The idea

As I’ve written before, on overnight youth trips I like to embed my Twitter account’s RSS feed into our youth group website so parents can get the play-by-play action of our trip while we’re gone. They love it for so many reasons!

Now that our new youth group website includes a special LiveStream just for our group’s online social activity, I’m taking the mobile updates to a new level for this summer’s youth group trips. Instead of all the web updates, mobile pictures and videos coming solely from me, I’ve opened it up so all the kids on the trip can contribute to our LiveStream while we’re away. I think there’s a couple benefits of this:

• All the kids feel like they have some ownership in sharing the story with what’s going on.
• Parents can see and read the trip from the perspective of the teenagers.
• Parents feel included and have a lot to talk about with their teen when they get home besides asking, “So how was it?”
• We have an ongoing “digital scrapbook” of pictures, short video clips and updates for every trip. Everyone can contribute to it.

How to set it up

I’ve already explained how to setup the website for collecting all the updates. The rest of it is really quite simple. It basically entails setting up a couple email addresses and passing them on to the kids to send updates, pictures and videos to.

1. Set up a Twitter account for your youth group. Twitter is limited to receiving updates from only one mobile device, so I use TwitterMail.com to setup a special email address for the youth group’s twitter account that can receive messages from anyone. Any message sent to that special email address is automatically posted to our Twitter feed.

2. Set up a TwitPic account for your youth group. TwitPic.com allows users to take a picture with their mobile phone and post it to their Twitter updates. Again, you’ll get a secret email address to send pictures to that will automatically publish the images to Twitter.

3. Set up a YouTube account for your youth group. Then grab the mobile “secret address” for your YouTube account. Any videos that are taken with a cell phone and sent to that address will automatically be added to your YouTube account.

Once all your youth group accounts are setup, plug each one of them in to the Lifestream WordPress Plugin you setup on your youth group’s WordPress website.

Then, right before the trip, give the teenagers the “secret addresses” for Twittermail, TwitPic and YouTube and let ‘em loose (within reason, of course). I recommend encouraging them to add the email addresses to their cell phones as individual contacts for easy access. And it might be best to ensure that you or someone at home has access to moderating the messages through the plugin throughout the trip just in case something inappropriate is posted.

And no, teens do not have to send messages as an email for this to work. Sending a text message, picture message or video message to an email address works just fine for most mobile providers and does not usually require a data plan or incur extra charges beyond their normal messaging plan.

For advanced users

Since I plan on utilizing this for most of our overnight trips, I want the kids to be able to use the same “secret addresses” over and over again without having to update the contacts in their phone for every trip. But neither do I want them to be able to continue updating the LiveStream on our site randomly throughout the year. I want to control when they can and can’t update our youth group website with those addresses.

So I went into our webhost’s control panel and created an email forwarding address for each of the services: one for the TwitterMail address, one for TwitPic address, and one for YouTube address. (For example, trippics@alexandriayouth.com forwards all messages to our secret TwitPic address and tripupdates@alexandriayouth.com forwards all mail to our TwitterMail secret address.) Instead of handing out the original secret addresses, I instead hand out the forwarding addresses to kids so they can use them on every trip. For the time between trips, I will delete the forwarding addresses so no messages pass through to the social stream during that time.

Plus, it just looks cool to use addresses from your own domain.

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I’m not sure passing laws and focusing on education will change anything. It’s not a major deterrent to stopping drug usage, so why should it stop kids from sexting? The solution definitely has to go back to having parents who are actually in touch with their kids lives and who are teaching them openly, honestly and biblically about sexuality from a younger age. Otherwise, what’s next? Safe-sexting?

This MSNBC news video is worth watching.

[ht Inetta Smith via email]

I actually drafted this post several months ago, but am finally publishing it now in light of some other blog posts that are coming out. Among others, Anastasia Goodstein writes about Facebook and youth social networking fatigue, Libby Issendorf says that gen Y lost that loving feeling for Facebook, and Adam McLanes writes about how MTV lost their “cool factor” with this generation.

