In 2025, YMCA Europe continued to expand its digital presence, connecting with and engaging more people than ever across our online platforms, while connecting and providing the latest updates to our online community.
Through a diverse content strategy with a strong emphasis on video and storytelling, our reach and interaction grew significantly. From social media to our website and newsletters, our online presence provided the latest updates on our programs, initiatives and key areas of work, within our European movement. Here are the results of our joint work in developing our online presence, based on each platform.
On Facebook, our main social media channel, we’ve observed a remarkable increase in outreach, due to the growth of our project and departments. In 2025 we diversified our content and engagement strategies, as well as focus on growth on other platforms we continued engaging within our Facebook communities, reaching 5,107,943 people this year, 10 times more than in 2024!
The main channels audience is comprised of 54.9% female and 45.1% male, and we are happy to say that 50% of them are young people below the age of 34.
Our commitment to sustained engagement shows in our retention of 198,900 engaged individuals and 111,700 followers. Notably, video views surged from 111,300 in 2024 to an impressive 860,200, over 8 times more than last year – as our strategy focuses on video content production, as well as the employment of organic paid advertisement during our key campaigns.
Moving forward to our flagship project, YMCA Roots for Peace, which experienced a steady growth of followers on Facebook, with 3,634 followers, reaching 143,800 people, and engaging 8,980. Roots for Peace’s videos were viewed 28,400 times in 2025. 61% of Roots for Peace’s audience is female and 39% male, 38.4% under 34 years old and 30.2% between the age of 35 and 44.
Throughout the year, we shared content regularly on our Facebook community page, YMCA Connects. Overall, YMCA Connects continues to grow as a vibrant and engaged community of 1,626 members.
On our web page, we posted 180 times (news, events, resources), attracting 70,143 sessions and 101,630 page views by 57,442 users, with a 48.74% engagement rate.
YMCA Europe’s Instagram continues to see a positive growth! This year, we reached 4,724 followers and reached 339,434 people. We also have a staggering number of 918,912 impressions! On Instagram, 54.9% of our audience are female and 45.1% male, 55.6% under 34.
Our newsletter has 7,055 subscribers this year, and our open rate of 44% more than double the average industry open rate of 20%.
The other platforms also also grew this past year. We now have a total of 46,511 views on our Flickr, while our LinkedIn has experienced an increase in impressions (people interacting with our content), amounting to 150,748 impressions with 3,595 page views and 3,514 followers.
In an attempt to expand our reach to more youth-focused platforms, we joined TikTok, where we adapted our video and storytelling approach – having 113 followers, 47,000 pageviews, and over 1500 engagements- as we continue diversifying our content further in 2026.
Videos on our YouTube channel were viewed 21,800 times and watched for 12,268 hours. Due to the restrictive nature of the platform, we stopped posting on X, where we have 3,068 followers.
In a remarkable achievement for our digital outreach efforts, our Giphy GIFs garnered over 5.2 million views in 2024. This milestone underscores the growing engagement and impact of our story-telling and visual content in reaching diverse audiences
As we reflect on our ongoing digital journey this year, we extend our sincere thanks to everyone who continues to support and engage with our team. We look forward to strengthening our connection with our global audience and are excited about what lies ahead in 2026. We hope you are just as excited as we are.
