An East Texas Ministry Hosts Its Own Videos and Shares Them Home

Most small ministries and small businesses in East Texas do the same thing with their best video. They upload it straight to Facebook and hope.

Don and Patti Nichols did it the other way around, and it is worth a look whether you run a church outreach or a roofing crew.

What is on the page

The site has a ministry video page filmed September 15, 2026 in Ore City. Eleven videos. Don explains how ministry starts right where you live: grocery pickups, loading food, and a dessert plan so families get something extra.

That local work is real. In Don's own words on the blog, they are helping the Ore City Ministerial Alliance feed people in need, and this fall they funded cake mix, eggs, oil and frosting for 60 cakes for 60 families. The same post says they plan to buy reading glasses for those same folks in December, and to offer free readers at FBC Ore City and to the teachers, staff, cafeteria workers and janitors at New Diana ISD.

The part most people miss

Here is the lesson. Open any single video, like Serve Right Here, and look at where things live.

• The video file itself is served from donandpatti.com. Not borrowed from a platform.
• The Facebook, X and text message share buttons all send people back to that same donandpatti.com watch page.
• Right under the video sits a give button for Local Community Outreach and a "Want to lend a hand?" link to the contact page.
• The footer says it plainly: every photograph is theirs.

So when somebody shares it on Facebook, Facebook is the hallway. The ministry's own page is the room. Every share brings a neighbor back to a place Don and Patti control, where the next step is one tap away.

Short clips, long stories

The eleven videos are not all the same length, and that is on purpose. Short hooks for a quick scroll. Longer stories for the people who want the whole thing. All of it lives in one place.

Ore City ministry videos, length in seconds

Source: Don and Patti Nichols, ministry video page, November 3, 2026 ↗

Add those up and it is about 17 minutes of video. Every second of it points home.

The data ownership lesson for your business

If your best video only lives on Facebook, the views, the comments and the reach all play by Facebook's rules. If the platform changes, or the account gets locked, the video and the audience go with it.

Here is the simple version you can do this month:

1. Keep the original file. Save your best video somewhere you control, not just on your phone.
2. Put it on your own website. One page, one video, one clear next step under it: call, quote, give, or book.
3. Share the link, not just the upload. Post to Facebook and wherever else, but send people to your page.
4. Say what you do with people's information. Don and Patti's privacy policy says they do not sell or rent personal information and that prayer requests stay confidential. A line like that builds trust before anybody fills out a form.

A small ministry in Ore City figured this out. A small business in Longview, Marshall or Jefferson can too.