The cycle of youth culture

It’s really not surprising to me that this is happening. It’s the cycle of youth culture. Teens gravitate to something, usually under criticism from adults, until it becomes common and mainstream. As the adults eventually start adopting it themselves, teens gradually move on to something else.

Remember that, in his day, Elvis Presley was greatly criticized for his gyrating hips and the moral values his followers were adopting, but eventually his music became common among adults, parents, and teens alike. So, teens moved on to other flavors of rock and roll. As those flavors became mainstream with adults, teens moved once again to alternative rock. And so on…

Mark Oestreicher, in his book, Youth Ministry 3.0, summarizes it well:

Youth culture has become the dominate culture…. Middle-aged and younger parents listen to the same music their teenagers listen to (or, at least, used to listen to)…. Clothing brands cross age barriers…. Adults are all over Facebook and MySpace. …youth culture cannot stand by while it becomes completely commoditized and commonplace. That rubs against the essential fabric of adolescence…. Teenagers’ constant need to differentiate from the adult world… drives them to new, “other” ways of connecting, coping, and creating. Every time some aspect of youth culture becomes commoditized and mainstream, accepted by adults and culture at large, teenagers tweak it in a new way for themselves or create a whole new category. Case in point: All Web-watchers and adolescent speculators were still convinced that teenagers were going to continue using email and online chat rooms to connect with each other virtually, but teenagers slid out from under that and embraced instant messaging. Then we adults… were shocked… that teens would slide out from under our assumptions about their IM use and move to texting as the most common form of social networking. (Pages 65, 66, 68.)

It’s impossible to predict what teens will move toward next, but I will take the liberty of going on record to say that the general population of teens will move away from Facebook in the next two years.

This is becoming more and more evident as young adults like Julian Smith are annoyed that grandparents are joining Facebook. In his popular video, 25 Things I Hate About Facebook, Julian says there should be an age limit to Facebook (1:14 in the video).

Some teens I know still love Facebook and use it daily, but not everyone. Actually, what prompted me to write this blog post a couple months ago was a conversation I had with a teen who said he closed his Facebook account because there’s too many adults there and it’s too bloated with random features he doesn’t care about.

So what’s next?

I have no idea what they’ll gravitate toward as teens stop checking Facebook multiple times a day and start checking it only once a day, eventually checking it a couple times a week and then only once in a while, but I think it will have a couple elements:

1. It will not be tethered to a computer. Although Facebook has a mobile version and features, it’s still largely bound to a computer. As teens become more and more mobile and as smart phone data plans become more common, their networking will move to a mobile device that connects to a computer rather than the other way around.

2. It will still enhance and lead to face-to-face socializing. When the telephone was gaining traction, the criticism was that people would no longer meet face-to-face to talk and the dangers of miscommunication from not seeing body language would create a lot of problems. Today we all know people still continue to meet face-to-face anyway. The telephone just extended our communication. Oddly enough, however, that’s the same argument that was made when I was younger and email and IM was gaining traction, except that those communication methods didn’t even have talking involved! But yet, here we are today still meeting in person, despite all the text messaging and social networking sites. Remember, God has created mankind with an innate need for relationships, primarily with Himself, but also with each other. That face-to-face component will never go away, just the expressions of it change as technology and youth culture continues to develop.

One possibility of something teens might gravitate toward is something like Loopt, a social service that utilizes the GPS capabilities of newer phones to show you where your friends are in proximity to you, what they’re doing, and quickly contact them so you can meet together face-to-face. (This Apple commercial explains it a bit more.) Whether or not it will reach the widespread acceptance like Facebook is yet to be seen (I kinda think it won’t).

Whatever teens move toward, though, it will initially come under criticism from adults just like MySpace and Facebook did. Soon enough adults will accept it and cause the teens to once again move elsewhere, but thus is the cycle of youth culture and all the subsequent challenges of youth ministry.

