EPIC's Odd Advantage: The Handshake Before the Megaphone

The peculiar thing about a modern marketing campaign is that nearly everyone can do their own part perfectly and the campaign can still fail. The publicist lands the interview. The designer makes the square graphic. The media buyer finds an audience. The developer builds the page. The fundraiser writes the appeal. Then the interview points to yesterday's message, the graphic arrives after the ad deadline, and the donation page asks a visitor to solve a puzzle. Five small victories produce one large shrug.

EPIC - a RESULTS Agency was built around this gap. Founded in 2019 by Jennifer Willingham and Jeff Roman, the Murfreesboro, Tennessee company has the familiar menu of a full-service shop: strategy, PR, fundraising, websites, branding, creative, social, email, video and paid media. The more revealing product is not on the menu. It is the handoff.

EPIC works mainly where belief and business overlap - nonprofits, ministries, authors, publishers, filmmakers and public figures with a cause attached. Its clients have included Orange County Rescue Mission, African Children's Choir, Angel Studios, Zonderkidz, Savannah Guthrie, Allie Beth Stuckey and the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. These are not customers shopping for a jaunty slogan. They are trying to turn conviction into an action: donate, buy, attend, watch, share.

01 / The hidden productA full-service agency, minus the buffet

“Full service” can be agency Esperanto for “we would like every line of your budget.” EPIC makes a more interesting argument. A campaign is a sequence, and sequences fail at their seams. When the people shaping the message also understand the landing page, the donor file, the talent calendar and the reporting dashboard, fewer ideas are lost in translation.

That explains the breadth of the 31-person team: publicity directors beside creative directors, a web developer beside an ad strategist, video producers beside nonprofit veterans. The company says its staff carries more than 125 combined years inside nonprofits and ministries, plus more than 200 years across publishing, media, television, film and communications. The arithmetic is less important than the design. EPIC hires for both sides of the table.

Consider Plus Nothing, a ministry that wanted to distribute 50,000 copies of The Life and Teachings of Jesus of Nazareth before Easter. The obvious temptation was a broad awareness campaign. EPIC instead designed two clean routes into the same story: individuals could request a few books to share personally; large partners could move them at scale. Web, email, social, video and paid media all pointed toward those choices. In three weeks, 224,151 books shipped - 4.48 times the original target.

02 / What failed firstThe bottleneck was rarely attention

The agency's case studies read like a catalogue of blocked pipes. Sound of Freedom had been shelved for years, carried a politicized subject and entered a Fourth of July weekend against studio films. JDFI had an outdated, complicated website while more than 85 percent of its users arrived on mobile. African Children's Choir needed one appeal to make sense in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Savannah Guthrie's children's book had a national profile but scarce time and three powerful organizations - NBC, Zonderkidz and the author team - to keep aligned.

In each case, the first failure was structural. Publicity without shared language becomes noise. Traffic without a good place to land becomes leakage. A universal message sent to three donor cultures becomes beige. EPIC's change of mind, repeated from project to project, is to treat the campaign infrastructure as part of the story.

For JDFI, that meant rebuilding the core site in 30 days before scaling content and paid distribution. EPIC simplified navigation, reworked donation flows and designed mobile-first. The agency reports that new visitors rose more than 110 percent, social engagement grew 290 percent and donation revenue increased 24 percent. The website was not the wrapping. It was the floor.

For Sound of Freedom, the floor was coordination: one core message, aligned agency and studio partners, prepared talent, managed schedules and outreach across mainstream, conservative and faith outlets. EPIC reports 783 pieces of coverage during a six-plus-month engagement. The film reached number one at the U.S. box office on July 4 and passed $250 million globally. Marketing did not manufacture the audience's concern. It gave that concern a coherent route to the theater.

03 / The marketFluency is a business model

EPIC sits between several familiar alternatives. A specialist PR firm may have deeper newsroom relationships in one vertical. A performance shop may optimize ads with greater zeal. A fundraising consultancy may know the donor database by heart. An internal team knows the institution. EPIC's wager is that many mission-led clients lose more value between those specialists than they gain within any one specialty.

This is also why its faith orientation matters commercially. The company does not treat “purpose-driven” as a soft-focus stock photograph. It understands the vocabulary, sensitivities and calendar of Christian publishing, entertainment and fundraising. That fluency lowers explanation costs. It also narrows the market. An organization that wants ideological distance from faith-based work, or needs a single deeply technical specialty, may prefer another shop.

The business is privately held and fee-for-service, using project work and longer partnerships; EPIC reports an average relationship of 2.5 years. It does not behave like software, despite its fondness for systems. Its scale comes from repeatable campaign architecture and a multidisciplinary team, not a self-serve dashboard. Clients are buying judgment and ownership, both stubbornly human products.

The method has conditions. It works when a client can make decisions quickly, share access across teams and agree on a measurable action. It weakens when every department protects its own version of the message, approvals move slower than the news cycle, or the mission is used to excuse a muddy offer. Integration is not automatic harmony. It simply puts the disagreement in one room, where somebody can finally settle it.

04 / The useful contradictionBig numbers, small hinges

EPIC likes a box score. Its site counts more than 2,500 projects and over $250 million raised for nonprofit partners across seven years. Individual studies supply the fireworks: 1.79 billion media impressions and 941 percent ROI for an Allie Beth Stuckey book-and-event launch; one billion impressions for Savannah Guthrie's children's book; 145 percent of goal for African Children's Choir across three countries.

But the instructive details are almost comically ordinary. A 185-person launch team needs managing. A celebrity has limited interview time. Donors in three countries should not receive the same bland appeal. A page viewed mainly on phones should work on a phone. A film with hostile press needs prepared people speaking from the same text. The large result hangs on the small hinge.

That is EPIC's odd advantage. The agency may be paid for publicity, a website or a fundraising campaign. What it really sells is the moment before any of those things go public - the meeting in which the message becomes clear, the jobs acquire owners and the handoffs stop being hopeful guesses. The megaphone gets the attention. The handshake makes it useful.