.

If they skip it there, the questions follow them into the inbox and back onto the site on their next visit, one at a time, until you know enough. Nothing is lost by somebody not answering today.

Look them up in the offer matrix

Once you know who they are, their answers become the lookup. What they see on the site, what lands in their inbox, and what you ask them to do all come out of that.

So behaviour first, because it's free and it's already sitting there. Stated second, because it's better. Behaviour gets the headline right, the headline gets the opt-in, the opt-in gets the survey, and the survey runs everything after that.

What Personalization Is Worth to the Ministry

Somebody who's getting what they need is more inclined to support the ministry, through a purchase or a donation. Higher opt-ins, higher conversions, higher retention, better return on acquisition spend.

We've seen it. Spark Discipleship went from 40% to 68% sign-ups on ad traffic after we matched the page to the visitor. The Culture Translator saw a 96% click-through on recommendations matched to what a parent told us they were navigating.

It works in the other direction too. When somebody has lapsed and stopped giving, the system can see it, and you can find a better message to bring them back, or a different way for them to support.

That's meaningful movement for the ministry, and all of it runs on knowing who you're talking to.

Stated Data Beats Inferred Data

You just saw both kinds doing work. Behaviour picked the headline. The survey picked the offers. This is where we'd draw the line between them.

The site can see which prayer page you read. It can see you browsed the kids collection. That's real and it's useful. Somebody reading a leader's guide is probably leading a group.

But behaviour should adjust what's on top of the page for that visit. It shouldn't write a permanent label about a person into a database.

A person reading the novena to Saint Jude at midnight does not get tagged "in crisis" forever. That isn't stewardship.

What somebody told you in the survey wins. Always. Stated beats inferred, because stated was given knowingly, by a person who was asked.

Ascension already runs the machinery for doing this properly. They have a privacy policy, a separate app policy, and consent in place. None of this is a workaround. It runs inside what they've already built.

What we probably got wrong

Everything above came off the public website, the sitemap and the product data. No access, no analytics, no conversations with anyone there.

So some of it is wrong. We don't know what they've already tried, what didn't work, or what's on the roadmap for next quarter. We don't know their numbers. An outside read is a starting point for a conversation, not a verdict.

If somebody at Ascension wants to correct us, we'd welcome it.

If Your Ministry Has the Same Problem

This is where marketing is going, and the giant companies with billions are already doing it. They're doing it to sell widgets and software and gadgets. The same strategies ought to be pointed at missions that change lives and save souls.

The pattern isn't specific to Ascension. Large content library, thorough product data, no idea who's on the other side of the screen. If that sounds like your organization, we built a calculator that estimates what a personalized system could be worth against your own numbers.

It's free.

If you'd rather just talk it through, book an intro call. We block 45 minutes and it usually runs 20, and the point is to work out whether we can help you. And if you're a Catholic ministry specifically, here's how we work with them.