Curt Landry Ministries is a humanitarian non-profit organisation focused on outreach and community-building. It offers welcoming virtual and in-person spaces where individuals can engage with biblical teachings while deepening their understanding and appreciation of Jewish heritage and its vital connection to Christianity.
Darrell Puckett, Creative Media Director at Curt Landry Ministries, oversees all creative aspects of the organisation, balancing innovation with a business-focused approach. Puckett prioritises data, analytics, and organic reach to scale the ministry's gospel and broaden its impact.
His team, driven by a passion for sharing Curt Landry’s prophetic and spiritual message with a global audience, explored multiple options for scaling content quickly in several languages. After testing a number of competitors, Darrell and his team chose HeyGen to expand their reach, scale multilingual content, and significantly enhance their global outreach capabilities.
Reaching diverse nations in their native languages
Darrell wanted to take the spoken word to the next level by reaching diverse global audiences in a relatable and authentic way. Curt Landry Ministries has an initiative titled "Reaching the Nations,” which aims to connect with people in their native language using Rabbi Curt's spiritual content.
Having been with the ministry for two and a half years, one of Darrell's primary goals is to make Rabbi Curt’s spiritual teachings accessible in multiple languages through their YouTube channel. Traditional translation and dubbing processes were expensive, time-consuming, and often inconsistent. Their key requirements were natural-sounding voice tones, accurate lip synchronisation, and preservation of emotional cadence—all of which are crucial for spiritual content.
“Hearing the spoken word in your own language is incredibly powerful. We wanted to ensure that Rabbi Curt Landry’s message resonated in a truly authentic way, but doing this manually was simply not scalable,” said Darrell. “The AI had to be almost perfect. When people watch religious content, they connect very deeply with the speaker’s personality and emotion.”
Preserving emotional depth with AI
HeyGen’s AI video platform quickly emerged as the most reliable tool for their needs. It can maintain the original speakers' emotional depth, tone, and cadence while providing realistic lip synchronisation in translated languages.
The team started by translating content into Spanish, launching the “Curt Landry en Español” YouTube channel as a proof of concept. The workflow involves cutting long-form content, such as Shabbat services and podcasts, into manageable video segments. The team uploads clean video feeds to HeyGen for translation and processing, reviews the output with a bilingual team member to ensure accuracy and cultural relevance, and then distributes the content through YouTube, social media platforms, and Curt Landry Ministries’ One New Man Network app.
On average, the team translates four Shabbat services each month, totalling approximately 4.5 hours of content. In addition, they produce four main podcast episodes per month, each around 40 minutes in length, and create one short video per day, resulting in approximately 30 shorts per month.
By leveraging HeyGen’s cutting-edge video translation technology, the ministry has overcome language, time, and resource barriers to deliver its message in an authentic and efficient way to a global audience. “It’s enabling us to reach people in their own languages, with our small team, at a scale that was never possible earlier,” said Darrell.
Five-fold audience growth and worldwide scalability
The results of the Spanish-language pilot were both swift and remarkable. Within the first year, the Curt Landry en Español YouTube channel grew from zero to more than 5,700 subscribers, far exceeding the team’s original target of 1,000.
“The technology was so accurate that we saw immediate traction. It felt authentic, and audiences connected with it,” said Darrell.
The success of the Spanish channel confirmed that the strategy would work well for future languages. Curt Landry Ministries plans to launch a Mandarin-language channel next, followed by Hebrew and Arabic translations. By the end of 2025, the aim is to reach 25,000 subscribers for Curt Landry en Español, with plans to integrate the content into the organisation’s website and mobile app, providing a more comprehensive experience for the Spanish-speaking audience.
“If I close my eyes, I need it to sound as close to the original voice and tonality as possible, just in a different language,” said Darrell. “HeyGen has nailed that, which is why it scales so well. Now, it is up to my team to take the strategy behind it and build on it further.”
