Here’s what Luke Frederick has to say about this week’s freebie download:

Have you ever wanted a custom Twitter background for your youth group but don’t know how to make one? Well here is a free customizable Twitter background and tutorial to walk you through the customization process. I hope this makes your student ministry look hot! If you have any questions that are not answered in the tutorial please leave a comment and I will try to answer it.

Here is a preview of what it looks like:

You can customize…

• the logo
• the group name
• both polaroid images

Video tutorial

Luke created this video to give you step-by-step about how to modify and customize this Twitter background using PhotoShop. It also shows you how to add the background to your Twitter page and gives you the color settings to use on Twitter to make the background look like it fades to black.

NOTE: If you don’t have a copy of PhotoShop, you can download a 30-day free trial from Adobe’s website.

Download the Youth Group Twitter Background Template

Visit SheepishDesign.org to see Luke’s design ninjaness!

Also check out a free Twitter-themed newsletter template for your youth group.

Related posts:

• Freebie Friday #143: A free Twitter-themed youth group newsletter template
• Freebie Friday 184: Social media slides of pre-church graphics
• Freebie Friday #145: Motion background for PowerPoint, MediaShout, or Keynote

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.

Related posts:

• Enhancing communication with changes to our youth group website
• Open the lines of youth group communication
• Evaluating my group’s mid-week communication methods

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

———————————————————————-
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.

Related posts:

• Freebie Friday 185: Customizable Twitter background for your youth group page
• Freebie Friday #23: Free youth group contact management tool
• Freebie Friday #121: Free ebook, “Leadership Learnings from Bloggers”

A lot of different social media websites have popped up in the past couple years: YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, Virb, LinkedIn, MetaCafe, DeviantArt, Friendster, Ping.fm, Orkut, Tumblr, and a whole lot more. As if that wasn’t enough, just as many communication services are being developed online, too, like Google’s soon-to-be-released Voice and Wave services. It’s almost impossible to keep up with it all!

So where can your ministry communicate online without hiring someone full-time to oversee all the possibilities? These communication methods can be highly effective and can greatly enhance your ministry in so many ways, but the options can definitely be a bit overwhelming. Here are some tips that might help you in determining what communication method is best for your church.

1. Determine who your primary audience is for the info you want to communicate.
Different audiences look for information in difference places. For example, people who are new to your neighborhood probably are not going to search Twitter or Facebook for your church’s information. They will typically go to Google and search for your town’s name and “churches,” hoping to find some helpful local church websites. Thus, the information on your church’s website should be geared primarily toward newcomers and first-time visitors, not necessarily to church members.

To communicate with people inside your church, though, it is important to first know how they communicate. Is it by Facebook? Email? Text messaging? Twitter? If you have a lot of church members who are active on Facebook, then creating a Facebook Page (not a Facebook group) may be a great direction for you to go. If only a few members are on Twitter, than do not worry about jumping on board there.

2. If you choose to use social media, put someone in charge of it who knows how to use it.
Whatever social media you use, never put someone in charge of it that’s mostly clueless about how it works. Every network has unwritten etiquette rules that should be followed in order to be respected. Don’t let that scare you from using it, just put someone in charge who is familiar with the territory. Or, enter it yourself as a personal user for a little while before pulling your church into it.

3. Understand that it may be necessary to train the congregation to use your new forms of communication.
If you continue to add new methods of communicating and never eliminate old ones, you’ll eventually become overwhelmed with distributing the same info in too many places. It is more effective to be focused in a few methods rather than spreading yourself out among many methods. That means when communication methods shift, you may have to do a lot of re-training so people know where to look. Even if you start putting church information on your Facebook page and active Facebook users become fans, that does not mean those fans will remember to go to the Page Updates and find information. You may have to train people regardless of how active they are on the social network you church uses.

Also be prepared for the vocal minority to share their opinion about the shifts in how your ministry communicates. There may be those who resist the change and will give many valid reasons why abandoning the older method is a bad idea, so you’ll have to determine ahead of time if the time and energy you put into the old method is worth continuing it for those who use it.

4. Always evaluate what works best.
Just because 100% of your congregation frequently uses email doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best way to communicate with them. All of us often see mass messages and click delete without even opening it. In fact, the mass email service I use for our youth group shows that less than 20% of subscribers open my weekly news emails. That means 80% of the parents and teenagers in our group are not even looking at my messages there even though they all actively use email. The obvious solution is seemingly to send mass Facebook messages instead, but using a tracking link in those messages indicated that only 2% of my youth group kids ever clicked through those messages for information. Again, very poor results. Don’t assume that putting information in the most “obvious” places will always be the best communication method.

