11 Feb
In September of 2020, the Faith Ascent team came together to produce a social media strategy for the coming 12 months. In that design, we laid out growth goals for each social media platform. The focus, at that time, was on our Instagram and Facebook presence. We projected large growth in 2020/2021 for those online outlets. Unlike the other platforms, for Youtube, we set a low bar for success. The reason was fairly straight-forward. In June 1st of 2020, Faith Ascent had a humble 125 subscribers on its YouTube page. We thought we were being optimistic when we set the goal of 200 subscribers by June 2021.
We hit that 200 subscriber goal last October. As of February 11th, 2021, we’ve hit 283 subscribers. To be fair, this is a quite humble number. Still, we’re excited to say that since January 2020, individuals across the world have spent 13,400 hours watching Faith Ascent videos! That’s a lot of hours!
Moving forward, we want to expand our YouTube offerings and make it easier for apologetic-seekers to find meaningful content online. Our plan to do that is two-fold:
- Upload new videos to YouTube consistently.
- Create shorter videos to whet people’s appetites.
Our model for creating consistent YouTube videos is simple: every Wednesday at 8am from now until (at least) the end of July 2021, Faith Ascent will premiere a new Christian Worldview Formation video. How can we make such a promise? That part is easy: they’re all already ready to go and automated to premiere on their set date on YouTube! Where are we getting that content from? Well, as of today (Feb. 11th, 2021), we still have five full-length lectures to release from Base Camp 2020. Every Wednesday (at 8am) through March 24th will feature a newly released lecture. Next week, for instance, at 8am on February 17th, Chris Buckle’s lecture “Transformed by Truth: Turning Habits of the Mind into Virtues of the Soul” will premiere, while February 24th will feature Conway Wong’s talk, “Does God Exist and is Jesus His Unique Son?”
We’re excited to offer these longform lectures to anyone who would happen to be interested in these topics. With that being said, we understand that you don’t always have 45 minutes or 2 hours to devote to a lecture. Sometimes you need shorter content.
Starting on March 31st and going through July 28th, every Wednesday morning we’ll bring you a snippet from a longer lecture. These excerpts tend to be under five minutes long and tackle smaller ideas within a longer lecture. While you might think to yourself, “I’m not ready to devote a full 2 hours to understanding the history of the preservation of the Biblical text”, a four minute overview of the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls might just captivate you!
We’ve got some other tricks up our sleeve for 2021 and hope to bring you other types of content soon, but the core of our ministry has always been foundational, scholarly education. Our new YouTube approach ensures that we’ll be continuing that ministry with all our hearts and minds in this new year!
As 2021 marches along, we hope to diversify Faith Ascent’s YouTube content. Go check it out for yourself! And if you’re not already a subscriber, make sure to become one so that you’ll get a notification every Wednesday about what new content we’ve got ready for you!
