Talked with a fellow youth pastor, Derek Carpenter, of Bluffton, IN on the phone yesterday and he mentioned his latest idea of promoting his youth events to the entire church family.
Derek purchased a digital photo frame for around $100 and will be uploading his latest youth-event photos to the frame and displaying it on the church’s activities board where other ministries are displaying their latest information.
I suggested that Derek also upload MORE than just photographs to the digital frame, but to create some proportionate slides that includes his youth group logo, their meeting times, and anything else that he may have created digitally that would help identify what the slideshow is advertising. I also suggested that he add those created-images multiple times so as to increase the possibility of them showing up in the slideshow.
I love the idea!
Considering WalMart is having an incredible Black Friday deal on 7″ photo frames ($40!), this may be an idea worth considering for many of us!
I have personally been using youthtracker.net for my student ministries statistics and student-tracking for just one month and am ready to declare from any rooftop available the praises of this online software.
I signed up for Youth Tracker when I first arrived at my new place of ministry here in Western PA.
I immediately plugged in the information I collected during the first night of youth group. Student information inputs like a breeze along with pictures and all vital information.
Report-running is also a simple, few clicks and can be exported as .pdf or .xls (MS Excel format). I love this feature as I am quick to print a .pdf report and just as quick to export data to Excel and print it formatted for my own use.
Some generic reports can be made simply - like an all-student directory and mailing labels formatted to print to our favorite Avery label specs!
I just used the built-in TXTing feature last week to remind our students about our special youth service. The TXTing feature has built-in notification of both sent AND received txt messages. You can tell if a student’s phone has received the txt AND whether or not they’ve actually received it on their handset! TXT’s cost a mere $.05/ea to send from within the software.
What I love most of all is that the entire software is built on the web. I can access it from my youth room computer, my office computer, even my laptop on my couch at home! I am using this software nearly daily and it’s well worth our investment already!
I have also suggested a few changes/upgrades to the authors and they are quick to respond with their gratitude and assurance that my suggestions are being looked over.
If you’re looking for an all-inclusive way to track your student-information, attendance records, and even financial statistics for individual youth accounts, consider trying YouthTracker.net!
Support This Ministry advertises itself as a “Hassle-Free Christian Fundraiser”. From my personal experience, this is exactly the case.
The fundraiser take place through three main avenues:
1. A full-service Christian bookstore
2. An online mall
3. An online advertising directory for local businesses
The full-service bookstore offers your local organization 10% of all sales through the bookstore on books, music, and other resources. One draw-back is that most items for sale on the site can probably be found cheaper with a little search-time.
Support this Ministry partnered with big-retailers like Best Buy, iTunes, Office Depot, Macy’s, Staples, and Walmart to bring percentage-off savings to people who use your site to purchase everyday items! The site serves as a click-through to the major retailers so there is no limit to the available items for purchase!
The advertising directory can be as little or as large as each organization is willing to make it! Local businesses can choose to advertise their services on your Support this Ministry site.
All three fundraising avenues work independently of each other and you don’t need to have one to have the other. The site offers numerous advertising methods to get your supporters the information about the fundraiser site. There are bulletin-inserts and suggested text to send to your church family to get them to use the site. The more people that know about the fundraising site and use it to buy everyday products, the more income your organization can receive!
Within a few days of setting up our fundraising site (CRM’s Site) I had received a phone call from STM’s customer service representative asking me if there was anything I needed help with. I was blown away at their willingness to make things work for us. Currently we have NOT published the site to our church family and therefore haven’t made a dime!
Right now there are PLENTY of resources being developed to help youth leaders communicate easier/better to our students. With the widely available resources like txsignal.com and SYM’s “TXT”, we decided to let you in on a little-known secret out there that would allow you to TXT groups of students FOR FREE from your Internet Browser window!
Did you know that you can send a text-message to a cellphone from within AOL Instant Messenger?!
(If you did, there’s no real reason to keep reading…)
AOL allows you to send TXTs to cellphone numbers very simply - just add a new buddy to your buddies list in this format: +1 555 555 5555 (without spaces).
When you get students contact information, update your buddies list with their cell phone and be sure and keep them informed of updates to your ministry schedule and special events via TXT!
Another suggestion: use a service like Meebo™ or Pidgin™ to keep track of your students Instant Messaging screen names and cell phone contact information. These services allow you to connect to multiple IM services (AOL, Yahoo, Google, etc.) and add buddies in categories! Just be sure and add cellphone numbers under the AOL IM service tab and place in a category like “Youth Cell #s” or something similar.
This ability to TXT students from within AOL Instant Messenger is a FREE method of opening communication-lines with students.
If you haven’t tried adding students’ cellphone numbers to your IM service before, try it and leave a comment letting others know how easy (or difficult?) it was for you!
Walt Mueler (of CPYU.org) has developed a list of discussion-questions for use while watching the MTV VMA’s this Sunday night. This resource would be a great discussion-starter for students with their youth pastor and/or to send to parents that may not know how to openly dialogue with their students on what they watch on television.
The handout is available in Adobe’s PDF format for you print and/or distribute!
They have partnered with hundreds of retailers to bring discounts and freebies to youth workers across the nation. Access the map-of-participating-retailers here.
They also produced a few hard-hitting videos to remind youth workers why they’re important. Video #1 Video #2 Video #3
GRASSROOTSYOUTH is a site for you to find and share the best ministry resources, ideas, and techniques available. We at Grassroots Youth have been collaborating with others in ministry for years and this website is the expression of our belief that ministry can be done better when it is done as a team!
Talked with a fellow youth pastor, Derek Carpenter, of Bluffton, IN on the phone yesterday and he mentioned his latest idea of promoting his youth events to the entire church family.
I have personally been using youthtracker.net for my student ministries statistics and student-tracking for just one month and am ready to declare from any rooftop available the praises of this online software.
“Mangled Maxims” is a game designed in MS PowerPoint that challenges students to decipher popular catch-phrases.