About the project:

THE NEED

Josh Arthur, the new pastor of Avondale United Methodist Church in Muncie, Indiana, understood the church needed a regular social media presence. The small congregation had launched a number of programs from children’s ministry to small group study and a weekly community meal. He hired me to create a content strategy that would increase visibility to aid in developing community support.

THE APPROACH

Website

The church did not have a website, and it had no budget to create one. My first step was to put together a starter Wix site (http://avondalemuncie.wixsite.com/website) to be assigned the church’s own domain at a later date. This met the basic requirement of the site: a place to publish content.

Blog

The core of the content strategy was Josh’s Sunday morning messages, which contained the church’s ethos and biblical basis for its programming. Every Monday morning, I would write and publish a sermon recap. Sometimes I would use stock photography, other times I would use my own photos of Josh or whoever was speaking at the pulpit that Sunday. I would then promote that content on Facebook.

Social

The rest of the week, I promoted church programming via posts and as Facebook events. I would also draw relevant content from local media and resources provided by the United Methodist Church (umc.org) to maintain a routine of daily posting Monday through Friday.

THE RESULTS

Because of our efforts, we were able to increase average monthly impressions for the Avondale UMC Facebook page by 107% over 6 months (from November 2018 to April 2019). Anecdotally, the church received several compliments on its Facebook activity, and Facebook became a common way for people to interact with the church via direct message.

When my contract was up, I prepped a small team of volunteers to divide, continue and expand the work of keeping Avondale UMC and its vital programs visible to the local community.

Link to site: