Social Media Coordinator | Muskegon Polish Festival
May 2025 – Sept. 2026 | Muskegon, MI · Hybrid
From an urgent call for volunteers to documenting a rain-soaked Labor Day weekend at Hackley Park, this is how I planned, wrote, and ran the Muskegon Polish Festival's social channels as its sole Social Media Coordinator.
Sole Social Media Coordinator
333,636+ views across Facebook + Instagram
146 posts across 2 seasons
1,134 clicks on a single post
The Muskegon Polish Festival is an annual two-day Labor Day weekend event at Hackley Park celebrating Polish food, music, and culture, planned and run entirely by volunteers. I was the festival's sole Social Media Coordinator from May 2025 to September 2026. This is a board-recognized role on the Marketing Committee, working alongside the Marketing Chair to keep social content aligned with the festival's advertising, website, and merchandise strategy.
The workload scales with the calendar: about 1–3 hours a week in the off-season, rising to 5–10 hours a week from June through the festival. I reported on performance to the Board of Directors, and for the 2026 season I pulled the analytics myself to see what that reporting actually looks like in the numbers.
The Role
Owning the Social Calendar:
Strategy & Calendar Ownership
I built and maintained a formal content calendar with structured production stages: due date, format, meta description, draft, images, design, proofread, publish status. The channels had run ad hoc before that; this gave them an actual editorial workflow.
For 2026, I designed a two-tier content system: recurring evergreen posts (the Cash is King raffle, free-admission info, the Busia Contest, Save the Date reminders) running alongside single-spotlight posts for individual vendors, bands, and sponsors, split across main feed posts and Instagram Stories.
Posting cadence shifts seasonally per the festival's official plan: about once a week from October through May, 2–3 times a week in June and July, and daily through August as Labor Day weekend approaches. That cadence shows up directly in the data: this year's export tracks 34 published Facebook posts between June 17 and September 6 alone, almost all of it in the eight weeks before the gates opened.
Setting Up & Running Paid Campaigns
Paid Advertising in Meta Ads Manager
Beyond organic posting, I planned, built, and ran the festival's paid campaigns directly in Meta Ads Manager, setting the objective, budget, audience, and placements myself rather than just boosting a post with the default settings.
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I built and refined a custom saved audience in Ads Manager for the 2026 season, then ran both live campaigns against it.
Reach: an estimated 1.6–1.9 million people
Location: adults 18+ within 25 miles of 13 West Michigan communities
Interests: 17 categories spanning food festivals, Polish and Eastern European culture, and volunteering/nonprofit signals
Additional filter: a Polish-language field-of-study filter, to reach people with a direct cultural connection to the festival
Refinement: created 8/25/26, revised once on 8/27/26 before spend went behind it
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Built to promote the volunteer sign-up post after we fell behind on recruitment, only about half of the 350 needed spots were filled with a month to go before the festival.
Goal: send people directly to the volunteer sign-up link, not just generate likes
Budget: $10/day, spending $77.72 total
Reach: 7,322 people across 12,597 impressions
Clicks: 448 link clicks, a 3.56% click-through rate
Landing page views: 358, at $0.22 per view
Organic lift: 545 additional post engagements (69 reactions, 25 shares, 3 saves)
Outcome: volunteer sign-ups caught up, and all spots were filled by the week of the event
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Built around the festival's Facebook Event listing, aimed specifically at RSVPs rather than clicks or reach.
Budget: $4 lifetime, spending $2.28 total
Results: 52 RSVPs at $0.04 per result
Reach: 873 people
Click-through rate: 9.64% overall
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$80.00 in ad spend
13,697 impressions
8,195 reach
410 tracked conversions (landing page views + event RSVPs)
Blended CPR of about $0.20
Content in Action
What ran between June and September, and how each piece performed.
Volunteer recruitment
Opened the season with a call for 350+ volunteers, then followed up with a late-August push that became the season's top-performing link post. (8,617 reach · 1,134 clicks)
The Busia & Babcia Contest
Launched a new contest inviting attendees to nominate the family matriarch who's "already earned the title of queen," pairing playful copy with festival-branded graphics for its debut post. (9,535 views · 328 clicks)
Free admission for military & first responders
Wrote and designed the season's single best-performing post, promoting free admission for active-duty military, veterans, first responders, and anyone under 21. (13,322 views · 384 engagements)
Band lineup spotlight
Closed out pre-festival week with a swipe-through carousel introducing the full 2026 polka lineup, the season's highest-reach organic photo post. (10,183 views · 5,683 reach)
Rain Didn’t Stop the Polka, or the Posting
Real-time posts, Reels, and a rainy-weekend wrap-up
Both festival days in 2026 saw rain, and I leaned into it rather than working around it: "Some say polka dancing in the rain is more fun," ran as a real-time post alongside footage of the actual dance floor. I produced two short-form video Reels across the festival weekend, including a "Roll Out the Barrel" clip posted mid-event to pull same-day foot traffic toward Hackley Park. Together, the Reels drew a combined reach of 8,195 and 338 reactions, comments, and shares.
I closed the season with a wrap-up thank-you post to volunteers, sponsors, vendors, performers, and attendees, timed to keep goodwill going into next year's fundraising and volunteer recruitment.
333,636 total views
By The Numbers
Two seasons, two platforms, one verified total
Combined Total — 2025 & 2026 Seasons (Facebook + Instagram)
191,330 total reach
6,781 reactions, likes, comments, & shares
9,585 link & post clicks (Facebook)
Let’s Make Something Great
Running a channel alone means owning every part of it, the content calendar in the off-season, the crisis post, the Reel filmed in the rain, the numbers pulled for the Board after. That range is what I bring to a team. If you need someone who can move between strategy and ground-level execution without losing the voice, I'd love to hear from you.