For my ministry, the evaluation process revealed that people in my church will not take 2 minutes to read an email or Facebook message, but they’ll take 10 minutes to watch a YouTube video. Similarly, 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 via video, they’re all glued to it! So now I do my weekly communication by recording a video with some added value (giveaways, contests, polls, funny YouTube clips, etc.) and distribute it via email and Facebook. Plus, the videos spread much more viraly to people in our community via Facebook and YouTube than one-on-one emails and private Facebook messages can. Even a random stranger at Wal-Mart recognized my wife by her last name because of the youth group news videos I do on YouTube!

Whatever method you use, just make sure you evaluate it. Not only do communication methods change over time, but so do the ways people use those tools.

A video that goes into more detail
Earlier this year I taught a seminar at the National Youth Ministry Conference on this very issue in much greater detail, giving more insights into communication trends in my ministry, how to evaluate communication effectiveness in your ministry, and ideas for improvement. You can watch the seminar in it’s entirety here.

Related posts:

• Communication avenues for my youth group
• Enhancing communication with changes to our youth group website
• Evaluating my group’s mid-week communication methods

1) First of all, tell our readers a little bit about the work you do online (what blogs, websites, social media accounts, youth group sites, etc., do you manage?).

• Life In Student Ministry [Blog. HQ for YM Mentorships, YM training videos, LIVE YM Talk, Freebie Fridays, etc.]
• OnlineMissionsTrip.com [HQ for Online Missions Trip]
• MinistryQuestions.com [Recent project, details below]
• MinistryWebsites.biz [Side business that will hopefully keep future projects free]
• @timschmoyer on Twitter [Twitter]
• Tim Schmoyer on Facebook [Facebook]
• YouTube [YM Training videos, my youth group news, and personal videos]
• AlexandriaYouth.com [My youth group's site that is quickly becoming old-school.]
• …and other sites and ideas I’ve abandoned (like PlugRug.com)

2) Life In Student Ministry runs like a well-oiled machine. Where do you find inspiration for fresh content, and how far in advance do you prepare for each post?

Inspiration comes from almost anywhere: various conversations, my wife, issues in my own youth ministry, other blogs, and totally random thoughts from the Lord.

The preparation for posts really varies. Sometimes I’ll sit down with an idea, crank it out and publish it within a couple minutes. Other times I start with an idea, save it as a draft, and come back to it from time to time as I think about it. Right now I have 40 drafts started for blog post ideas, some of them dating back to 2006. So, there’s definitely not a set process of what I write and when I publish.

3) How much does the Life In Student Ministry community contribute to the content you deliver on the site?

Again, it varies. As previously mentioned, the content at Life In Student Ministry is a combination between a lot of different places. Sometimes the comments spark an issue that needs greater attention, so I’ll blog about that. Other times it’s an email from someone. Posts also are based on an ongoing need or question I see. And still other times it’s something that’s never been addressed before I think needs to be talked about. Other times it’s an old issue that has my own spin on it.

4) A search for “student ministry” on Google brings up Life In Student Ministry as the third result. What effort (if any at all) or marketing do you put into the site to attract new visitors?

A couple years ago I started reading a lot about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) online. Based on some of the advice I read, I made some changes to my site’s structure, which helped, but the ranking mainly comes from three things:

• Consistent new content over time
• Incoming links from other sites
• Blogging about roughly the same topic over and over again

I’ve also found that some of the conventional SEO wisdom out there is totally dead wrong in regards to my site. Not sure why, but some standard SEO practices actually kill my site’s Google traffic for sustained periods of time. That’s why it’s helpful to track site stats and experiment on your own a bit without swallowing whatever the “experts” say.

As far as marketing is concerned, though, I’ve never spent a dime on advertising or anything like that. Not only do I not have the money nor the interest to do that, but social networking is both better and free! I create content primarily for people, not Google. If people like it, they talk about it with others, post links on their own sites, and share it in their own way. Google has ears everywhere and picks up on that.

5) Your most recent project is MinistryQuestions.com. Can you tell us where you got the idea, and what the response has been like?

The idea for MinistryQuestions.com came from two places, actually.

I used to get a fair amount of youth ministry questions showing up in my Inbox. Instead of answering them privately, a long time ago I started a Q&A feature on my blog where I’d publicly answer some of them. However, the questions quickly began to pile up and before long no one was getting the answers they deserved. I also found that most of the time people gave better advice in the comments on my blog than I did in the post, which was great, but it made me start thinking through a better system for answering questions.

Around this same time I started the Youth Ministry Mentorship Program, which was great, but after the first round generated almost 200 applications, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see there was a huge need among youth workers — to be able to ask ministry questions and be mentored one-on-one. Since the mentorship is limited to however many mentors are on the team (currently 16 of us), I wanted to figure out a way to put the mentorship online where an open community of youth workers could encourage, mentor, and support each other.

MinistryQuestions.com is a response to both of those situations. It took months of dreaming, planning, and a huge financial investment to make it happen, but so far the Kingdom impact has been totally worth it. Many people are embracing the site and investing into each other’s ministries, which is awesome to see. I know I’ve been blessed tremendously through the people there! In the first week of its launch, it had over 30,000 hits, which was great!

The future vision for MQ is to have it extend into other areas besides youth ministry. It’s currently populated with youth ministry since that’s my primary audience, but hopefully over time it will grow to encompass worship ministry, children’s ministry, pastoral ministry, and more.

6) How do you balance time with your wife, your students, and investing in other student pastors?

I’m not really sure. Probably because I don’t have any kids of my own yet (first one due this August), but honestly, none of the areas seem to be lacking. I’m very conscious about putting my wife first, my ministry second, and my sites last as a hobby. I don’t really have much interest in watching TV, going out to movies, or other things like that, so the time most people spend on entertainment and such I spend developing content online. It feels so much rewarding than keeping up with TV shows.

It will be interesting to see how this changes in August when my first kid is born. Life In Student Ministry and other projects may slow down. Who knows.

7) On average, how much time do you spend updating, creating, and sharing content on the web each week?

Hmm… Fridays are my day off from the church, so I create most of it then and post it online throughout the rest of the week. My wife is usually at work on Fridays, so it doesn’t detract from our time together. So, maybe 10 hours a week, give or take, of course.

8 ) How supportive is your church of the things you are doing online?

Honestly, I don’t think they even know about most of the things I do online. Some of the staff have seen parts of it, but none of them know about all of it. As I already mentioned, I don’t really promote my content outside of online social networking, so I’ve never brought it up and they’ve never asked. I’d be fine if they knew, but I’ll wait for someone else to bring it up.

9) Lastly, do you have any advice, tips, or recommendations for youth pastors who have a passion for helping each other like you do?

• Just start doing it. Life In Student Ministry started as a personal blog one night in 2005 because I was bored and didn’t feel like playing video games. I threw WordPress on it and started blogging about nonsense with my mom and dad being the only readers. But as I continued to write, I tended to write about what I’m most passionate about: youth ministry. Over time it morphed into what it is today. I certainly didn’t set out to create what it is today. Others started connecting to it slowly and I realized that the Lord was giving me an opportunity to use it to serve Him.
• Do it for the long haul for the right reasons. Too many people have a great vision for something, but stop because they’re not becoming as popular as quickly as they think they should be. Or, they think that because they’re only helping 1 or 2 people that it’s not worth their time. Just like youth group, be a good steward with the 1 or 2 people God has sent your way and you’ll be blessed to serve others later.
• Be different. Seth Godin writes about this a lot and it’s absolutely true: don’t copy ideas someone else is already doing — no one talks about that. Do something unique for the kingdom. Meet a need no one else is meeting. Do something that’s extraordinary, something worth talking about and sharing with others. Build the kingdom in ways no one else is. That’s where the YM mentorship came from, MinistryQuestions.com, YM training videos, Online Missions Trip, etc.
• Start off small and invest as it grows. Don’t discount yourself because you think you need to start your ideas with a lot of big fancy equipment, an amazing website design, or a huge audience. Start simple and build from there if your idea takes off. For example, I started the weekly YM training videos with nothing more than my Macbook’s iSight webcam and iMovie. Now that iTunes downloads and views are over 1,000 per video, I’ve invested in an hi-def video camera and an good mic. Same with the LIVE YM Talks every Friday. I started those with my little gaming headset that sounded awful, but the idea took off, so I invested into a better mic and recording software. Even my website’s design a little over a year ago was hideous, but as traffic grew it was worth investing into something better.
• Have a plan for making money. I know this sounds weird, but new ideas often come with a price tag. Of course you’ll need to start cheap like I just mentioned, but as your idea grows, you’ll need to invest into a better webhost (or increased traffic will knock you offline like it did to me), better equipment, or even have to pay designers and web developers. Adsense supported most of my projects until I decided to provide all the books for the YM mentorship to the mentees for free, and more recently when MinistryQuestions.com required almost $1,000 up-front just to get it started. Since I never want to charge a penny for a single thing I do to serve the Lord online, I need to find other ways to finance ideas. For example, MinistryWebsites.biz is an attempt to generate funds to keep my projects online. Unless you have a lot of extra money lying around somewhere, I advise you also come up with a plan to keep the finances of your ideas out of your personal bank account as much as possible.

