St. Ignatius Loyola NYC
Park Avenue
This historic Roman Catholic church asked us to give it a new brand voice. Then COVID hit, and we set up a crisis action team to help it re-imagine and deepen its connections with donors and parishioners—before and after the darkest days of the pandemic.
BrandStories filming a demonstration of the church’s rare N.P. Mander organ, for a music video we created to share with parishioners during the COVID lockdown
How can internal silos become one team to help a brand in crisis?
Far right:
A parishioner participating as an extra in a video we produced on how to safely attend Mass during the pandemic
Far right:
Development Director Erin Pick in a video we made during the COVID outbreak to encourage parishioners to keep giving in support of the ongoing construction of an exterior elevator needed to provide better access to the Church for the disabled, post pandemic.
St. Ignatius Loyola NYC
Park Avenue
This historic Roman Catholic church asked us to give it a new brand voice. Then COVID hit, and we set up a crisis action team to help it reimagine and deepen its connections with donors and parishioners—before and after the darkest days of the pandemic.
THE CHALLENGE
New York City was the early epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, taking the lives of more than 30,000 of its residents in the first 10 months of 2020. It also rendered most city streets desolate
—including the Upper East Side stretch of Park Avenue which the Church, an NYC landmark, has occupied since the late 1800s. As makeshift treatment tents were pitched in nearby Central Park to handle the patient overflow from local hospitals, St. Ignatius was ordered to close its doors for the first time since the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic at the end of World War I.
A parishioner participating as an extra in a video we produced on how to safely attend Mass during the pandemic
OUR WORK
During that somber summer of 2020, we dismantled what had been staff silos into a Crisis Action Team, helped the church to livestream Masses, and catalyzed staff creation of a weekly, interactive newsletter as part of our crisis communications plan. By training staff to effectively co-create and help curate compelling content and stories, we achieved the internal collaboration needed to launch a new brand voice and accelerate the completion of the church’s first new web site in more than 30 years.
Development Director Erin Pick in a video we made during the COVID outbreak to encourage parishioners to keep giving in support of the Church’s capital campaign construction projects
We also invited parishioners to participate in weekly ZOOM-driven “social distancing socials,” virtual “sing-alongs” with the Church choir and attend an Interfaith memorial service for COVID victims we co-produced and distributed for livestream broadcast. While making an instructional video on how to safely attend Mass in person when the lockdown was lifted, we asked parishioners to volunteer as “extras” to demonstrate the new process.
OUR IMPACT
According to a 2021 report issued by the Church’s first Strategic Planning Committee of Parish leaders—a body formed to continue and build upon our foundational work—“We now have the chance to reset our Parish’s future with a new perspective and…create a new paradigm of the church for a post-pandemic world.”
“BrandStories helped us through the COVID pandemic, taught us how to tell better stories to expand our connections and made our switch to digital a lot easier”
Father Michael Hilbert, S.J.
Associate Pastor, Church of St. Ignatius Loyola
A video we created to introduce the Church’s renowned music program to new audiences
We created 14 video stories, including one about St. Ignatius donor and former Wall Street financier Felipe Propper, a parishioner who shared the story of his philanthropy and his father’s work to facilitate the escape of thousands of Jews from Nazi-occupied France during World War 2.