Last year I shared with you some of the ways my youth ministry communicates with teens and parents throughout the week, and last week I posted the entire video of my seminar on the subject, too.

If you watched the seminar video, these points will sound familiar to you. Here are five things to remember about your youth group announcements and how you communicate them.

1. Communication is a fine art that always seems to be morphing.

Each year when I present the seminar, “Communicating with teens and parents throughout the week,” at the Simply Youth Ministry Conference and I have to significantly update the content. It’s shocking how quickly it becomes outdated! Communication methods change so quickly as technology changes, new tools are introduced, and existing tools evolve.

It’s easy to look at communication over the span of decades and see how the printed word transitioned to the telegraph, which transitioned to the telephone and now how the Internet and social media play a role in all that, but we often fail to see the small subtle shifts that happen between them from year to year that slowly outdate our communication methods and morph into new or enhanced methods.

Because it’s always changing, the next tip is cruicial.

2. We must always evaluate our communication methods.

I’ll confess I’ve only been evaluating our ministry’s communication methods for a couple years now. I used to just take other people’s successful ideas and copy them in my own ministry expecting the same outstanding results, but that rarely happens because culture varies from one part of the country to another, even from church to church in the same community.

When I worked at a church in Texas, email worked perfect for us because almost everyone had Blackberrys. If I sent a message out, I had responses back from almost all my leaders within an hour. But when I moved to Minnesota, not only did most people not have smartphones, but they only checked email about once a week. Some people didn’t use email at all.

So I started tracking what works and doesn’t work in my youth group and came up with some very surprising results.

3. On some level, your audience must take some initiative.

You can be the best communicator in the world, but at some point your audience has the responsibility to receive your message. You can’t embed your youth group announcements into someone’s brain, or make the updated event information somehow post itself on everyone’s refrigerator.

While I know many of our churches expect us to spoon-feed them all the information they want in the way they want it, that’s an unrealistic expectation, especially as your group grows. So, relieve yourself of that expectation right now. It’s unrealistic.

You can and should do everything you can to make the information readily available in a format that easy for them to consume, but they still need to take the initiative to get the information and put it on their own calendars.

I serve a group of about 200 weekly active teenagers and every once in a while I get a parent who says, “We prefer if you could just call us each week and update Johnny about what’s going on with the youth group.” My response is always, “No.” All the information is readily available in multiple formats. Pick which one works best for you and go with that.

Which leads to the fourth tip:

4. Communication methods may take some training.

This is especially true if you’ve done some evaluating and determined that you need to eliminate one of your communication methods in place for something else.

For example, maybe the amount of time you were putting into postcard mailings just wasn’t worth the time and expense anymore, but you have three very vocal families in your ministry who demand that you continue the postcards. Maybe you continue the postcards for a pre-defined period of time while transitioning to bulletin inserts. Then you cut off the postcards because they’re just not working like they used to. You have to start training people to look to the bulletins instead. Sometimes that takes time, but training is a very necessary part of communicating well.

Communicating well includes three things:

• You must continually reinforce where people can find information. Repeat it over and over again, especially when you change something about how you communicate mid-week information.
• Be consistent with where you put information. You can’t publish it on Facebook one week, in the bulletin the next, and on your blog another week. Don’t make people play a guessing game.
• Publish information on a regular schedule so people learn when to expect it. I try to get all our youth group’s information published on Tuesdays so they know when to check the website, email, and Facebook for news and announcements. It becomes a part of their weekly routine.

5. Communication is credibility.

This is perhaps the most important part of why good communication is so essential to youth ministries. Way too many ministries miss this.

A youth worker can be a great person, loved by all the kids and teach God’s Word effectively, but if he communicates poorly with the parents and other church staff members throughout the week, there’s an unspoken level of weak credibility because no one’s quite sure what’s going on. When people feel lost and disconnected, they tend to loose trust in their leader.

Conversely, a youth leader may not be a hero to the students and maybe just an average teacher, but if he/she communicates effectively and consistently with parents and church staff throughout the week, there’s a greater level of perceived credibility and trust just because people feel like they’re included and know what’s going on.

Whether you like it or not, how well you communicate really does impact the perceived level of credibility people have of you and your ministry.

What else?

What other tips and reminders have you found to be true for your ministry? Let’s dialog about them in the comments below.

Last weekend at the Simply Youth Ministry Conference I was scheduled to present the same seminar I lead at conference the year before, “Communicating youth group news with teens and parents throughout the week,” except as I was going through my old notes, I was surprised how outdated a lot of it was already. It’s crazy how quickly communication methods can change. So, I updated a lot of my old content, revised many of my points, and added a whole bunch of new stuff.