Related posts:

• How to write a blog that people will actually read
• My most popular blog posts of 2006
• Two year anniversary of this blog

My normal communication is mediocre
The open rate of my youth group emails averages 35% (although, that may be partially due to deliverability). The click-through rate for Facebook messages is about 30%. Text message updates seems to be the most effective means of communication for our youth group, but obviously it is very limited with how much I can write in a single message. We also have bulletin inserts every week with youth group news, which may or may not be working since I have no way of tracking that (except to maybe stop doing it and see how many people still ask for it?). Our youth group website generates an average of 100 visitors per day and is probably our most effective means of communication.

Why try video
But we all know that for teenagers, online video is growing in exponential leaps and bounds, so if they’re not going to take 2 minutes to read an email, maybe they’ll take 10 minutes to watch a video. That’s why I’m now experimenting with youth group video episodes each week. I’ll continue it for another couple weeks while keeping an eye on the video traffic stats and then evaluate it’s effectiveness against all the other ways we already communicate.

Give it value
The success of communicating with teens in general, but especially through these videos, is that I need to give the episodes more value than just news and announcements. That’s why I’ve laid out the format of each episode as follows:

• Welcome and summary of what’s coming up in the video
• Announcements and news with L.T.
• A giveaway of some kind
• A devotional thought that serves as a preview to next week’s lesson
• YouTube video of the week

Of course, each episode is available in iTunes as a podcast so teenagers can easily transfer the episodes to their iPods and watch later on the bus, working out in the gym, or whenever they want.

My latest youth group video episodes
Tomorrow I’ll post a tutorial about how I made these videos, but in the meantime, below are the latest episodes from my youth group.

UPDATE: Part 2 of this series is posted and includes instructions on how I created the videos along with links to everything I could think of.

Shawn Michael is also using video for his youth group news. If you want to see an example of what he’s doing, see here.

Related posts:

• Using video to communicate youth group news (2 of 2)
• Freebie Friday #111: Youth group news video intro
• 4 tips for communicating youth group news

Shelby Craig asked me this question on Twitter.

How do you follow up with students that haven’t been to youth group in a while?

First of all, how we know when a student has been missing for a while is very important. The typical strategy is to take attendance or have everyone sign in when they show up at youth group. After a couple weeks, if Quiet Jonny’s name hasn’t been checked off for a while, then we know to give him a call.

The problem with that approach is that it’s very impersonal. The only way we know if Quiet Jonny is missing or not is because of boxes that are not checked on a sheet of paper, not because we were looking for him specifically and missed his presence at youth group. Maybe we notice when the outgoing kids are gone, but rarely the quiet kids.

In my ministry, we don’t take attendance. When I get the question, “How many kids are in your youth ministry?” the honest answer is, “I don’t know.” Frankly, it doesn’t matter much to me if we have 1 kid show up or 100. We’re excited about whoever is there and will invest into them personally.

And I think that’s the key — investing into every student personally. If every student has a personal connection to an adult leader who is looking for them and can’t wait to talk with them once they show up at youth group, not only does that kid want to be there, but that adult leader notices when he or she is missing. It is then that leader’s responsibility to contact the student during the week.

So here’s the plan, especially for large-group meetings:

1. Have enough adult leaders to meet a 1 to 5 ratio of leaders to kids. As the youth group grows, add more leaders to maintain that balance.

2. Every leader is responsible for 5 specific kids. These leaders are intentionally looking for those students so they can catch up with them about their week.

3. If an adult is responsible for a kid who brings a friend, that friend becomes one more person that the adult leader will get to know and look for in following weeks. If one leader’s group of kids grows too large, then another adult joins and slowly they divide into two groups.

4. When one student is missing, the leader who was looking for them at youth group contacts them during the week just to say HI, hear about their week, and let them know they were missed. (NO guilt trips!!!)

5. Be sure to have designated greeters who look for visitors that come by themselves. Usually they’re pretty easy to spot because they’re sitting alone, looking uncomfortable.

