HeartSupport

How a dormant channel became a 293,000-subscriber media platform

The results

YouTube subscribers 25,000 → 293,000 Channel views 3.2M → 67.7M Total views, all platforms 600M+ Milestone YouTube Silver Play Button

Creative Director · August 2023 – 2025

The situation

HeartSupport is a national nonprofit working in mental health and suicide prevention inside the music community. Real stories, real stakes, and people willing to say hard things on camera.

The digital presence wasn't carrying any of it. Branding shifted from post to post. Content went out when somebody had time. There was no system underneath it, which meant every piece of content started from zero and growth depended entirely on how much any one person could carry that week.

I was hired in August 2023 as a contract video editor.

What the job turned into

The editing scope didn't hold. The organization didn't need someone to cut videos — it needed someone to decide what the videos were for.

Within months I'd taken creative authority across YouTube, social, and brand, and the contract became a full-time role as growth accelerated. I owned visual identity, messaging and tone, thumbnail and title strategy, publishing standards, and final approval on everything that went out.

The actual work: building an engine

The obvious move with an underperforming channel is to make better videos. Better videos help. They don't compound.

What compounds is a system, so that's what I built:

• A content workflow running from concept to publication, with defined handoffs between recording, editing, and publishing

• Standards for thumbnails, titles, descriptions, and metadata — so quality stopped depending on who happened to be doing it

• A repurposing pipeline turning every long-form piece into Shorts and Reels rather than treating each platform as separate work

• A single approval path with clear sign-off, tracked in Asana

The point of all of it: output that no longer depended on any one person's availability or memory. Scattered effort became a repeatable media engine — and the systems outlasted my involvement, which was always the intention.

The line I wouldn't cross

Mental health content and engagement optimization pull against each other. The most clickable version of a suicide prevention story is rarely the most responsible one.

Every growth decision ran through that filter. Algorithms matter; people matter more. The stories stayed honest, the framing stayed human-first, and the growth came from clarity and trust rather than from short-term spikes that cost the audience something.

Music, faith, and mental health intersect naturally. That intersection shaped how the stories got told.

Beyond the screen

Not all of it was digital. I developed and designed the Support Wall, a deployable inflatable structure in 7×7 and 10×10 formats, built to travel and set up at events across the country. Fans wrote what they were carrying and left it on the wall for strangers to answer.

It's the clearest example of what the brand work was actually for. The visual identity had to hold up in a festival field, not just in a feed.

Furnace Fest

I started making YouTube videos in 2007, hoping to encourage somebody.

Years later, after volunteering, interning, and coming back as Creative Director, I stood at Furnace Fest and opened HeartSupport's YouTube Silver Play Button.

Persistence, mentorship, faith, and a mission worth the work. Meaningful creative work compounds. It just takes longer than anyone wants it to.

What this means for your organization

The specifics here are a mental health nonprofit and a YouTube channel. The transferable part isn't either of those.

It's this: most organizations don't have a content problem; they have a system problem. They produce inconsistently because nothing underneath makes consistency possible. Building that foundation-identity, standards, workflow, approvals, is what turns sporadic effort into compounding growth.

That's the work I do.

Tools: DaVinci Resolve · Adobe Creative Suite · Canon and Blackmagic · TubeBuddy · Google Analytics · Asana