Thankfully, Simply gave me permission to record a video of the seminar and share it here with you all.

Here’s the link I mention in the beginning of the seminar that contains links to many of the tools, articles, tutorials, and resources discussed throughout the seminar.

You can either watch the seminar in it’s entirety on YouTube in high quality or download it in iTunes in iPod/mobile quality.

Subscribe to LISM media content in iTunes

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This Monday, March 8, we will discuss some of the recent questions and debates from MinistryQuestions.com. Join us and give your input to answering other youth worker’s ministry questions. The live conversation starts at 2:00 PM eastern time! See our LIVE YM Talk page for details.

Just a quick reminder that that Online Missions Trip starts this Sunday! Greg Stier reminded us about it this morning, too.

If you’re not familiar with the Online Missions Trip, it’s a 2-week campaign to encourage students to engage in spiritual conversations with their unsaved/unchurched friends through mediums where they’re already communicating, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Xbox Live, World of Warcraft, etc.

To learn more about this trip, visit OnlineMissionsTrip.com. There are many ideas, free resources and tools, a 24/7 Prayer Room, and more. It also has a video of me explaining the trip in more detail. This blog post summarizes it, as well.

And while you’re there, become a fan of the Online Missions Trip on Facebook and meet some of the other teens and youth leaders who will be attending this missions trip starting on Sunday.

Also, you have to see this video about this video, which underscores why this outreach campaign comes at such a key moment in history.

[ Visit OnlineMissionsTrip.com ]

A couple months ago Joshua Griffin posted a big, yellow smiley face they used for a teaching series at Saddleback. I looked at it and thought it could work great for another personality for youth group video announcements since it works very similarly to our good friend, L.T.

Basically, use your computer’s microphone to talk while using the keys on your computer to control the smiley face. A screen capture program will allow you to record a video from your audio and smiley face together, just how we discussed with the jib-jab effect tutorial. (See that post for screen capture software suggestions.) Upload the video announcement to your youth group’s Facebook page and, wa-la, you’ve created an engaging, creative and fun announcement in under 5 minutes.

Here are the controls for using Big, Yellow Smiley:

• Mouse – controls eye movement (click and drag to move)
• Q through O – controls the eyes
• A through G – controls moving mouths (hold to make mouth move)
• Z through B – controls static mouths (hold to make them stay on the screen)
• Space Bar – controls talking mouth (hold to talk)

View Smiley full-screen in your browser (right-click and “Save as…” to download)

[ht Dennis Poulette]

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For LIVE YM Talk this Monday, November 23, Brad Cooper is our featured guest. As the youth pastor at Perry Noble’s church, Newspring Community Church, he will lead us in a discussion about leading a team of volunteer youth workers. We’d love to have you join us for the live conversation at 2:00 PM eastern time! See our LIVE YM Talk page for details.

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you may notice that I already published this document earlier in the week on my personal blog, but since I put the time into creating the resource, I thought I’d share it with everyone else here, as well.

This weekend I’ll be at a youth pastor retreat for the Christian Missionary Alliance denomination doing a seminar on, “Web tools for youth ministry.” Although we’ll probably cover a lot more than what’s on this handout, this is what we’ll start with and see what direction we go from here.

View and download, “Web tools for youth ministry”

Any glaring oversights of a service or tool I missed? Let me hear them in the comments below.

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LIVE YM Talk this Monday, November 16, Mark Riddle is our featured guest. He will lead us in a discussion about how to find and determine the Lord’s leading to a healthy church ministry as a follow-up to my recent post on when to back away from a youth ministry position. We’d love to have you join us for the live conversation at 2:00 PM eastern time! See our LIVE YM Talk page for details.

Communication in ministry is vitally important because it really sets the stage for how people will perceive the ministry. Solid communication gives the impression that the ministry’s leadership is trustworthy, capable, and competent, whereas weak communication, even if the actual ministry is solid, leaves people feeling that the leadership is lacking direction and credibility. Probably about 80% of my office time each week is spent communicating our ministry with others, not just calendar events and news items, but the vision of who we are that drives what we do. (UPDATE: I usually do the communication stuff in the office, lesson prep and planning at home, and of course all the relationship stuff outside in other places. So, it’s not 80% of my total working hours, just my office hours.)

On a very practical level, here are the avenues my ministry uses to communicate with teens and parents throughout the week. In fact, we even have a handout that sits at our youth kiosk at church that lists these for newcomers.

