Youth Ministry Ideas » Youth Ministry Administration

Youth Ministry and Church Text Messaging Service $9.95 a Month!

Steve — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 16:31:26 +0000

I have a youth ministry text service that is the best that I have seen for only $9.95 a month. This is an introductory offer and the service will eventually go up, but you can lock in at $9.95 if you contact me within the first 30 days of the date of this post.

What will the service do?

Unlimited number of people can join your text service
You can create unlimited groups: for example just parents, just middle school…..
Your students can reply to the group text
Send up to 500 texts to your group per month
Easy signup: They just text your group’s keyword to a 5 digit shortcode that you will get and then they are subscribed.

If you set up your groups a-head-of-time – you can have parents text your keyword with a .1 to join the parent texting group and have the youth join with .2 at the end of your keyword or vice versa.

95% of youth will read a text message within the first couple minutes they get it!

Using this service keeps both parents and youth informed and updated about what is going on from week to week and you can update them if there are any last minute changes. You can use it to send out follow-up thoughts or key-verses about your weekly talks, or just an encouragement note.

If you are interested in this service for your youth ministry, please:

CLICK HERE

Contact Me with any questions and I will call you to answer your questions and get you signed up. I will be prompt in contacting you about it.

This can be a great service to have your church sign up with and then you can use it for your youth ministry as a sub group of the church texting service. Maybe you already have a church text messaging service but it’s costing you an arm and a leg and you need to get into something more affordable.

Get A Customized Facebook Like Page For Your Youth Ministry

Steve — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 18:06:04 +0000

how to customize your facebook like page

If you have a like page on Facebook for your youth ministry – do you know how to customize it? Customizing it allows you to place things like pictures and videos with your feel to it.

Below is a screen shot of my youth ministry ideas like page and you can see how I have placed an image on their and also when someone visits the page before they have liked it – I can set it up to land on a specific tab that I want them to see.

So as of the writing of this post I have it set up to land on my lessons plan tab because I get of a lot of searches for lessons, but you could have some type of cool landing page that welcomes students to your youth ministry or lets them know more about your youth ministry.

Setting this up isn’t as easy as people think because you need to use FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and it’s similar to HTML but it’s a little different. I have read up about how to do this online and you can certainly do that too. Here are the basic steps:

Have to have a like page on Facebook – this is easy to do but make sure that you select that you are an official rep for your page otherwise Facebook can take it over if it becomes popular.
Go to your edit button below the profile pic of your like page and click it.
Now you will see a left-hand side list of things and you need to click on “apps”
You will want to Go to FBML or add it if it’s not there.
Next you will see a box with a title of FBML and space below to add your FBML so that you can customize your tab. You will want to change the title to whatever name you want and then below you will need to add the code for your picture or whatever you are trying to add.
Click Save and it should show up.

Here is my code for my survivor lock-in that you can look at to see what I did and then just change out the image link with your image link. Keep in mind the biggest width you can have is about 520 pixels:

Want to have a fun lock-in? Try the survivor lock-in and have a blast with your students

This should help you get started. If you want to have an easy way to do this, click on the link below about how to get a customized facebook like page for your youth ministry.

UPDATE: Facebook has stopped using FBML and started using iframes. If you want to customize your Facebook Page for Youth Ministry which is Hot right now – I recommend CLICKING HERE and using their product.

What Do You Use To Speak To Students in Your Youth Ministry?

Steve — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:49:53 +0000

I’m curious as to what most youth workers are using to communicate to their students now-a-days. With the constant change in technology and different platforms and presentation softwares – I simply want to hear from you what you are using to communicate and or give your “talk/lesson” to your students.

Here are some examples:

PowerPoint – for lesson or worship or something totally different
MediaShout – presentation software or some other software like easy worship or song show plus
Only Your Voice – be curious if you just speak without any visuals
Vcast, Skype – or some online resource to broadcast yourself
Projectors or TV’s or both
Sound System – wireless mics, handhelds
Lighting/Mood

Please share with everyone via commenting on this post. Also, if you want to, please share this post on Twitter and or Facebook to gain more feedback via the share button below. Your comments will help all those that are looking at this post wondering what everyone else is doing to speak with students.

Thanks!

Facebook Groups For Youth Ministry Leaders and Student Leaders

Steve — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 16:34:49 +0000

You may have logged into your facebook account recently and noticed a new groups notification. I just added a group last night and today to try it out for my youth worship team and youth leaders team.

I really like this youth ministry idea because I think it could develop into better communication.

Once you create a new Group, you decide if you want it to be an open group, where members and content are open for anyone to see. Or it can be a closed group, where people can see who is in the group, but only group members can see what has been posted. And there are secret groups, where the only way you would know about them is if you got invited.

Beyond just posting photos and messages, group members can even create a text document that everyone in the group can edit. And the whole group can be in a private chat window, all talking at once.

So this may be something to try and test to see if it would work for your youth ministry. Here’s a screen shot of a group I just created in my facebook:

How To Create a YouTube Playlist For Your Youth Ministry

Steve — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:54:10 +0000

I was thinking this summer that it would be cool to just be able to go to YouTube and create a playlist of videos that would be looped or shuffled while students were showing up for our youth nights this fall.

This may all be old information for many, but I thought that I would put together a video showing you exactly how to create your own YouTube playlist for your youth ministry.

What’s great about it is you can add or take videos out each week. Add funny videos to your playlist or whatever you want to do. As long as you have high speed internet streaming at your church you should be able to use this idea effectively.

Here’s the video (I was using a free screen capture software so you may hear some glitch noises but it’s nothing over-powering):