A healthcare case study about how faith and comprehensive healthcare coexist.
Across various faith traditions, from Reform/Progressive Judaism to Protestant and Catholic Christianity to progressive Muslim organizations and others, many believers openly support comprehensive healthcare and sexuality education. It is part of their broader, shared value system that upholds human dignity, justice, and community well-being. In fact, groups like Muslim Wellness Foundation and the Unitarian Universalists’ Our Whole Lives program specifically develop and distribute resources and programs to support sexual health, anti-violence, consent, LGBTQIA+ inclusion, and gender/sexuality diversity.
Yet many institutional religious policies continue to shape access to health in harmful ways, such as blocking birth control access and curbing HIV/AIDS prevention, despite clear evidence that positions do not reflect what more believers actually think or practice. This creates a great power gap where institutions speak for communities that don’t need them
A faith-based nonprofit faced this exact challenge.
Before We Started
After conducting groundbreaking research, they had a comprehensive report detailing their faith’s institutional restrictions on contraception, plus polling data from five countries showing that followers of the faith tradition neither followed nor supported the institutional position. It was gold because they had concrete, compelling evidence of the gap between doctrine and lived beliefs and experiences. But, they didn’t have a strategy to get that information into the hands of advocates, influencers, or the public in ways that could shift narratives about religious doctrine and policies about reproductive health.
Time was of the essence. They were staring down an important 50th anniversary, but they didn’t have the internal staff and digital infrastructure in place to turn research into action.
We saw an opportunity to strengthen their paid advertising and develop systematic approaches to mobilizing partners by creating shareable content for influencers.
What Changed
From Unused Research to Movement-Wide Resource
We transformed the report and polling data from internal documents into widely shared advocacy tools. Through a social media toolkit and targeted outreach strategies, our efforts mobilized major reproductive health and rights organizations—including SIECUS, Reproductive Health Access Project, AWID, PSI, DAWN, Population Institute, CHANGE, and Ipas—to share the resources with their networks. The research, which before had been sitting on desks and shelves in the nonprofit’s office, was now being amplified by some of the sector’s most influential voices.
From Limited Paid Advertising to Strategic Investment
We shifted the organization’s mindset from sporadic, underperforming paid posts to a more strategic approach to digital advertising. During the engagement, 71% of their paid advertising was directly managed by our campaign. As a result, the campaign’s paid post achieved a 41% engagement rate. They dramatically outperformed their other paid posts, which ranged in engagement from 1.95% to 6.03%. Audiences weren’t just scrolling past the content, they were actively engaging with, sharing, and clicking through it to read the research.
From Modest Reach to 20k+ People in One Month
Through strategic paid posts during one month alone, July, we reached 23,185 targeted audiences who cared about the intersection of faith, reproductive rights, and policy. Not only did this represent a significant expansion of the organization’s influence during the critical anniversary period, it also ensured that the report and polling data reached far beyond the nonprofit’s existing base.
From Isolated Content to Top-Performing Posts
Our campaign content included links to the report, polling data, and timely news articles about religious refusals and reproductive healthcare access. It regularly ranked among the organization’s top-performing content for the entire year.
From Reactive Posting to Data-Driven Digital Strategy
Using our data analytics skills, we provided the organization with comprehensive insights that they didn’t previously know about their social media audiences, which were predominantly women (between 73% and 78%), highly educated (61% of fans held college degrees), and more likely to engage with specific types of content. This transformed how they understood and communicated with their supporters in general.
From Missed Opportunity to Momentum
We created complimentary digital strategies for the organization’s board meeting and other in-person events, ensuring attendees could view and support the campaign in real-time. This integrated digital advocacy with in-person organizing, thereby multiplying the campaign’s impact beyond what either approach could achieve on its own.
The Lasting Impact
People of faith often care deeply about human dignity, justice, and community well-being.
This campaign fundamentally challenged the narrative that institutional religious doctrine reflects what people of faith actually believe. By strategically disseminating polling data showing that followers of the faith themselves neither followed nor supported the institutional restrictions on contraception, we strengthened the evidence-base for advocates pushing for policy change in global health.
Faith-based organizations have no need to abandon their religious values. In fact, this campaign helped the nonprofit use digital strategies and data science to challenge institutional power from within. It established a model for how the relationship between religious doctrine and modern life can be re-examined through data. Research can be transformed into advocacy tools through strategic digital marketing. Organizations can mobilize entire networks of partners through clear calls to action and well-designed campaign strategies.
Most importantly, we helped shift the conversation from “this is what religious doctrine says” to “this is what people of faith actually believe.” It gave advocates, policymakers, and faith communities themselves the evidence to demand change on contraception access, HIV/AIDS prevention, and reproductive healthcare worldwide. Faith and comprehensive healthcare access can—and sometimes indeed do—coexist.
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