Youth Group website

www.AlexandriaYouth.com
This is our main hub of communication because it’s a neutral place that almost everyone can access. On the front page site visitors will find the most current information, where and when to be places and who to get a hold of for each thing. There are also pictures and videos of past events, and lots more!. Here’s more information about how I made our website and the thought process behind it.

E-mail list

Whenever news is posted to our website, that info is automatically emailed to our mailing list. We use Feedblitz.com to automatically distribute the emails and manage the subscription list.

Text messaging

Text messaging is a great way to get last minute updates, reminders, and cancellations, but we use it for a lot more than that. There’s a lot of mass text messaging services out there, but I highly recommend TXTSignal.com.

A note about Tatango.com
I know a lot of youth ministries are using Tatango.com, but, although their service may be okay, I can personally vouch that their marketing ethics are highly questionable. Their VP marketing guy emailed me two weeks ago and, after some exchanges, started calling TXTSignal’s service illegal (citing a list of “best practices” as evidence, all of which TXTSignal meets and exceeds) and pointing me to a misleading blog post on their site about the SMS technology. Kinda ticked me off because people who aren’t familiar with the technology could easily get sucked in, like they were trying to do with me. I’ll never use them.

Facebook Page

www.Facebook.com/AlexandriaYouth
Many of our youth group kids are on Facebook. We use it to keep in touch, posting not only youth group pictures, videos and status updates, but video clips and pictures of high school sports games and performances. When kids start commenting on the media, it highlights the videos and pictures for most of their friends. Some of them check out the rest of our page and even become fans. More about using a Facebook page for youth ministry here (although, it’s slightly outdated already).

Bulletin inserts

Every Sunday we basically copy and paste what was posted on our website and distributed via email to a bulletin insert. This is mostly for first-time visitors and those who don’t use email or the web too much at home.

Youth kiosk table at church

We have a youth kiosk table at church right outside the main entrance to our worship center (sanctuary). The lights and motion on the TV and digital picture frames catch people’s eye as they walk by. We have a lot of general information sitting out, as well as sign-ups, pictures, promo flyers, and our weekly news video on a loop. Hanging around it on Sundays is a great way to meet new visitors with teens. See a picture of it here.

Twitter

twitter.com/AlexandriaYouth
Although only a couple of our teens use Twitter, the real reason I use it is to easily easily post short little updates to the front page of our youth group website. (Parents love it when I post updates while we’re away on trips!)

iTunes News Videos

http://www.alexandriayouth.com/itunes
Most weeks we publish a fun video that gives and overview of announcements, highlights of past events, previews of what’s coming up, contests, giveaways, and funny clips from YouTube. I found that if I stand in front of the youth group and make announcements, no one listens, but if I say the exact same thing on a screen, everyone is glued to it.

We post these videos on our website, our Facebook page, and show them at our weekly large-group jr. high and sr. high meetings. Publishing the videos in iTunes allows teens to automatically sync them to their iPods to watch on the bus, in the gym, and share with friends.

Personal contact

And, of course, I make my personal contact information readily available.

A video of my seminar on youth ministry communication

Last year at the Simply Youth Ministry Conference I taught a seminar on, “Communicating with teens and parents throughout the week,” which went into some of these areas in more detail. You can watch the video of the seminar here. Although some of it needs to be updated now (especially the Facebook part), it’s still generally true.

Last week my youth group’s news video featured my 2-month old daughter sharing some announcements using the JibJab effect along with my wife’s voice. It’s pretty funny! Check it out on YouTube, if you want.

Many of you were asking how I did it, and fortunately for all of us, it’s really simple.

1. Setup the talking head

Visit Blabberize.com and follow the instructions. You’ll have to upload a picture you want to use, select the mouth area (it looks best if you select the entire chin area, too), and select what audio source you want to use. Click the icon to use your computer microphone and you’ll see that the mouth starts bouncing along with your voice. This is as far as you need to go for our purposes.

2. Record your JibJab video

Since there’s no way to download your JibJab videos from Blabberize, you’ll have to use screen capture software that basically records to video whatever you select on your computer screen. I use iShowU for Mac, but Jing is free and available for both Mac and PC. Or, Free Screen Capturer might work for you PC users, too. (Disclaimer: I’ve never used Jing nor Free Screen Capturer.)

Just like I explained in the tutorial about how to record L.T. for youth group video announcements, set the screen capture software to record only the area of your computer screen where your Blabberize character resides. Make sure you also set it to record the audio from your computer microphone. Then click record and start talking. Stop the recording when you’re finished and, wa-la, you have your JibJab video announcement.

