Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing and Friends in Busi­ness spon­sored a two-person pan­el last night called “Quak­er Voic­es, Dig­i­tal Paths” and fea­tur­ing Glo­ria Sul­li­van, who has over 600,000 fol­low­ers across Tik­Tok and Insta­gram, and Grif­fin Macaulay, con­tent cre­ator for Dun­geons and Drag­ons. Glo­ria does­n’t gen­er­al­ly talk about being a Quak­er on her chan­nel but did in Jan­u­ary. It’s had over 300,000 views and a stag­ger­ing 6,042 comments. 

The scale of the new­er forms of online media is real­ly stag­ger­ing, as is the sim­plic­i­ty of start­ing a chan­nel. There’s no need to incor­po­rate or find fun­ders or write mis­sion state­ments: you just start talk­ing to the com­put­er. It quick­ly becomes all-consuming of course, and there’s a lot of thought that goes into the top­ics and scope of the chan­nel. All the pop­u­lar Tik­Toks also have lots of edits to speed them up. It’s a lot of work to do this part or full-time.

Grif­fin talked about being known for a thing and remain­ing pas­sion­ate about it even in a vac­u­um. It’s the follow-your-passion advice: lov­ing what you do will pull peo­ple to you and you will find a way to turn it into a business.

In some ways, I feel that at least some of the work my col­leagues and I are doing ¹is akin to an out­field­er scan­ning the sky for pop balls com­ing in from these inter­net men­tions. When a pop­u­lar influ­encer talks about Quak­ers I’m sure hun­dreds of fin­gers open a new tab to ask “What is a Quak­er?” and “What Do Quak­ers Believe?” We hope­ful­ly show up in the search with easily-digestible answers and links to Quak­er com­mu­ni­ties. I asked Glo­ria and Grif­fin for ideas about how we could bet­ter sup­port inquir­ers they might send our way. We’re doing a lot already — good search engine opti­miza­tion, catchy URLs — but there was some good advice on using Insta­gram bet­ter and real­ly sim­pli­fy­ing our mes­sag­ing and turn­ing it into stories. 

1. At Friends Jour­nal and Quak­er­S­peak, Quak­ers Today, and Quak​er​.org