What do you think?

Do you think it will take teens longer than two years to move to something else? Shorter? Will Facebook be able to keep up with the morphing trends in culture and adolescence? Have an idea of what they’ll move toward after Facebook? Would love to hear from you in the comments below.

Later this month I’m speaking at the National Youth Ministry Conference on this very topic. It also came up at MinistryQuestions.com as “Best form of communication.” Here’s a quick summary of how I communicate with my parents and teens in my youth group during the week, including my method of evaluating each one’s effectiveness. Some of the results may be more surprising than you think.

NOTE: The findings below are from my own youth group only. Every youth group and every area of the country will have different results. It’s important that you test your methods with your group and not just adopt my own because what works for my kids may not work with yours.

From worst to best:

6. Mass Facebook messages

Primary Audience: High school students

It surprised me to find that mass Facebook messages are absolutely the worst form of communication I have with my kids. I have a typical Facebook group set up and every week I send an update out of information that pertains mostly to high school kids even though almost every single one of them are active there. I try to keep the messages brief, to-the-point, and very skimmable thinking that would help kids actually get the information they need. However, I wanted to track how many kids were actually opening the messages, so I started sending just the main headings of the announcements and included a link to more details on our website. I found that the click-through rate was about 2%.

I used a self-hosted URL shortner scripture called Get Shorty to track the number of times my links were clicked, but you could just as easily use something like bit.ly, too, which is what I use for Twitter, actually.

If only 2% of the kids actually click the link in Facebook to get the info they want, that method is pretty much worthless for us.

5. Mass email

Primary Audience: Parents

Most kids here don’t use email, so this is mostly for the few kids who do use it and all the parents. When I write up our weekly youth group news and announcements, I publish it to the front page of our youth group website and shortly thereafter a service called Feedblitz automatically sends it as an email to everyone on the mailing list.

Fortunately, Feedblitz has some tracking tools that show that the open rate of my emails are about 20%. I know that sounds good compared to the Facebook messages, but that still means that 80% of the parents are not even opening my weekly email messages! And of the 20% that actually open the email (either accidentally or on purpose), an even smaller number of them actually click through anything to get more information.

So, email doesn’t seem to be a great solution for us either.

4. Bulletin insert/Youth kiosk

Primary Audience: Church visitors

Since every newcomer to our church services takes a bulletin, we include a youth group news insert that gives an overview that pertains mostly to someone who is a first-time visitor and wants to know more about the youth ministry.

We also have a youth kiosk right outside the main doors of our Worship Center (sanctuary) with more handouts and serves as the hub of our information center at church. That’s where we keep handouts, flyers, contact forms, sign-up sheets, and more. It also has that week’s youth group news video playing in a loop (see below). See a picture of it here.

Unfortunately, there’s no real way to track the effectiveness of bulletin inserts or our youth kiosk, but using them is very low maintenance, so we continue to use them anyway. The insert is mostly a tweaked copy and paste of the email update I posted to our website earlier that week, so it’s not a lot of extra work.

3. Website

Primary Audience: Parents and jr. high

Not really sure why the high school kids don’t seem to utilize our website too much, but regardless, they don’t.

Our site’s traffic statistics show that the site is getting over 100 visitors and about 1,500 page loads every day. That means that the average visitor clicks through approximately 15 pages on the site before leaving. That’s very high click- through rate for any website! (This blog, by contrast, gets about 2 clicks from each visitor.) People are definitely visiting our site and looking for information there. In fact, whenever there’s a typo or an incorrect calendar date, we hear about it pretty quickly.

(If you’re looking to start a website for your ministry, check out MinistryWebsites.biz and support the on-going work of Life In Student Ministry.)