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Yesterday Simply Youth Ministry released only 400 units of the Spooky Awesome Bundle. It’s a $69 bundle with $280 worth of resources included, plus some free gifts. They’re already half way gone, so get the value while you still can.

The following guest post is contributed by Jason Stemm.

Is your student ministry leading students into the presence of Christ? As a youth leader myself, I know the demands that are placed on us to do a good job with the teenagers. I’ve noticed in many student ministries the need for effective media in their meeting times. This is one small way to make a huge difference in what your groups accomplishes. I’ve put together a list of things that may help you in getting your student ministry media looking fresher and better organized and why it may benefit your ministry. In a world of cool motion graphics and HD television, sometimes integrating the visual element in your group’s workings can help your ministry, hopefully leading more people to Jesus Christ.

Tip #1: Animation is Key

I’ve heard it said at times that PowerPoint is an effective teaching tool and I have to respectively disagree. PowerPoint has its uses, but a lot of times it is used wrong. Bad animations and outdated graphics can turn off kids because of its dated approach. Find out what worship software your church uses and, if your group has a student band, look into putting animated backgrounds and elements in your worship. Maybe even get your group’s logo over an animated background. This can create excitement and class to your student worship experience. There are lots of good worship software out there for all budgets. I would suggest Worship Him for low budgets, EasyWorship and MediaShout for bigger budgets. Get away from PowerPoint, it was cool at first, but there are things so much better to bring your church and student ministry great worship. These types of software are easy to train your kids on as well, and it’s a skill that will enable them to serve in God’s Kingdom after they leave your group. Your church doesn’t have to be 2,000 strong to enjoy great worship media.

Tip #2: Transcend Stereotypes

An old stereotype of Christian media is that it’s corny and irrelevant. God gave us the gift of media to teach, inspire, motivate, and worship. Use media that generates excitement and enthusiasm for what you’re trying to accomplish in your student ministry. Great Christian media is focused, creative, and powerful. And this type of media, when used in the right way, can do great things for your students. It’s the shock and awe of this type of media that often shows kids that the church is not a boring place and that Jesus’ message is real. I’m so glad Christian media is getting better, in many places becoming cutting edge. But many youth groups haven’t tapped into the potential of this. Often times by not tapping into the benefits of Christian media, you miss out on the increasing number of creative students that grace the streets of our culture.

Tip #3: Become the Innovator

What separates one youth group from the next group down the road? What are you doing they are or are not doing? Are your students serving more? Worshipping more? Giving more? Hanging out with each other more outside of group meeting times? The point is clear, separate your student ministry from the rest with relevant media, but don’t get lost in it. Have the media work around the strengths of your group. Use illustration videos that are relevant and teach. Use media to motivate your kids to serve on the mission field. Use media to motivate parents into integrating Christian principles into the family. Use media smartly. Don’t invest in media just because it’s a cool toy to add to the student ministry worship hour. Integrate media to innovate the way your student ministry operates and gets the Gospel to those who desperately need to hear it. Use these tips as a starting point to better integrating media into your student ministry’s worship or youth group meeting.

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Jason Stemm is a husband of one wife, father of three boys, and associate minister at his church in southern Iowa where he currently leads the worship and student ministries. He is also the founder of www.motionrevival.com, a new company that sells video backgrounds and other church media resources. Jason can be reached at jason@gostemm.com.

A few weeks ago, Adam Walker Cleaveland, Minister for Youth & Young Adults at Asbury United Methodist Church in Livermore, CA, was sitting down to put the monthly newsletter together. He was feeling a little bored with the current layout so he posted something on Twitter asking for ideas. A few of his youth caught wind of that, and one sophomore girl said she’d work on it when she got home, and the result is today’s Freebie Friday: a Twitter-Themed Newsletter.

In the download, you’ll get the newsletter in a variety of editable formats:

• iWork’s Pages
• Microsoft Office
• A postcard version in Microsoft Publisher format
• The necessary font files and Photoshop file are also included

This is such a great idea – primarily because it was created by youth. The designer said she was so stoked that people around the US were using her design for their youth groups – she’s pretty excited to be able to let everyone use this for free! It’s also a great way to keep your newsletters brief, to the point, and concise with a layout that’s been proven to communicate successfully.

Download the Twitter-themed youth group newsletter from Adam’s blog:
How to make a Twitter Youth Group Newsletter

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Today our featured guest is Mark Matlock. He’ll lead us in a discussion about some pretty cutting edge group teaching methods: How to use improvisational techniques for group learning. See the LIVE YM Talk page for details on how to join the call and/or the live chat at 2:00 PM Eastern time.