Case Study · Economic Development
Luling EDC
A town of under six thousand people, with a channel that reaches well past the city limits.
Views from the Luling EDC's own analytics, December 2025 to July 2026, as of October 31, 2026. Population per the 2020 U.S. Census.
Who we work with
Luling is a small town in Caldwell County, an hour from both Austin and San Antonio, best known for oil, barbecue, and a watermelon festival that has run for generations. The Luling EDC is the body charged with bringing employers in and keeping the town worth staying in.
The challenge
Small towns are not short of stories. They are short of anyone telling them outside the county line.
A town this size gets described rather than heard from. It shows up as an exit sign, a barbecue recommendation, or a line in a regional growth report, and the people who actually live and hire and build there are rarely the ones talking. Meanwhile the audience that matters most to an EDC, the employer weighing a site or the family weighing a move, is somewhere else entirely, forming an impression from almost nothing.
The EDC was not short on substance either. There are real employers here doing work most people would not expect to find in a town of this size, alongside the ordinary municipal business that decides whether a place feels looked after. None of it travels on its own.
Then the constraint every small public body has, and it is sharper here than in a metro suburb. A very small team, no communications department, and no realistic path to standing up production in-house. Whatever gets built has to keep running without a staffer whose job it becomes.
What we did
Three moves, built for a team that does not have a comms department.
Let the town talk instead of describing it
Every episode is a conversation with somebody who is actually doing the thing, an employer, a city staffer, an organizer. Nobody narrates Luling over stock footage. The people who live there make the case better than a brochure can.
Made it a series, not a video
A repeatable interview format, a consistent look, thumbnails, and a publishing rhythm on the EDC's own channel. The value is in the back catalogue that builds up, which is why the format had to survive without us in the room.
Covered the unglamorous alongside the headline
A manufacturer building careers is the story that travels. Property standards and the public library are the ones that tell a resident the town is being run properly. A channel that only carries wins reads like marketing, so this one carries both.
The work
Let's Talk Luling, published on the EDC's own channel under its own branding. Every play here is a play there.
How a rocket company is building careers in a small Texas town
Property standards and home values · Ryan DeCamp
The library and the Watermelon Thump · Dayton Bailey
What people watched
Each episode gets cut down for the feeds. These are the clips that traveled furthest, and most of them are about ordinary town business.
The two lines on your electric bill
Rocket testing in Luling
The City Manager on vampire power
Career pathways at Luling ISD
The outcome
Luling has a voice that carries now. When someone wants to know what is actually happening in town, there is a growing library of people from Luling explaining it themselves, on a channel the EDC owns.
The audience is not bounded by the city limits, and that is the part worth sitting with. Between December 2025 and July 2026, the EDC's videos were viewed more than 365,000 times. Fewer than 6,000 people live in Luling. The people forming an impression of Luling now include a great many who have never driven through it.
The range of the catalogue is doing quiet work too. An episode about a manufacturer hiring locally sits next to one about property standards and one about the library and the Watermelon Thump. A prospective employer sees a town that talks openly about the ordinary parts of running itself, which is a more convincing signal than any single success story.
What the EDC has now is not a folder of videos. It is a format, a channel with an audience already attached, and a back catalogue that keeps answering questions after the week it was published.
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