This isn’t a branded process in our ministry. Most of the kids have no idea this is even intentionally happening. They just know that one adult in particular enjoys them, loves their presence, and notices when they’re absent. That feels a lot nicer than being known by a checkmark on an attendance sheet.

———————————————————————-

Have a youth ministry question you’d like me and other readers to answer? E-mail it to me! Please keep your question brief and to-the-point. Thanks!

Related posts:

• Q&A: What to do when less than 5 kids show up at youth group
• Youth Leadership 101: What students need from youth leaders
• Q&A: Handling students who don’t want to participate in youth activities

I find great value in keeping parents updated throughout our trips on an almost play-by-play basis.

• Parents feel a part of what’s happening.
• They trust the youth leaders more.
• They feel at ease seeing and hearing the great time their kid is having.
• They know exactly how the trip unfolded, making for a better conversation when the kids get home.
• I can quickly share prayer requests and highlights right when something happens.
• Everyone at home sees the highlights and funny stories right away.
• The kids love reading my updates once they get home and reliving the memories of the experience.

Thankfully, several web services make it simple and FREE to keep parents updated with text, pictures and videos, all from your cell phone (txt/pix/video message charges may apply). I’ve done it almost every trip for over a year now, including just two weeks ago during our jr. high retreat. See individual examples here, here, here and here.

Here’s how you can share text updates, pictures and video clips from your cell phone with parents and anyone else who has access to an Internet connection.

Share short text updates

Twitter is the service that will drive your communication with parents back home. Create an account at Twitter.com and add your cell phone to your account (under Settings and then Devices). Once your number is verified, all you have to do to update your profile page is send a txt message to the number 40404. Within seconds, your message appears online at http://twitter.com/[yourusername]. Give that web address to parents ahead of time and tell them to keep an eye on it for updates while you’re away. The parents in my ministry are usually glued to it, refreshing the page every couple minutes, to get the latest update!

(NOTE: If parents want your updates automatically sent to their cell phones, they can create a Twitter account, too, add their cell phone to their account, and click on the little gray Follow button under your icon on your profile page.)

(NOTE: If you sign up for Twitter, feel free to follow my updates, too: http://twitter.com/timschmoyer is my profile page. When logged in to Twitter, click the little gray Follow button under my icon image.)

Add pictures to your updates

Almost every cell phone has a camera on it now, making it easy to share pictures, so why not share photos of your trip with parents right when it happens? To post pictures in your Twitter updates, go to TwitPic.com and login with the Twitter username and password you created earlier. Then click on Settings in the top black navigation bar. There you’ll find a special private email address. Enter that address as a contact in your phone. To post a picture to your Twitter page, just take a picture with your cell phone and send it as a pic message to that email address. Add a brief description of the photo as the Subject of the message and send the picture message. After a few minutes a link to the picture will show up on your Twitter page along with the caption you entered as the Subject in your pic message. Simple.

Add videos to your updates

More and more cell phones are capable of sending video messages now, too. A new service called 12Seconds.tv does exactly that. It works the same way as TwitPic. Register an account at 12Seconds.tv, go to Settings, enter your Twitter login information and check the box to “Post updates to twitter.” Click Submit at the bottom of the page to save your settings. In the right-hand column of your Settings page, take note of the special private email address where you can send videos messages from your cell phone and have them automatically posted on your 12Seconds.tv page and your Twitter page.

(NOTE: 12Seconds.tv is still in early development stages. Joining the site is currently on an invitation basis only. If you request an invitation to join, but don’t get one after a day or so, post a comment below. I have a couple invitations left and I know a couple other people who do, too. We’ll gladly send you one.)

An idea for high-tech nerds

Instead of giving out my Twitter page address to parents, I embed my Twitter RSS feed into my youth group website. It’s easier for me to just tell everyone to keep an eye on our website for regular updates, but for most people it’s probably easier to email a Twitter link to everyone to watch. Of course, you could use TwitStamp.com to embed your Twitter updates into any web page, too.

Twitter can also automatically update your status in Facebook if you add the Twitter Facebook application and set the settings to do so.

A thought on privacy

As you update, be sensitive to what you’re posting. Some parents freak out and immediately think rapists are going to find their kids because you put a picture of them online or mentioned their name. You and I both know that’s absolutely ridiculous, but parents don’t always feel that way. So respect their wishes if they want their kid left out. Either way, use common sense: no sensitive information, no last names, no pictures from the bathrooms, nothing that could be misinterpreted without the full story, no frustration comments about the problem kid, etc.

