Exposure for Religious Organizations.. Any Ideas?

Hey all,

I have an interesting question for you, to see if you have any ideas you could throw my way.

I was wondering how best to get exposure for a religious organization, or organizations in general. Ideally this would entail strategies for Social Media, SEO, and more, from a local perspective (and after checking, the locality I'd be working with only has minor search engine competition... definitely a plus).

Here was the plan I was thinking...

The organization's website is built on Wordpress, which in my experience makes SEO easier. But also, it's easier to employ social media tactics as well, with the sharing plug-ins. I'd think between all the members of the organization, coupled with the sharing options from Facebook and Twitter alone (+retweeting, "sharing", organizing a Facebook Group, and using both as a means of promotion), word could spread pretty quickly.

I was also thinking about having the organization gather volunteers to do some work as well via Twitter (search.twitter.com) and Facebook, targeting local prospects/people.

Next would come the SEO for top keywords. With Wordpress I usually have little to no issues ranking for lower competition keywords, so that's not a problem here. The question would be: is there a way to leverage the organization's own authority to get authority backlinks (.gov, .edu, etc) and rank for more competitive keywords?

If you guys have more/other ideas, please let me know. The above is mostly brainstorming aloud, but given the religious nature of the organization and its locality-specific intentions, I'd think something like that could be fairly viral, hence the emphasis on social media.

Thanks!
-Tom