With the onset of Covid-19 and stay-at-home orders unfolding across the U.S., businesses and organizations of all sizes quickly began searching for creative solutions that would allow them to continue operating at a time of incredible uncertainty. While challenges were widespread, especially during the chaotic first days and weeks of the pandemic, religious institutions, which traditionally rely on a physical location as a place of worship, were hit particularly hard.

With everything unfolding right before Palm Sunday and Easter, churches around the U.S. faced pressing decisions as to how they would approach the holidays, and how their parishioners would observe them. It was against this backdrop that Corkboard Concepts was tapped by a local diocese for help reimagining their online live broadcasts.

The diocese’s overarching goal was to ensure that anyone who wanted to attend an online church service could—and that an influx of visitors wouldn’t crash their site. Diocese staff had already produced a live broadcast using their existing website and hosting provider, which had proven unsuccessful. Nearly 40% of viewers who tried to join the service were unable to access it due to the high number of concurrent users that had overloaded the site’s server resources.

The team at Corkboard was brought in to overhaul the process, find a new solution that could supply the needed uptime, and do it all within a seven-day timeframe, before the next Sunday mass. It wouldn’t be solved with a simple migration, either—the diocese legacy site had been built using SharePoint, and it had accumulated pages, content, and data spanning nearly two decades. The legacy site was simply too large and cumbersome to pick up and move to a new server within the allotted time frame. With the clock ticking, finding a solution that could support a high number of concurrent users took center stage. While the rest of the site could be managed later on, the Corkboard team focused on finding a new hosting provider and building a separate digital property, where the live broadcasts could be easily accessed.