Crossposted on Substack.
This is a guest post by Alexandra Voica (Marketing Lead at CFI)
Tl;dr
- CFI uses social media and digital marketing to reach Christians interested in high-impact careers.
- This has grown our audience from a few hundred to 10k+ website visitors/month and led to real career changes and conference attendance.
- Our goals for 2026: sharper audience targeting, improved performance tracking, and a steady cadence of high-quality video content.
Subscribe to Building CapacityGergő approached me at EA Connect to chat about my work at Christians for Impact (CFI). I didn’t expect I’d be writing a post about it a few weeks later, but the conversation prompted me to step back and map what we’re doing, and why, in case it’s helpful for other small EA-orgs like ours.
This is a brief overview of what has worked, how our funnel currently operates, and where the bottlenecks lie.
What CFI Is (and How I Ended Up Here)
Christians for Impact is a nonprofit career advisory for Christians who want to do the most good they can with their careers. It’s essentially like 80,000 Hours, but for thoughtful, ambitious, impact-driven Christians in their early-to-mid careers.
I joined at the end of 2023 as a freelance marketer for 5–10 hours/week while working full-time at a design and user research agency as a User Researcher. After a few months, I realised my work at CFI was far more fulfilling and impactful, so I quit my job. I am now CFI’s first full-time employee.
So why did our board think marketing was worth funding?
Why We’re Taking Marketing Seriously
It comes down to awareness. We can have the best resources, advising programme, and conferences, but if people don’t know about them, our impact stays limited.
Word-of-mouth, a regular newsletter, and attending events can take us to a few hundred people. To reach beyond that, we need online distribution.
Over the past two years, experimenting across platforms has helped us grow from a few hundred website visits per month to ~10,000/month consistently. A large part of that came from:
- Instagram (growing to nearly 3,000 followers from zero)
- Google Search (improving rankings via Google Ads and SEO blogs)
That growth has contributed to:
- 2,500+ newsletter subscribers
- 150+ new advising applications
- ~300 conference attendees across DC and London in 2025 (our biggest year so far)
But do these numbers translate to actual changes in people’s careers? Here are just a couple of examples of how our investment in digital marketing has led to real shifts into higher-impact careers:
Ana, a Rice University Student (pre-med), found us through Google. She was uncertain about her major (and pre-med before), but changed to economics after being exposed to our content. She's now looking to work for a startup and earn to give or start something that directly helps the global poor (e.g. Wave, TapTap Send). She also took a pledge to give 10% or more of her lifetime income to the most effective charities.
Sam, a graduate from Liberty University and a Microsoft intern, found us through a friend who also found us through Google. He had an advising call with our Director, JD, and learned about effective altruism and earning to give. He had JD on his podcast to discuss this, and he decided to pursue earning to give to fund effective charities and is currently working at a startup.
Additionally, a large share of the people we reach are Christians who perhaps wouldn’t engage with Effective Altruism or the idea of “most effective ways of doing good”. Many (though not all) Christians either don’t know about EA or have somewhat negative perceptions of it as being too cold or calculating. While their faith motivates them to help their neighbour, the methods chosen are often not very EA-aligned.
CFI tries to introduce EA concepts to Christians who might otherwise be reluctant to engage with these topics from a purely secular perspective.
When asked, “Did the conference change your beliefs or ideas about anything?”, here are what some of our attendees who came directly from a social media post answered:
“It opened my ideas on animal welfare and how biblical it is, helped me better articulate the balance between duty and heart posture/motivation, also why cash giving is so effective over other forms of aid.”
“Avoiding lifestyle inflation with the call to give a good portion of my pay, which is something I've never considered.”
“It opened my eyes to problems I’d never given much consideration to, e.g., [the] respective talks on animal welfare.”
Right now we use:
- Instagram
- TikTok
- LinkedIn
- YouTube
My workflow is designed for speed because I’m currently the only person managing all our accounts:
- Create for Instagram (primary platform)
- Repurpose for TikTok
- Cross-post to LinkedIn if it fits the audience
- Post to YouTube as a Short if it’s video
Ideally, we’d tailor content to each platform’s strengths. But even with the same core content, we still reach different people across platforms.
Instagram (strongest channel)
When I started, our target audience skewed toward university students, graduates, and early-career professionals, so Instagram was the obvious place to begin with.
It has paid off: Instagram brought 70+ new people to our 2025 London conference who wouldn’t otherwise have found it.
TikTok (good reach, lower conversion so far)
TikTok has a similar demographic, but we’ve seen lower conversion rates (e.g. people signing up to an event/advising afterwards) than on Instagram. One reason for this is that TikTok doesn’t currently offer the same kind of auto-DM workflow we’ve used effectively on Instagram. Another reason is that TikTok values more casual, informal, and ‘authentic’ (as much as I dislike using that word) rather than polished and overly edited content, which our Instagram content tends to be.
LinkedIn (where our best-fit advisees often are)
We’ve started leaning more into LinkedIn via content from JD’s personal account (CFI’s director), for two reasons:
- People trust individuals more than organisations, and we believe JD’s personal brand will lift CFI overall.
- Many of our highest-quality advisees are mid-career professionals, and LinkedIn is simply a better place to find them than Instagram or TikTok.
YouTube (currently underutilised, but still valuable)
CFI’s channel predates me. It’s mostly been used to host:
We’ve experimented with long-form explainer videos (JD on camera), but they’ve gained little traction due to inconsistent posting and limited resources.
Our Current Funnel
People find out about CFI through a few main pathways:
1) Search funnel
Google search → Website → Download free career guide (email-gated) → Newsletter → A small % apply for advising (we still need better tracking here)
Social post → Link to our bio hosting our most important resources or comment-to-DM → Resource/event info → Action (newsletter / advising / event)
3) Event funnel
Social post → Event (conference/workshop) → Advising sign-up
And sometimes it’s:
- word-of-mouth (e.g., JD in 1:1 conversations, friends/family)
- invited talks at universities/conferences
2026 Marketing Plans (and the Bottlenecks)
What we’re doing
Our biggest push in 2026 is launching our upcoming book, All The Lives You Can Change, written by JD and two others who spearheaded the EA for Christians community. That will likely include:
- paid ads
- pitching to hundreds of podcasts
- high-volume creative social media content
Later in the year, our focus shifts to filling two conferences, again with:
- Meta ads
- creative social content
- email outreach
We also want to:
- build a higher-quality podcast with JD as the face
- grow YouTube (short- and long-form)
- keep building JD’s LinkedIn presence
- explore other platforms (X, Reddit, Threads)
What’s currently holding us back
- Lack of a fully streamlined content system
- Target audience drift since I started (which may confuse the algorithm and dilute conversions)
- Need for more high-quality video, posted consistently
- Limited tracking (knowing exactly which platform does what)
- Inconsistent platform-specific strategy (because bandwidth is limited)
The next step is doubling down on a clear target audience, building out a reliable tracking and data analysis system, and creating enough video volume to earn consistent distribution across platforms.
Thankfully, we already have a freelance video editor/filmmaker to support content production. And me going full-time should allow us to build a tighter strategy and tailor content more intentionally by platform.
Ultimately, I strongly believe social media and digital marketing more broadly will remain one of CFI’s most valuable growth levers, and the last two years have proven this.
Now it’s about tightening the system and scaling what’s already working.
If you’d like to get in touch to talk about marketing, CFI, or anything else, please feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or book a short call here. I’d especially love to hear what has/hasn’t worked for you!
