St Mary Redcliffe A Year at Redcliffe Magazine 2022

Marketing and digital
Marketing, digital and design
During the early stages of Covid, in March
2020, we launched the church’s new website,
which I had been designing, building and
readying for launch for a number of months
prior to the arrival of Covid.
The launch was precipitated by the onset of
the virus and the attendant need to be able
to livestream services to the site while the
church was closed.
Having researched a suitable platform to
support live-streaming, we settled on Vimeo
because this platform worked seamlessly
with the software package I used to build
the website. The combination of website
and embeddable video platform, in effect,
allows us to host our own online TV channel
- SMR Live - that’s available to anyone with
access to a computer, smart phone or tablet.
This is a significant step forward, in terms of
our online presence, and the worship team
has done an excellent job in maximising
the potential of this set-up to engage online
audiences by managing the use of digital
technology during services.
During 2021 our Vimeo account recorded
10,000 views with the total time that SMR
video content was watched reaching 229
days, 18 hours, 32 minutes, 44 seconds.
These figures demonstrate that digital
streaming has been successful and is firmly
embedded in the life of St Mary Redcliffe as
an alternative way for people to experience
the the church and take part in worship,
whether or not they are able to visit the
church building.
Since the new site was launched there has
been a significant growth in website traffic,
due, in part, to the development of SMR
Live. During 2021 the website received
55,989 visits and 139,501 page views. A
significant proportion of this traffic has
been driven by the church’s presence on the
various digital and social media platforms,
which have been developed during the
last nine years. In 2013 when I launched
the church’s Twitter account, there was no
St Mary Redcliffe social media presence,
other than a Facebook account which had
yet to receive a post. We now have an active
presence on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,
Tumblr, YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud,
Pinterest and Google My Business. Each
of these platforms allows us to present
the life of the church in different ways to
a variety of audiences. This has a knockon
effect in that it encourages members of
these audiences to visit and engage with the
life of the church, whether this is through
joining the congregation, attending events,
finding out about the church’s rich heritage
or volunteering.
With respect to the three main platforms,
Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, the stats
for 2021 are as follows:
• Facebook page reach 112,327 (page
reach refers to the number of people
who saw content from our Facebook
page or about our Page, including posts,
stories, ads, social information)
• Facebook page visits 5507 (the number
of times our Facebook Page was visited)
• Instagram reach 6657 (Instagram reach
refers to the number of unique accounts
that saw any of our posts or stories at
least once)
62