Creating student profiles can be a great resource for your youth ministry and for current and new volunteer staff. If you decide to do a profile, I suggest that you get a picture of every student to go along with the info that you decide. You can add as much information as you would like about each student, but at least get basic information if you do it.

The length of this project will depend on how big your youth ministry currently is and how much information that you want to have in the profile. This project will be easier if you enlist some help to get it done. There are also some programs out there that already have this capability so check with your church secretary to see what they do to keep track of everyone’s info.

Here’s what you need to do:

1)      Have one or two volunteers ready to take the pictures. Make sure they know what kind of picture that you would like to have for example (head shot or head and shoulders).

2)      Plan to do this as a part of the kick off to the fall. Many youth ministries still have these as students are getting back to school. Then as the year goes on you can simply add the new students as they become a part of your youth ministry.

3)      Let the students and parents know that you will be doing this about a couple of weeks ahead so that way girls (no offense) won’t be crabby about getting their pic taken because they weren’t ready although it shouldn’t really matter. This also may be a good time to see what your church’s policy is on taking pictures especially if some of these could be posted on the internet.

4)      Take pictures of the students using digital cameras. With digital cameras you can always retake the picture if it was bad. Digital cameras will store pictures in the order you take them; so while you take the picture write down the # of the picture on an info card and have the student fill out the info card immediately after the picture is taken. This way when you get ready to put all the info together all you will need to do is match the number of the picture with the number on the info card.

5)      Enlist the help of an administrator (sweetly talk the secretary;) to help put all the info together. Some may disagree, but I would try to format things so that 1 sheet of paper is one student. Leave room for notes about the student that you or your volunteers could write in about that student. Print off books for volunteer staff that doesn’t have or wants to use computers, but otherwise you can have everything stored on the computer to update and write notes and learn more about each student that you have.

Other suggestions:

 See what’s out there as far as software for doing this because it may save you time if you want to download addresses but not necessarily the rest of the information. See what’s compatible with what programs you currently use so you can best utilize the information.

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