Non-Profit/Church Social Media Playbook

Good morning!

Welcome to Social Studies.

Here’s the agenda for today:

• Brought to you by…

• Church Social Media Playbook

I met Dave Adamson in 2019 at a conference in Washington D.C. I was running social for YouVersion, and he was the social media pastor at Andy Stanley’s North Point Ministries (He was also the 8th online pastor. Ever.) Two years later, I was determined to build a podcast around empowering social media professionals. Dave was the one of the first people I emailed. The podcast puttered out, but the interview with Dave is a gold mine.

So… here’s my experience at YouVersion and all I’ve learned from Dave (and his book) distilled into a playbook designed specifically for churches/non-profits.

Non-Profit/Church Social Media Playbook:

I’ll start with an anecdote that Dave told me. After his first week on the job at North Point, his wife asked how the new job was going. His reply perfectly encapsulates how most church social media managers feel.

Before we talk about where to start, let’s talk about where we’re at.

The Problem:

The primary view of social media is as a promotional tool for their ministry rather than an extension of their ministry. We see social as a megaphone, not a telephone.

We’re really good at inviting people to events. Sunday service, men’s retreat, youth group, asking for donations, you name it. But we forget the social side of social media. After all… it’s called social media, not media media.

As a result, we struggle to get engagement so we throw money at the problem. We boost our way out of creating content that fosters organic engagement.

The Playbook:

1. Instead of inviting people to events, invite them to conversations

When we pull that off, we connect better with our audience, our engagement goes through the roof and most importantly… we reach more people for Jesus.

Here’s Dave’s magic formula:

If you’re writing a caption on social media and end with a period, you’re not inviting anybody into anything.

If you end it with a question, that invites people into conversations.

Here’s what it looks like in action:

From Dave:

“This is one of the most engaged posts I ever had. It was National Coffee Day and all I did was grab this image of 9 cups of coffee and each mug had a different color, ranging from black to straight milk.

I posted that on the church Facebook and Instagram and just said, “How do you prefer your coffee?”

Everybody had an opinion.

On Facebook alone, we had 850 comments. 200 commenters were upset that I didn’t include tea. 150 were confused about how I numbered them (I started midway through since I was in a rush).

So what?

People having an opinion about coffee doesn’t impact people for Christ right?

Not exactly. When I realized that this post had built a wave of algorithm love, the next post was really strategic, promoting something that was important to the church. We leveraged the highly engaged content in the lead up to a piece of highly important content.”

Here’s another example:

Last one…

Dave posted this with the caption, “You can only choose THREE of these Tom Cruise movies…”

Is your org getting into the business of film production? Probably not.

But is your org getting into the business of garnering engagement as a way to influence people for good? I hope so.

2. You can’t fake authenticity

Years ago, Dave made a massive shift on his personal Instagram.

Here’s his experience in his own words:

“But then my youngest daughter has dyslexia and we started to realize that the way that she learns is visually. And so as somebody who follows Jesus, I wanted to teach her about my faith and everything that I knew about the Bible and church and Jesus and stuff like that.

And I thought the best way for me to do that was to post images that she could relate to. And then I could connect some of my faith to those images. All I wanted to do was to teach her. And so I started to post little photos and devotions for her and it's just started to grow. And more and more people wanted to learn from these same devotions.”

He’s now sitting on a pretty huge audience that regularly engages with rich, deep, theological content.

The audience could feel Dave’s motives.

You can’t fake that. Create content accordingly.

3. Follow the platforms

Simply put… Prioritize what the platforms are prioritizing.

My friend Brittany Maher created Her True Worth a few years ago.

When she started, Instagram carousels were starting to get really popular. So what did she do? She made multiple carousels every single day. Today she’s at 1.8 million followers.

A guy I used to work with started LeadershipFeed right when reels were blowing up. He posted multiple reels everyday. He grew to 100k followers in less than 6 months.

When social media platforms launch a new feature, they have a vested interest in it’s success. As a result, they tend to give a disproportionate amount of exposure to accounts that consistently use that new feature.

Here’s Vayner’s media director talking about a tangible example of this.

4. Start with your audience

Ask yourself, “Why is my target audience on social media?”

Here’s Dave again…

“They're not going to social media to look for a church. They're going to social media to look for answers.

Too many churches are answering questions no one is asking. So why don't you get online and figure out what people actually are asking and create content around that.

People are looking for purpose, people are looking for encouragement, people are looking for inspiration.”

Back to Jacob 😎 

When I was at YouVersion, we noticed a spike in searches for terms around sleep sounds. It was the height of COVID and people were stressed.

When you searched on YouTube for “bible sleep” the top ranked content wasn’t actually that great. We saw an opportunity.

We created a series of videos called YouVersion Rest. It was several variations of different narrators reading Psalms with backgrounds like piano, rain, storm, etc.

Last time I checked, the videos had amassed 20 some million views.

When you start with your audience (not your org), you can back into what content to create.

That’s what relevance is.

Dave again…

“In the church world, we've turned relevance into smoke machines and moving lights. That's not relevance. Relevance is meeting somebody's need in the moment they need it most.

If I'm stuck in the desert. And I've been there a week and I'm starving. And I'm thirsty. And I'm on my last legs. I look into the horizon. I see a cloud of dust and I see a car approaching. And you get out of the car with a bottle of water…

I don't give a crap what sort of car you drive, what sort of brand of water you give me. I don't care. You are the most relevant person in the world to me because you're meeting my need in the moment that I need it the most.

That's what we need to do with social media, meet the needs of people in the moment that they need them the most.”

Aaaaaand Jacob here…

Once you’ve figured out that piece, you can produce as much of that content as you can sustain.

Don’t fall into the trap of posting 4 times per day only to putter out after a couple of weeks.

Stick to what’s reasonable and maintain for the long haul.

5. Measure what matters

So how do you know if you’re “winning”?

Facebook counts a 3 second view as a view. They also count a 30 minute view as a view. So when Facebook says you have 5,000 views, did you get 5,000 views?

Naturally, you want a high reach (getting in front of more people).

But what’s more important… 5,000 people seeing that you posted a video or 5 people truly engaging with your content and being impacted by what you posted?

If we can find ways to keep people on the platform, that benefits us AND the algorithm.

When you create multiple pieces of content that people engage with, you can start to trace similarities and produce more content that fits that mold.

Really hope that helps.

If you’re a church or a faith-based non profit here are some of my favorite resources. (No affiliate links just stuff/people I like.)

Dave Adamson Obviously I think the world of Dave and his opinions on social media. Here’s that link to his book again. 10/10 recommend.

Alan George (I worked with Alan at Life.Church. He was the Church Online pastor and is hands down one of the most prolific leaders in the integration between in-person and digital ministry.)