Increasing Reach by 96% | Strive to Be YouTube Channel

As part of my digital design internship for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I was the first intern to work on the Strive to Be YouTube channel. From January 2023 through June 2023, I had the privilege of improving SEO, editing videos, creating promotional content, managing the YouTube calendar, moderating the comments, and analyzing analytics. Below are the statistics of the channel’s growth during my internship.

As part of my research about how to improve the channel, I learned about a helpful SEO and keyword research tool called TubeBuddy. One of the channel’s consultants and YouTube expert, Kathie Steingal, also mentioned this tool just a few days after I learned about it. We found that all of Strive to Be’s YouTube videos had a SEO score of 0, which consequently reduced our reach and ability to rank in YouTube’s algorithm. With no formal training, I took the initiative to research and learn all I could about the tool and how it could be used to improve our SEO score.

The song “He’ll Be There” was the first video release I did all the backend SEO work for. The SEO score went from 0 to 100 and 100% of the tags ranked. The affect SEO work had on the video performance was more than anyone on our team could have expected! Here are some key results from that release:

This success did not go unnoticed! Jermey Vick, supervisor of the main YouTube channel for The Church of Jesus Christ, reached out and asked what we were doing to get such amazing results! I was able to train him and three others on how to use TubeBuddy.  After just a couple weeks of practice, the time it took me to do SEO for a video decreased from 4 hours to about 30 minutes. 

One of my favorites parts of the job was creating content for the YouTube channel! In six months, I produced 16 different long and short form videos for the channel and edited them using Adobe Premiere. To watch all these videos, please go to the “Videos” section in the top menu. Here are a couple that stand out! 

Channel Trailer: The YouTube channel did not have any sort of channel trailer or introduction video. The purpose of this video was to create an upbeat, youthful video that explained who Strive to Be is.  

Youth Music & Arts Festival: I also created a series of three videos promoting the 2023 Youth Music & Arts Festival. After the reels were published on Instagram, other areas asked to use them. To make the reels more accessible to other countries, I translated the text and created a Spanish version of the reels. I also made a clean version (version without any text) so many areas around the world could add their own text in their native languages. I loved seeing these reels shared by general authorities and translated into different languages!

General Conference Video: We wanted to make an outward facing General Conference video that was “friend-friendly.” I loved writing the script, choosing the images, and putting this video together. It was a such a neat and spiritual experience to create this video. It resulted in increased impressions and interactions, especially on Instagram.  

Most recently, I’ve been able to work one-on-one with Strive to Be’s music producer, Mitch Davis. We meet weekly to collaborate and plan content marketing strategies for upcoming music releases. In June 2023 we launched the music video, “I Choose You.” It was the first music video where we implemented the release plan we’d created. I planned and edited all the promotional video. Thanks to the pre-release promotion and getting the video published on ChurchofJesusChrist.org, “I Choose You” views were 5.7x higher than average. Additionally, the channel gained 400+ subscribers and had a steady, upward trend in reach 14 days post-publication.  

Mitch Davis and I continue to make plans for the rest of 2023 and 2024’s song releases.  

I was responsible for creating an organized and up-to-date YouTube calendar. This calendar is shared by multiple teams – music producers, music schedulers, publishers, content creators and more. Thus, it was imperative that the calendar was structured in an easy to read manner. I was responsible for assigning dates to every release and making sure that release dates did not interfere with one another.

When I first began interning in January, one of the big goals the department had was creating a sense of community on the channel and getting more reach! The channel was getting so many comments, but previously the team did not have enough manpower or time to respond to all of them. However, we knew the importance of community engagement for both long-term and short-term growth. So, a small team and I got to work responding to every comment in their native language. I was able to use my skills in Spanish to respond to our Latino friends on the channel.  For languages that I did not speak, I used Google Translate. It was  incredible to see the impact our music had on the lives of so many people.  

Over time we began building relationships with our Strive to Be superfans! On-going conversations began in the comments, we saw an increase of community interaction on new releases, and our overall reach began to improve. 

I worked with the PSD department to get a montly report of our YouTube performance. I reviewed the analytic reports monthly and presented to the Strive to Be team our progress and opportunities for growth. Strive to Be is currently the fastest growing channel in the church. On Spotify, our international reach has doubled in the past five months. Our music is reaching all four corners of the earth and it is thrilling!