———————————————————————-
Been in youth ministry for 2 years or fewer? Life In Student Ministry has an outstanding team of youth ministry veterans waiting to mentor you one-on-one! [Mentorship made free for you thanks to YouthBytes video curriculum.]

Related posts:

• Turn your youth group website into an event LiveStream
• Youth group game: Cell phone picture challenge
• When parents ground their kids from youth group

If you’re looking for ways to interact with other youth workers online, here’s where I am online. Feel free to join me or comment below with other places online you’ve found to be significantly beneficial.

Facebook “Youth Pastors Only” group

Unlike most groups of Facebook, Rob Kashow, the creator of Facebook’s “Youth Pastors Only” group (and an old college friend of mine), does a great job of keeping the group alive and active. There’s always new forum posts of questions, struggles and ideas. If you need input about something, this is a great place to start. Just remember, like anything else you post online, this group is open to the public, so don’t write anything you don’t want your kids or other church people to potentially read.

Twitter

The thing I love about Twitter is that I can ask a question from anywhere via txt message and within minutes several people respond with great ideas, insights, or stories to make me laugh. Just last week I asked for a movie recommendation, input on upcoming blog posts, WordPress help, and more. Even cooler, though, is the opportunity to answer other people’s questions, too, and just generally keep up with what other youth workers are up to during the day. If you’re on Twitter, follow me here. I recommend following these youth guys, too:

• Mike Kupferer
• Josh Griffin
• Adam McLane
• Mark Matlock
• Mike Lovato
• Doug Fields
• Youth Ministry
• Brian Eberly
• Youth Specialties
• Kevin Twombly
• Brian Ford
• Dana Schmoyer, my wife

Skype

I prefer Skype as my choice for instant communication because it’s so versatile: text chat, voice chat, video conferencing, SMS, even telephone calls, and it does it all better than any other communication client out there. Since the Life In Student Ministry Skypecasts started, my contact list has grown to include a lot of youth workers from around the world, which makes for a lot of great conversations during the week. Add me to your Skype contact list: rockinyp. If you join our Skypecasts on Fridays, you’ll also start making a lot of these connections, too, which is exactly why I use Skype for our youth ministry conversations over other voice conference-call technologies.

Youth Ministry Blogs

Since you’re already reading this site, you obviously know the value of connecting with the ideas and stories of other youth workers through blogs. I’ve formed great relationships with many youth workers around the world just through simple comments and linking back to others posts.

Here’s a couple of my favorite youth ministry blogs:

• GregStier.org – President of Dare 2 Share Ministries
• Insight – by Grahame Knox, a veteran youth worker in the U.K.
• More Than Dodge Ball – by Joshua Griffin, high school pastor at Saddleback Church.
• Youth Ministry Ideas – Resources and ideas by Steve Blanchard
• Youthblog.org – by Ian, a Anglican youth worker in Oxford.
• YSMarko.com – by Mark Oestreicher, president of Youth Specialties
• Married To A Youth Pastor – Just started reading this one. Fun YM stories!
• Rethinking Youth Ministry – Two guys exploring different approaches to youth ministry
• Thoughts of a Student Pastor – A student pastor in the ATL
• BrianEberly.com – by a youth pastor in Oregon who started blogging around the same time I did.
• The Poulette Family in Mexico – by Dennis Poulette, a youth ministry professor in Mexico

If you use Google Reader and want to share RSS items with me, add rockinyp@gmail.com to your friends list. Or, for non-Google Reader users, grab my shared items here.

Youth Ministry Exchange

Although I’m not a very active participant at YMExchange.com anymore, they still have the best youth ministry forum on the Internet. There’s lot of great youth workers there who love discussing youth ministry and issues therein, so if you want an online community of youth workers all in one spot, that’s probably the site you’ll want to check out first.

Connect with me personally

Here’s a list of where you can connect with me personally through many different social media sites and services.

Connect with other youth workers personally

Do you want to find more youth ministry friends? Do you want to find other bloggers to follow and network with? If so, here’s an opportunity to do just that. In comments below, leave links to any of your social media profiles that you want to promote (Twitter, Facebook, blog, Skype, Google Chat, etc.). Once you’ve done so, add the other people who post their info in the comments. This will only work if you make connections rather than just promote yourself.

Related posts:

• Where to connect with me
• Talk with me and other youth workers LIVE this Friday
• Building online Christian community for your youth group (1 of 2)