Child Welfare Agency Transforms Social Media Strategy, Achieves Record-Breaking Q1 Results

In just one month, Iris Family Support Center achieved what had previously taken an entire year—reaching their annual social media engagement goals and reducing their social media management time by 75%. Here’s how the right tools and strategy can help nonprofits maximize their impact and connect more effectively with families in need.

Mission of Compassion: Meet Iris Family Support Center

For 50 years, Iris Family Support Center (formerly SCAN, Inc.) has been dedicated to protecting children and preparing parents across 41 Indiana counties. What began with 11 volunteers in one town has grown into a comprehensive family support organization with 150 employees, serving over 45,000 individuals annually. Their recent rebranding reflects their evolution from crisis intervention to proactive family support.

“We’re dedicated to protecting children, preparing parents, and stopping child abuse from neglect,” explains Whitney Craig, Marketing and Communications Director, of the child welfare agency. “The majority of what we do is for families who need hope, mentoring, resources, and guidance.”

When Social Media Becomes a Full-Time Job: The Breaking Point

Before implementing Agorapulse, Whitney spent the last hour of every day scheduling content, with additional time needed on Fridays to cover weekends.

“I was spending the last hour of my day, every day, scheduling our content,” says Whitney. “On Fridays, I’d have to spend 90 minutes making sure I got through the weekend.”

Managing 16 different social profiles across multiple platforms created a logistical nightmare, especially when supporting two additional partner organizations. The team struggled with duplicated efforts, lost content, and platform-specific formatting challenges.

Finding Clarity in Chaos: A Search for Better Solutions

After years of struggling with Hootsuite and direct platform posting, Whitney knew there had to be a better way. Leading communications for a growing nonprofit across 41 counties demanded a more robust solution. “I started doing research, pretending I knew nothing about social media management tools,” Whitney recalls. “I was looking for something that could do everything we needed but was cost-effective and could grow with us.”

The search for a cost-effective solution for nonprofit budgets was driven by specific needs for:

• Ability to manage multiple social profiles across different platforms
• Seamless integration with partner organizations
• Robust scheduling capabilities
• Comprehensive reporting features

As a nonprofit communications leader, Whitney had to make a compelling business case for moving from a free tool to a paid solution. “I had to make that business proposition back to my agency because we were moving from a free tool to a paid tool, and I had to be able to say that this would be worth it.”

After Whitney evaluated options, Agorapulse emerged as the clear choice, offering the perfect balance of functionality and affordability.

“Agorapulse met that need and then exceeded it. We started out at the lowest-tiered plan, and as our communication efforts have grown, so has our team, so has our plan, and here we are six years in.” (Whitney Craig, Marketing and Communications Director)

Building Digital Bridges to Families in Need: The Transformation

The implementation of Agorapulse brought immediate relief and long-term strategic benefits.

Agorapulse helped Iris Family Support Center to:

• Reduce scheduling time from 6-8 hours weekly to just 2-3 hours
• Streamline management of 16 social profiles across multiple organizations
• Enhance team collaboration with customizable permission settings
• Improve reporting capabilities for demonstrating ROI
• Simplify content adaptation across different platforms

One of the most significant improvements came in how the team manages content across different social platforms. “The way we tell stories has completely changed,” Whitney says. “We’ve gotten better at telling compelling social media stories because we can plug in different forms of media and use the social media pages effectively.”

Their refined approach includes:

• Platform-specific content optimization. “Sometimes we go, ‘That’s a TikTok story. We’re not going to put that anywhere else.'”
• Content repurposing. “Maybe a couple of months later, that would play really well as a Reel. So we’re going to go find that TikTok story. And it’s really easy to find it, replicate it, and put it as a Reel on Instagram.”
• Streamlined scheduling. “Our marketing team lead does the majority of the Iris pages, and he spends his Monday morning working on that. We normally do about two posts a day per platform, so that’s 14 posts, and he’s done on Monday morning.”
• Consistent messaging. The team can maintain brand voice while it adapts the content format for each platform’s requirements.

This strategic approach to content adaptation has helped Iris Family Support Center maintain an active, engaging presence across all their social media channels while significantly reducing the time spent on content management.

Beyond the Numbers: Measurable Impact and Real Results

The transformation has been remarkable.

“Already in January, in the first quarter, we had reached as many people as we had in the whole of the year before, which had been a record-breaking year. (Whitney Craig, Marketing and Communications Director)

Key achievements include:

• Record-breaking engagement levels
• Increased self-referrals for family support services
• Enhanced ability to demonstrate social media ROI to leadership
• More authentic community engagement
• Improved storytelling capabilities across platforms

“We now primarily market on social media,” Whitney says. “We use all the other traditional forms of marketing throughout the year, but we’re always marketing on social media. And we know that’s where we’re going to get the most bang for our buck.”

Empowering Future Growth: The Road Ahead

As Iris Family Support Center continues to evolve, their partnership with Agorapulse grows stronger. “We’ll continue to grow with that, and we will trust that Agorapulse will grow with us,” Whitney says. “Because they have completely done that to this point.”

The transformation has gone beyond metrics to create meaningful community impact.

“It is really gratifying. We’re able to share the behind-the-scenes of our work on our pages and have that authentic engagement because child welfare workers are a very unseen population doing very hard work.” (Whitney Craig, Marketing and Communications Director)

For organizations considering Agorapulse, Whitney offers this advice: “Give it a month, commit for one month, and see how it goes. I have a feeling that it will be seamless enough and will make enough of a difference in their workload that they won’t be able to stop using it after a month.”