The Des Moines Playhouse.
BRAND APPLICATION • SOCIAL MEDIA • layout design • Photography
THE PROJECT
Last summer, I joined The Des Moines Community Playhouse as their Marketing & Philanthropy Intern, where I stepped into a little bit of everything-- writing copy, capturing photos, designing graphics and planning out a content calendar. One of my goals was to create social posts that felt energetic, polished and personal, all while supporting ticket sales and community engagement.
What I Started With
The Playhouse is busy with 11+ shows a season, 3-6 youth classes running daily, donor events, rehearsals, behind-the-scenes moments and countless stories waiting to be told. I needed to create content that could keep up with the large audience base and attract views and follows from thousands of accounts.
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These are a few of the posts I created for the brand and how they performed based on my analytics report. Click on each subhead to open the post in Instagram.
For Bright Star, we had an unusual challenge. Compared to the typically well-known season opener, most of our audience wasn’t familiar with the show. Instead of waiting to begin marketing closer to the performance, I wanted to plant seeds early.
I brought my camera into an early rehearsal and captured the cast members warming up, directors blocking scenes and a stage manager taking notes. These behind-the-scenes details helped audiences feel like they were “in the room” long before opening night, driving interest in a new story.
This strategy paid off with nearly a 4x increase in visibility from behind the scenes content from last year's season opener, and interactions nearly tripled, proving that early storytelling from my photography builds real momentum.
My team wanted to share our long list of nominations for the Cloris Awards, the local theatre awards competition. I wanted the post to stay consistent with The Playhouse's brand, and also celebrate all of the hard work from productions this season.
With so many nominations to celebrate, I designed a clean carousel that balanced visuals celebrating this past season with digestible text. I created something polished enough to honor the work, but simple enough to read through quickly.
Last year’s award post reached 1.8k views on instagram; this one reached 5.2k, nearly tripling visibility. Even with more text than usual, the carousel kept viewers swiping, sharing, and engaging through all the slides.
This year’s Penguin Project title (Honk Jr) wasn’t as instantly compelling as it has been in the past (Frozen Jr, Annie Jr, etc.). Because of this, we were down in ticket sales. I shifted the focus of our social strategy to the heart of the program—the mentorship model, processes and life-changing experiences for the kids involved.
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This post was part content creation, part education and part mission storytelling.
The post matched the performance of our biggest show-centered posts, showing how well audiences respond when we communicate our mission, not just marketing.
Opening night for the Penguin Project is pure magic, and I wanted our traditional opening night post to feel that way. The photos I posted were full of movement, celebration and the behind-the-scenes teamwork audiences never get to see.
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I also wanted to post the content in a timely manner, so I spent the performance culling, editing and preparing the post to go live just after the show.
This post reached almost 5,000 views on Instagram, more than doubling last year's penguin project opening night post, and was the most engaging Penguin Project posts of the season in terms of interactions.
This post was designed to reinforce the Playhouse’s identity as the community theatre in Des Moines. When a cast member, who also happened to be a local celebrity, wrote a thoughtful blog post about the collaborative process of community theatre, I transformed it into a storytelling carousel using quotes from the blog and photos of him in our upcoming production.
The audience loved it. This post became one of the most engaged brand-forward posts of the season, proving the power of authentic community storytelling.
Closing the Curtain
While my content was all up in terms of engagement compared to previous years', the content I produced also created a spike in engagement from previous months'.
Content views across our socials platforms were up 81% over the period of internship, with a 66% increase of views from non-followers and an upward trend in followers.