2. Video announcements

Priamry Audience: Parents, high school and jr. high

Last year I started experimenting with communicating youth group news and announcements through video and made a couple observations:

• If I stood in front of the kids and made an announcement, most of them tune out. However, if I say the exact same thing on a screen, they all listen intently.
• Plugging videos into iTunes makes it simple for kids to sync them to their iPods to watch whenever they want.
• Adding more value to the videos than just news makes it a highlight of youth group for some kids.
• There’s a reason why YouTube and online video is so huge with teens — let’s utilize it!

I blogged about it in more detail here and even gave you a step-by-step tutorial on how I make my weekly videos. Yes, it takes more time than writing a simple email, but if it actually communicates, then it’s worth the time.

The statistics for each video’s views and downloads at YouTube, Blip.tv, and Facebook (although, we can’t track Facebook stats) equals a lot more than the number of kids we have in our youth ministry, which probably means that kids are watching the episodes several times each week and that their parents are watching them, too. In fact, I often hear from people in our community who don’t even attend our church but watch our youth group videos online! So, our message definitely spreads farther via video than any other communication method we have. (Hint: get some of your youth group kids in the video, tag them in it when you post it to Facebook, and it shows up in a lot of their friends’ feed, making it easy to use video to communicate with many more kids than just your youth group.)

For kids who don’t have high-speed Internet at home, I also show the video each week at youth group if there is time for it.

1. Mass text messages

Primary Audience: High school kids

Text messaging is by far our #1 most effective means of communication. Last summer I shared several ideas for using text messaging in youth ministry, so check that out for more details.

I use TxtSignal.com to send mass text messages out at pretty random times, usually as last-minute reminders or event cancelations, but I also love doing contents, asking for feedback, and sharing ideas through it, too. Just last week the kids had a snow day off from school, so I sent a message to everyone saying, “The first 3 people to reply to this message get a free lunch with me and Dana today. We’ll pick you up at 12:30 PM.” Within minutes my reply box in TxtSignal was lit up (which was good for my self-esteem, too!).

The only limitation with text messaging is that I must be very concise, and that not every kid or parent in our group has text messaging available. But for the ones that do have it, it is hands-down the best communication method we have. Fast, quick communication with instant responses.

How about you?

What works best for your group? How have you evaluated it and tracked it’s effectiveness?

Those of you who follow me on Twitter have seen some of the recent episodes of my youth group video announcements. Since I rarely make announcements at youth group meetings, I depend on other means of communication to share news, announcements and other important youth group news. My latest experiment is with video, for a couple of important reasons.

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.

Right on the heels of yesterday’s post on, “Ideas for using txt messaging in youth ministry,” comes a great FREE resource.

North Park University and the people in the Department of Christian Formation in the Evangelical Covenant denomination have partnered to bring you FREE txt devotions you can send to your youth group kids every day using a service like Txtsignal.com.

Right now there are 3 months available, each addressing a different topic:

• Risk
• Loving God
• Loving Others

Each devotional includes a scripture reference and a couple reflection questions. For example:

Luke 7:36-50 What prompted this woman’s extravagant actions? Has God’s forgiveness caused you to love him extravagantly? How? If not, what’s holding you back?

These txt devotions are available for download from the Evangelical Covenant’s website:

3 months of free txt devotions to send to your teens

CONTRIBUTE TO FREEBIE FRIDAY: If you’ve benefited from others who have freely shared their youth ministry resources online, consider giving back to the community by sharing your own materials here. Send me your donations for review and if I publish them in a Freebie Friday, you’ll receive full credit, a link, lots of gratitude and a warm feeling inside that comes from sharing with others.

According to my cell phone bill, I went through almost 300 txt messages last month. That averages 10 a day, which sounds like a lot, but when compared to students I know who go through 30-40 messages per day, that’s not really too many. Whether good or bad, txt messaging is one of the preferred methods of communication for teenagers. Leveraging it in youth ministry can be one of the most effective ways for us to get our message to our students.

Practical Ideas

Here’s some ideas for how you can start using txt messaging in your youth ministry.

