The Online Missions Trip went amazingly well last year! Around 3,000 youth leaders and teenagers from every continent except Antarctica intentionally used social media online to share Christ with unsaved friends. Many teenagers trusted in Christ for salvation as a result and many youth group teens were challenged to take God into yet another part of their world: the Internet.

Although this idea started originally for my own youth group out of my discontentment with outreach events, it’s a great experience when we can all connect together online through this “outreach campaign.”

The Internet has never made it so easy to share Christ with those all over the world! Teenagers spend a crazy amount of hours talking with friends on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, World of Warcraft and other such social hangouts online, as youth workers, let’s train them to share their faith and encourage them to do it online. The Online Missions Trip is a 2-week campaign to empower them to use social media to share Christ with their friends who don’t yet know Him.

The structure looks like this:

January 10-30, 2010

Pre-trip training. Use youth group meetings to train kids how to share their faith, think through the Online Missions Trip concept, and start praying for unsaved friends.

January 31 to February 13, 2010

Online Missions Trip! During these two weeks teens and youth leaders are engaging in spiritual conversations with unsaved friends online. They’re uploading videos, photos, posting links, using status updates to share what God’s doing in their lives, writing notes, sending messages, posting on blogs, creating event invites to youth group, and anything else that will bring God up in a conversation that starts online and hopefully spreads to a face-to-face discussion.

February 14, 2010

Outreach event/series and new-believer follow-up starts. Follow-up on this missions trip with a series that helps the new teens in your ministry either investigate Christianity a bit closer or start growing in their new faith. Be sure to follow-up one-on-one with new converts, as well.

To learn more about this trip, visit OnlineMissionsTrip.com. There are many ideas, free resources and tools, a 24/7 Prayer Room that will open in 2010, and more. It also has a video of me explaining the trip in more detail.

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

While you’re there, become a fan of The OnlineMissionsTrip.com Facebook Page and meet some of the other teens and youth leaders who will be attending this missions trip with you next year.

[ Visit OnlineMissionsTrip.com ]

—————————————————————–
Only 2 day left to apply for the FREE Youth Ministry Mentorship! Please help support the mentorship, the Online Missions Trip, and MinistryQuestions.com by subscribing to YouthWorker Journal. Get your FREE no-risk trial issue of YouthWorker Journal today, the best in youth ministry resources!

The following is an article I wrote for one of my denomination’s publications. I have permission to republish it here for you all.

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.

Yesterday I wrote about why I’m abandoning outreach events and gave several reasons why “outreach campaigns” may be a more effective solution.

For several months now I’ve been planning an outreach campaign for my own youth group and am excited to have other youth groups join us! The best part is that it’s completely FREE! We’ll be going all over the world, sharing the gospel with friends both in our local neighborhoods and friends far away. It’s an online missions trip, a “missions trip to Facebook,” if you will.

The Internet has never made it so easy to share Christ with those all over the world! Teenagers spend a crazy amount of hours talking with friends on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, World of Warcraft and other such social hangouts online about things that don’t really matter in light of eternity, let’s train them to share their faith and push them to do it online. The Online Missions Trip is a 2-week campaign to empower them to use social media to share Christ with their friends who don’t yet know Him.

The structure looks like this:

January whatever-31, 2009

Pre-trip training. Use youth group meetings to train kids how to share their faith, think through the Online Missions Trip concept, and start praying for unsaved friends.

February 1-14, 2009

Online Missions Trip! During these two weeks teens and youth leaders are engaging in spiritual conversations with unsaved friends online. They’re uploading videos, photos, posting links, using status updates to share what God’s doing in their lives, writing notes, sending messages, posting on blogs, creating event invites to youth group, and anything else that will bring God up in a conversation that starts online and hopefully spreads to a face-to-face discussion.

February 15-whenever, 2009

Outreach event/series and new-believer follow-up starts. Follow-up on this missions trip with a series that helps the new teens in your ministry either investigate Christianity a bit closer or start growing in their new faith. Be sure to follow-up one-on-one with new converts, as well.

To learn more about this trip, visit OnlineMissionsTrip.com. There are many ideas, free resources and tools, a 24/7 Prayer Room, a Facebook app you can use, and more. It also has a video of me explaining the trip in more detail.

While you’re there, join the OnlineMissionsTrip.com Facebook Group and meet some of the other teens and youth leaders who will be attending this missions trip with you in February.

———————————————————————————

Thanks to YouthBytes, Dare 2 Share Ministries, and Xtreme Youth Alliance for their support, promotion, and free resources for the Online Missions Trip! Thank you Brian Ford and Michael Rothermel for all your help in creating content and tools for this missions trip that will bring teenagers to Christ! And thanks Janelle Painter for designing the Online Mission Trip logo!

Over the past two weeks, I posted a couple articles about using video to communicate with youth group kids. The first one talked about why online video can be such an effective communication tool for youth groups, and the second one gave more of a step-by-step how to make the videos with links to all the resources I use.

The glaring oversight that’s missing in both of those posts is where to put the videos on the web once your content is created. Here are my recommendations, each with pros and cons.

YouTube

YouTube has only two things going for it: it’s extremely popular and it’s social. Other than that, YouTube is honestly a horrible place to host your videos because the video quality is very poor and the only distribution methods are to link to it or embed it in your site. Fortunately, YouTube now has a “watch high quality version” feature linked under some of the videos, but even then the quality is still poor and there’s no way to embed the high quality video in your site or link to it directly.

Use YouTube as an outreach
However, I still recommend that you keep your youth group video episodes shorter than 10 minutes so you can post them on YouTube. Why? Because that’s where kids know to look and search for them. Besides, now that Google owns YouTube, their videos tend to rank fairly well in search engines. Just be sure to tag your YouTube videos with your church name, youth group name, town and state so when random kids in your community search to see, “What’s going on in my town on YouTube?” they find your youth group. It’s an easy way to do outreach! If your youth group has a website, put that URL in the very beginning of your video’s description so viewers to see it right away and visit your site for more info about your ministry.

[ Visit YouTube.com. ]

Vimeo

Vimeo is geared toward professional and amateur film developers and thus has amazing video quality and full support for HD (high definition) content. You can create “channels,” which is basically a brandable page that displays all your latest youth group videos, latest udpates from an RSS feed, custom URL, and more. Plus, Vimeo makes it easy to distribute videos by putting the embed code right in the video itself for people to copy and paste. Although free accounts are limited to 500 MB uploads per week, that should be more than enough for most people’s needs. Other than that, the service is phenomenal. The only reason I don’t use them for my youth group videos and the Life In Student Ministry video posts is because it lacks iTunes compatible RSS feeds, which Blip.tv offers.

[ Visit Vimeo.com ]

Blip.tv

Blip.tv is my choice until Vimeo adds a couple key features that I want. Blip.tv offers pretty much everything you could think of and it does it all for free: amazing video quality, customizable video players for your website, a simple interface, unlimited uploads, and an RSS feed that you can plug into iTunes as a video podcast in less than 60 seconds. The iTunes feature really is the selling point for me over Vimeo right now because if my youth group kids subscribe to the video podcast in iTunes, they can easily sync it with their iPods and watch the episodes on the bus, in the car, on a treadmill at the gym, or wherever else they want.

[ Visit Blip.tv ]

Facebook

Of course, if you have a Facebook group or page for your youth group, remember to upload your video episodes there, too. Just be sure that you don’t have any copyrighted material in it (like a music background from song or something) because Facebook will take it down pretty quickly, at least they did with my old ones before I started using only royalty free content.

[ Visit Facebook.com ]