At a Glance

Industry: Nonprofit + Faith-Based Organization
The Challenge: Create a more consistent digital presence that could engage the existing congregation + reach new people
My Role: Social Media Strategy + Management
The Project: Develop and execute a multi-platform content strategy across Instagram, Facebook + YouTube
The Goal: Increase online engagement, strengthen community + create more opportunities for people to connect with the church
The Result: 200% increase in Facebook video views, 58.3% increase in Instagram followers + 3,932% increase in YouTube video views

When Social Media Becomes More Than Marketing

For most organizations, social media is one of many ways to stay connected with the people they serve. For a church, that might mean sharing what’s happening that weekend, highlighting opportunities to get involved, posting clips from a recent message, or simply giving someone a glimpse into the community before they ever decide to walk through the doors.

That was part of the opportunity when I began supporting this local church with its social media presence.

They knew digital marketing gave them another way to connect with their existing congregation while also reaching people who might be looking for a church community. But like a lot of organizations with approximately 847 other things happening at any given time, consistently planning, creating, and publishing content was another story.

They needed more than a handful of posts whenever someone had time to make them. They needed a strategy and someone to help actually carry it out. So we started building one….and then 2020 happened. Suddenly, social media wasn’t simply another way to communicate with the congregation. For a period of time, it became one of the only ways to gather at all.

Building a More Consistent Social Media Presence

Before the pandemic changed the way the church operated, our initial focus was creating a more intentional and consistent presence across its social media channels. I took on full-service social media management, which included developing the strategy, planning and scheduling content, writing copy, creating graphics, managing community interactions, and monitoring performance.

We also developed a content calendar so the church wasn’t constantly asking, “Wait…what are we posting today?”

But consistency for the sake of consistency wasn’t really the point. The content needed to reflect the larger mission of the church while serving both people who were already part of the congregation and people encountering the church online for the first time. That meant creating a mix of content around weekend services, current teaching series, church updates, spiritual encouragement, opportunities to get involved, and the larger life of the community.

The goal wasn’t simply to make the accounts more active. We wanted the online presence to feel like an extension of the community people were experiencing in person.

Creating the Content Behind the Strategy

Of course, having a social media strategy doesn’t magically produce all of the content you need to execute it. So alongside planning the strategy, I also handled much of the actual content creation.

That included designing branded graphics for posts and Stories, writing captions and calls-to-action, photographing the weekend experience, editing photos and video, and coordinating with volunteer photographers to make sure we had fresh imagery that reflected what was actually happening within the church. Because especially for an organization built around people and community, we didn’t want the feed to feel like an endless stream of announcements and graphics.

We wanted people to be able to see themselves in the community. And then, almost overnight, the way we had to create that feeling of connection completely changed.

Pivoting When In-Person Church Wasn’t an Option

When pandemic restrictions began affecting in-person gatherings in 2020, the church had to figure out how to continue serving and connecting with people who could no longer physically gather in the same space. The existing content calendar suddenly wasn’t our biggest priority. We needed to adapt the strategy around what the community needed now.

Weekend services were made available through livestreams on YouTube and Facebook so people could continue participating from home. We incorporated weekly Instagram Lives to create opportunities for more immediate, interactive connection. And video became an increasingly important part of the strategy because it allowed people to see and hear familiar faces when they couldn’t physically be together.

The platforms hadn’t changed; the job we needed them to do had. And I think that’s an important distinction when we talk about strategy — a strategy isn’t valuable because you followed the original plan perfectly. It’s valuable because it gives you enough clarity about the larger goal that you can make better decisions when the original plan no longer makes sense.

For us, the larger goal had always been connection. So when the circumstances changed, we changed how we created it.

Creating Community When Everyone Was Apart

This was also a season where engagement meant something a little different. A comment wasn’t simply another engagement metric. A livestream view represented someone being able to participate in a service from their living room. An Instagram Live gave people an opportunity to interact when many of their normal opportunities for community had suddenly disappeared.

So while we continued maintaining a consistent posting schedule and paying attention to performance, we were also thinking about what people on the other side of those numbers actually needed. We focused on creating a welcoming digital environment, responding to the community, making important information easy to find, and giving people multiple ways to stay connected with the church.

Because at the end of the day, the goal wasn’t to build an audience for the sake of having a bigger audience. It was to reach actual people.

What Changed?

Even during an incredibly uncertain period, the church’s digital presence experienced significant growth.

Facebook video views increased by 200%, giving the church greater reach through its video content and livestreams.

Instagram followers increased by 58.3%, expanding the community regularly connecting with the church through social media.

And YouTube video views increased by 3,932%, dramatically increasing the reach of the church’s video content during a period when digital access had become especially important.

Those numbers are significant, but they’re also a little different from the results in some of my other marketing case studies. Because in this case, the value of increased reach wasn’t ultimately about generating a sale. It meant more opportunities for people to stay connected to a community during a time when connection was particularly hard to come by…and that’s what made this project meaningful.

What Can Nonprofits Learn From This Social Media Strategy?

You don’t necessarily need to be selling something for your marketing to have a measurable goal.

For a nonprofit, church, or other mission-driven organization, social media might be there to increase awareness, educate people about an issue, recruit volunteers, encourage donations, promote an event, share resources, or simply help more people access the work you’re already doing.

But whatever the goal is, I think it’s important to know why you’re showing up. Because “we should probably post on Instagram” isn’t much of a strategy. Once you know what you want your digital presence to actually do, you can make much more intentional decisions about the content you create, the platforms you use, the metrics you pay attention to, and how much time and energy those channels deserve.

For this church, that purpose became incredibly clear in 2020: social media was there to help people stay connected. And every strategic decision could come back to that.

What Happens When Your Original Strategy Stops Making Sense?

You change it. (Which sounds incredibly obvious when I say it like that.)

But I think businesses and organizations can become really attached to the plan because they invested time, money, and energy into creating it. The content calendar says this. The strategy document says that. We decided six months ago that we were going to do XYZ.

Meanwhile, the business, audience, market, or circumstances have changed.

This project was obviously an extreme example of that. None of us had “global pandemic completely changes how people gather” penciled into the marketing calendar.

But the principle applies on a much smaller scale too: Strategy should give you direction without preventing you from adapting. The goal isn’t to follow the plan at all costs. The goal is to know what you’re trying to accomplish well enough that you can recognize when there’s a better way to accomplish it.

How This Work Still Shapes the Way I Work Today

This case study comes from an earlier chapter of Magnolia Creative Co, when full-service social media management, content creation, and digital marketing made up a much larger part of my client work.

My services might look different today, but the way I approached this project is still very much part of how I approach the businesses and organizations I work with now.

I want to understand the bigger goal before deciding what needs to happen. I want to know why we’re doing something instead of blindly following a list of best practices. And when something changes, I want to be able to look at all of the moving pieces and figure out what needs to change with it.

Because whether we’re talking about a marketing strategy, client experience, project, or the systems running behind the scenes, what worked for one version of an organization isn’t guaranteed to work forever. Sometimes the goal stays exactly the same; it’s the way we get there that needs to change.

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