OCT 2019 → NOW
Marketing Director, executive team
Victory Life Church, Battle Creek, Michigan
One of the largest churches in the United States — a multi-site church in the top 0.5% by size, and one of the country's fastest-growing. When I became director in 2019 it was a single location of about 1,761; it is now three locations pushing past 2,000, served by a four-person communications team. The title says marketing. Most of the work was operations and internal product, replacing expensive dependencies with systems the organization owns.
- Built Axiom, a production database that replaced a $12,000-a-year vendor tool and runs on about $120 a year.
- Built a 60-day onboarding roadmap for new hires with my department. It went well enough that HR is making it the standard for every hire across three locations.
- Mapped the guest journey from first visit to membership class and replaced phone follow-up with a drip text campaign. Engagement went from under 10% to about 60%.
- Replaced email and ticket intake with a Notion operating system: automated deadlines from vendor lead times, calendar-aware reviews, story-point capacity.
- Replaced a PDF employee handbook and SOPs with a searchable knowledge base.
- Cut paid spend for the Easter campaign by about 90% in a record year for attendance, while coverage grew from one location to three.
- Ran communications across three locations with two full-time and two part-time people. One coached hire drove about two million Instagram views in a year.
- Cut recurring subscription spend by more than 60% and took the department budget down year over year while output rose.
- Delivered in-house 3D renders and studio builds at about a tenth of quoted cost. Six direct reports across two business units.