Case Study
Church of the City New York
Services provided:
Media Operations
Media Production
Systems Design
Volunteer Management
Creative Direction
Content Strategy
Context
In the years leading up to the pandemic, Church of the City New York was a vibrant, young church emerging in the middle of Manhattan, and poised for exponential growth with access to some of New York’s brightest young talent across all the creative fields from within its own congregation.
These opportunities birthed the strategy to design a creative department for the church. We built a creative studio serving the church from within, an internal creative agency powered by key staff and a small army of volunteers serving in their creative giftings and professional expertise.
The creative department sustained itself as volunteer team members from the congregation experienced both professional and discipleship growth by supporting their church through creative work, thus fueling their commitment to serve their church. As these volunteers grew in discipleship, they were called upon to train and lead other team members as the church and its ministries expanded.
We scaled up media operations from 3 services to 5 services across 3 locations.
We standardized production workflows and built a multi-disciplinary Creative Department of volunteer, contractor, and staff creatives who generated a daily flow of multimedia and multi-platform content.
We grew to 60 members on the volunteer team before the pandemic, with 50% still serving remotely during the 2020 lock down in NYC.
We built a department that took ownership of creating all media supporting the church’s preaching, teaching, marketing, communications, and in-person events.
This included communications and content strategy, graphic design, video and editing, photography, event media projection, copy writing, website, social media, and book publishing.
A large percent of the weekly production work was done by volunteers collaborating and serving rotations on teams that operated under the creative direction and shepherding of the staff and lay leaders.
Some notable fruit of this volunteer-powered ministry were several projects for the internet public that were inspired by the Holy Spirit’s voice heard by members of the team during the pandemic: the photographic and editorial storytelling series Signs of Life, and Liturgies for Hope, which gained the attention of publisher Penguin Random House, who signed our volunteer authors to their first book deal, releasing Fall 2022.
When the church’s needs during the pandemic shifted to full-on live media production, we restructured operations to accommodate. An additional staff was brought on to specifically oversee live production for church services and events, and the Creative Department pivoted to digital production for marketing and communications.
This structure seamlessly paved the way for the church to make new key staff hires in 2021-2022 to take the systems and teams into the future.