This year, YMCA Europe saw significant growth across our online platforms, reaching and engaging more people than ever.
With a diverse content strategy and a focus on video and storytelling, our outreach and interaction surged. From social media to our website and newsletters, we strengthened connections across our global community. As we celebrate these milestones, we look forward to building on this momentum in 2025!
On Facebook, a primary pillar of our online presence, we’ve observed a remarkable increase in outreach. In 2024 we diversified our content and engagement strategies, as well as focus on growth on other platforms we continued engaging within our Facebook communities, reaching 659,790 people this year!
Within our audience, 58.3% are female, 41,7% male, and we are happy to say that 51.9% of them are young people below the age of 34.
Our commitment to sustained engagement shows in our retention of 123,700 engaged individuals and 111,400 followers. Notably, video views surged from 61,113 in 2023 to an impressive 111,300, almost doubled this year – as we focus our priority of producing more video based content!
Turning our attention to our flagship project, YMCA Roots for Peace experienced a steady growth of followers on Facebook, with 3,538 followers, reaching 127,023 people, and engaging 9,089. Roots for Peace’s videos were viewed 19,933 times in 2024. 61,2% of Roots for Peace’s audience is female and 38,8% male, 40.1% under 34 years old and 27.9% between the age of 35 and 44.
We posted 205 times on our Facebook community page, YMCA Connects, this year. We are happy to receive a total of 212 comments and 3,356 reactions from our 800 active members. In total, YMCA Connects has 1,626 members.
On our web page, we posted 177 times (news, events, resources), attracting 66,900 sessions and 117,000 page views by 46,000 users. Remarkably, 70% of this reach was organic, with a 55,42% engagement rate.
YMCA Europe’s Instagram continues to see a positive growth! This year, we reached 3,978 followers and reached 124,226 people. We also have a staggering number of 918,912 impressions! On Instagram, 55.9% of our audience are female and 44.1% male, 59.4% under 34.
Our newsletter has 5,946 subscribers this year, and our open rate of 42.1% more than double the average industry open rate of 20%.
Our other social media also grew this past year. We now have a total of 36,525 views on our Flickr and our LinkedIn has experienced an increase in impressions (people interacting with our content), amounting to 161,737 impressions with 3,057 page views and 2,796 followers.
Our YouTube channel was viewed 12,900 times and watched for 12,100 hours. We are veering away from Twitter—now called X—however, in 2024 we accumulated 3,068 followers.
In a remarkable achievement for our digital outreach efforts, our Giphy GIFs garnered over 4.8 million views in 2024. This milestone underscores the growing engagement and impact of our story-telling and visual content in reaching diverse audiences across digital platforms.
As we reflect on our stellar digital journey in 2024, we would like to extend our gratitude to everyone who has continuously supported our team. We look forward to connecting even deeper with our global audience. We are excited to see what 2025 brings us, and we hope you are, too.
