Getting Your Death Work Out There, Beyond the Algorithm
This blog started as a podcast episode. I sat down and wrote out three pages of notes for that episode - on what I wanted to share about my thoughts on getting our death work, arts, and healing offerings out there beyond social media. I recorded the podcast, and then I sat down and reworked my notes to become this blog. 🌱🕊️
I want to help us death workers use our time wisely, and that’s why I’m writing this at all - because our work is too precious and too needed to be lost in an algorithm.
I’ve spent years experimenting with how to share my work in ways that feel soulful and sustainable, and I want to pass on what I’ve learned. Not as a marketing expert, because I’m definitely not that, but as someone who has walked this path and has built her practice through real community, real relationships, and real devotion. My hope is that as you read, something inside you relaxes. Something reminds you that your work doesn’t have to live inside an endless scrolling feed to be felt. 🔥
We deserve ways of sharing our work that feel human. Ways that honor the slowness, the intimacy, and the depth that death work requires. And this is my offering toward that.
The back story…
I started sharing my death work officially on Instagram in 2017, though truthfully I’d been sharing my death work long before that - on my personal page, inside my Atlanta community, through classes, and on a now-deleted Facebook page. Back then, when I was working at a green burial cemetery in Conyers, GA and had just launched Atlanta Death Midwifery, everything I posted was meant for the people right around me. I wanted my community to know their options. I wanted them to know what I knew about death care and funeral choices. It was the early “soul era” of death work online, when the conversations were slower, warmer, more intimate. My work was mostly with warm bodies. Instagram was simply an extension of what I was already doing on the ground.
There were gifts to that time. Social media made me visible and available to people who genuinely needed my care. It linked me into a wider death work community. It taught me, connected me, and helped me support myself (literally). I will never stop being grateful for that platform. The gifts I have received there have been deep and true. ✨🕯️
But the costs were real too. Screen fatigue is a son-of-a… The “hooked in” feeling I’d get after somehow being there for 20 minutes when I came on just to send one message. The expectation to stay warm and open in my DMs even when every part of me needed to be off the screen. Algorithm crap. The feeling of being constantly “on.”
…And then came 2020, when the pandemic moved all of my offerings online. For someone living with chronic illness, this shift was both necessary and a blessing. It made my work accessible and supported me in turn. Again, grateful for the platform. But it ain’t all of it. Things have changed there, and I want us to move with these changes.
Where we are now…
My friend and colleague, Daje Aloh, recently called Instagram “the crazy bazaar.” I laughed out loud because she hit the nail on the head with that perfect metaphor. It used to feel warmer and intimate. Now it feels like an intersection in Times Square. When you put your death work out there, it’s natural to think that the first step is to post online…and I’ve suggested that, and still kind of do.
Social media is a powerful tool. But it’s just that: a tool. 🛠️
Here’s a secret: smaller audiences in our work, honestly, are often better. You didn’t get into death work to go viral. It’s kind of fun for a second when something you made does do that, maybe. But that’s not why you’re there. You’re on social media to build community, to shift culture, to reach out, to make your work available.
Social media has value when we use it strategically. But… your newsletters are the sacred hearth. Newsletters are where people who want to be there for your work gather. They choose to receive your words. It’s simply a more intimate space. I adore writing newsletters for this reason. They don’t feel spammy or performative. They feel like craft. I love reading newsletters I’ve subscribed to. And I’m more likely to go to an event I hear about in a newsletter than one I missed during an IG scroll binge. If you need help moving your work from social media to newsletters, reach out!
Repurpose, reuse, recycle 📻🌾📚
You have something super valuable to share, death worker. And if you share it once on Instagram, it’s highly likely that it’s going to get lost.
Hot tip: take what you already have, your Instagram posts, small reflections, teachings, and repurpose them. Turn a post into a blog essay. Add local keywords into your blog so people in your region can find you when they’re searching for support. (Example: if you live in Belfast, Maine, you need to use “Belfast, Maine death doula” in your blogs…see what I did there? 🙂 ) Then record yourself reading that same essay, and now you have a podcast episode. I know, I know—you’re rolling your eyes about making a podcast. But they are actually a lot easier to make than you may think.
The point I’m trying to make is this: let your wisdom live in places where it won’t disappear in 24 hours.
Blogs help people find you.
Podcasts help people feel you.
Newsletters help people stay with you.
And all of that creates an ecosystem for your work. This creates lasting change.
IRL
If you’re called to work with more warm bodies, then you’ve got to get outside the algorithm. Workshops in libraries or yoga studios. Small classes in bookshops or art galleries. Flyers at the co-op. A stack of zines at a free little library. Community radio. Collaborations with herbalists, doulas, artists, healers.
📣 You do not need to be everywhere; you just need to be where it feels aligned.
Choose a couple of channels that feel good for your body, your art, and the way your devotion works. Be consistent, not constant. Let your social media be the doorway, but build your lighthouses elsewhere.
Your work travels through care, through resonance, through web streams, through community, not just through an algorithm.
*If you need some super duper one-on-one help with this stuff, see my mentorship sessions with me here! I LOVE helping death doulas, death workers, grief guides, healers, and artists LIVE their work in sustainable and meaningful ways.