1. Announcements and last-minute reminders
2. Event cancellations (works great when the weather forces you to change plans on the spot!)
3. Birthday wishes
4. Send Bible verses and short devos (watch for this Friday’s Freebie Friday!)
5. Contests, quizzes and polls
6. Prayer chain and praise reports
7. Introduce the weekend’s upcoming lesson
8. Get quick feedback about an idea or question

Several txt messaging services are popping up on the web that present a host of new opportunities to interact with our students using the above ideas and more. Here’s my four favorites.

1. TxtSignal.com

TxtSignal.com has been the backbone of txt communication in my youth group for over a year now. They are such a great company that I’ve already reviewed them twice. TxtSignal makes it simple to create a mass txt “mailing list” of your students. Or, if you don’t want to manually enter their information, send everyone a sign-up link or post it on your youth group website where they can subscribe, unsubscribe, change phone numbers or service providers, and more. Each TxtSignal account lets you organize txt subscribers into groups (i.e. youth group, college ministry, church staff) and into sub-groups called “teams” (i.e. sr. high, jr. high, parents).

Perhaps my favorite TxtSignal feature is the ability to queue txt messages to send at a later date and time. I queue up txt reminders about all our events and Bible studies sometimes several weeks in advance so I don’t have to worry about remembering to do it later.

The only feature TxtSignal does not have that I wish it did is the ability for subscribers to reply to my mass txt messages. Matt Donovan, the owner of TxtSignal, assures me they are working on this feature, but that it is not yet ready for public consumption.

TxtSignal is not free, but with plans starting at $10/month, it is definitely worth the price.

2. PollEverywhere.com

Ever want to poll your audience about something while you teach? Me neither, but the idea sure sounds cool! PollEverywhere.com allows you to ask your audience a question, they vote via txt message and, if you have an Internet connection, the results are displayed on the overhead screen in real time. It easily embeds into PowerPoint or displays in a web page. The service is free if you only need 30 responses or fewer, but anything over that you’ll have to start forking over monthly fees starting at $9/month. PollEverywhere.com could be a great way to make a point during a lesson, guess about a detail in an upcoming event, who will win the high school football game, or see who their favorite youth leader is (j/k!).

3. Wiffiti.com

I’m pretty excited about the ministry potential behind Wiffiti.com. Think of a virtual whiteboard in the front of a classroom that everyone can write on simultaneously just by submitting a txt message and watching it appear up front. Even people who aren’t present can participate! The “whiteboard” can also be embedded into your website and the background image changed to whatever you want.

Imagine a worship experience where, during the music set, students can publicly share prayers with everyone in real time, post reflections on what the Lord means to them, and txt their favorite attribute of God. Or, in a teaching situation, asking how each student will practically apply the truth during the upcoming week. Or a brainstorming session on how teenagers can influence their friends for Christ. The possibilities are endless.

Of course, using Wiffiti in these ways sounds like you might be vulnerable to those who will abuse the system and maybe even post something inappropriate, but fortunately Wiffiti has several moderation options and filters that give you complete control over what actually shows up on the screen.

Oh, and Wiffiti is completely free!

4. TextMarks.com

TextMarks.com is somewhat similar to TxtSignal.com except that it is used mostly for 2-way communication among a group of people. For example, one of your students can send a txt message to your youth group’s special code and it will automatically be forwarded to everyone else on the group. Likewise, when someone replies to the message, it’s automatically distributed to everyone else.

The cool thing about TextMarks, though, is that it can also be used as a “txt info hotline.” You could print your youth group’s special txt code on t-shirts or event flyers and have people “txt YOUTHGROUP to 41411 for more info.” An auto-response is sent to the phone with whatever information you want. This is a great way for people to anonymously find out more about your group or event if they are too shy to ask or just happen to see your promo when passing by.

TextMarks is also free, but remember that standard txt messaging charges apply with all these services.

[ UPDATE ] In the comments below, Lane Gilbert points out that TextMarks includes text ads at the end of the messages. He stopped using them when he saw one for a psychic hotline. Now he uses Txtsignal.