Besides the obvious items like a Bible and a first aid kit, here are some key pieces of equipment that will definitely get a lot of use this summer.

1. Video Camera. I have the Canon VIXIA HF100, which is great because it records in full 1080p HD quality, has outstanding image reproduction, records to SD cards and is about the size of a soda can. It was relatively cheap when I bought it, but now it costs almost twice as much. Not sure why, especially when the newer Canon VIXIA HF200 is a better camera for a cheaper price. Weird. But anyway, we all love capturing our favorite moments together on video and putting it on Facebook for all to share. Some youth workers swear by the mini Flip HD cameras that’s approximately the size of a deck of cards. For $129, it’s hard to go wrong.

2. iMovie. What good would the video camera be without a very simple, intuitive, user-friendly video editing program to make some quick modifications to make a professional-looking video? Although I have the higher-end Final Cut Express software, I hardly use it because iMovie does pretty much everything I need and more.

3. Digital camera. Video is cool and all, but still images have their place, too. Gotta have a digital camera around to snap quick poses, twisted facial expressions, and capture those unrepeatable moments. Plus, a photo you can hang up around your youth room or put on a bulletin board at church. Can’t quite do that with videos.

4. Swimming suit. Since a lot of people in our community live on lakes, it goes without saying that we’ll need bathing suits. In fact, we often get together to go water skiing, tubing, wake boarding, and more. We do it officially as a youth group one Sunday each month, but it definitely happens more than that on a more spontaneous level.

5. Xbox. For those rainy days when we’re all hanging out and stuck inside, the Xbox comes in handy. I don’t think I’ve met a teenager who wasn’t up for some Halo or Guitar Hero. When we hop on Xbox Live and compete against others, it’s like instant teamwork and comradery.

What equipment is essential for your ministry this summer? I asked this question on Twitter and Facebook and got a bunch of answers from some of you.

• Jeff Greathouse: “air conditioning”
• Tony Myles: “A car trunk full of athletic balls and cones.”
• Sarah Webber: “spaghetti dinners”
• Joshua Treece: “Orange game cones”
• Summer Hamilton Brown: “water balloons”
• Dale Wayman: “patience and tolerance”
• Pastor Robbie: “diet mt dews, macbook, the message bible, megaphone, & college leaders to help hype up the youth”
• Chris Kidd: “water pistol, vit C tablets, team of leaders, BBQ & burgers, minibus keys, sleeping bag, credit card to buy the things you forget”
• Josh Christian: “Sunscreen, deodorant, water balloons, super soakers, and air conditioning. Not really “equipment” but essential!”
• Brit Windel: “Gas in the van, tons of disc golfs, Bible, camcorder, paint…”

How about you? What essential summer equipment do you use for youth ministry during the summer?

There was a lot of great youth ministry training at the National Youth Ministry Conference last weekend! Some of it came from your’s truly, which is what I have permission to post below.

Communicating with teens and parents throughout the week

My brown bag lunch seminar on Communicating with Teens and Parents Throughout the Week was packed! Ran out of chairs, so people sat around on the floor and stood in the back. It was a great time! Here’s the description of what we covered:

What means of communication do you use with teens and parents throughout the week and how well is it working for your ministry? Tim Schmoyer gives ideas for improvement, shows you how to utilize aspects of communication technology, and shares ways you can evaluate which method works best for your group.

Watch it on Vimeo: Communicating with teens and parents throughout the week

Panel discussion with a few of our favorite youth ministry bloggers

I was also on a panel of youth ministry bloggers, along with Chuck Bomar of collegeministrythoughts.com, Chris Davis of youthministrygeek.com and Joshua Griffin of morethandodgeball.com. We talked about some of the basics of blogging and answered many questions from the audience on just about everything from online video, search engine optimization, and how to get people to visit your site.

Watch it on Vimeo: Panel discussion with a few of our favorite youth ministry bloggers

The Skit Guys performing at the NYMC 2009

We all love The Skit Guys, especially their improv comedy when using guests to make sound effects for them. If you’re ready for a lot of good laughs, here’s one of their skits in HD.

Watch it on Vimeo: The Skit Guys at NYMC 2009

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk! Info on the LIVE YM Talk page.

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?

This past October I wrote a two-part blog series for you all explaining the effectiveness of using video to communicate with teens and an actual “how to” post of making videos a reality for your group. It’s been fun to see many of you pick up on the idea of using video to communicate more with your groups both at church and online throughout the week.

Last week I watched some tutorial videos on YouTube about how to use a program on my Mac called LiveType (included for free with my purchase of Final Cut Express). Although the program looked a bit intimidating at first, it is really quite simple to use. Below is my very first LiveType video and I made it for all of you! Feel free to download and use this generic “Youth Group News” video introduction with any youth group videos you make.

Download High-Definition version*

Download Standard-Definition version*

*You may have to right-click on the link and select, “Save Target As” or “Save Link As” in order to download the video file.

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk! Today we are talking with Bill Scott of Xtreme Talk Live and Sound of Light radio shows about becoming a dynamic speaker for teens. As someone who’s spoken to groups of 50,000+ teenagers, he’ll give us tips how to teach God’s Word effectively to a large audience of teens. Info on the LIVE YM Talk page.

This week’s Freebie Friday is donated by Patrick Ball. He’s giving us his video, “You, School and God,” absolutely free along with accompanying PowerPoint images. Tuck it away for the next time you talk with your kids about school and God. Maybe for next year’s See You At The Pole? Watch the video here on Vimeo.

Download “You, School and God” video with PowerPoint background

Patrick Ball is an experience creator for SMIRK. Smirk creates animations, videos, graphics and branding for student ministries around the U.S. His work can be found on Sermonspice.com and Vimeo.com.

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Join us at 2:00 PM EST this afternoon in our LIVE YM Talk! Alejandro Reyes will lead our discussion about using technology and social media to better connect with teenagers and build online community. Info on the LIVE YM Talk page.

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Been in youth ministry for 2 years or fewer? Apply for a FREE 10 week one-on-one Life In Student Ministry Mentorship with one of our 13 youth ministry veterans. Application closes on January 24, 2009. Mentorship is made available for free thanks to Lifeway Students, who are supplying all the resources and materials to each mentee. Thanks, Lifeway Students!

Dana and I sent this video “Christmas card” to friends and family, and now to you, too! Merry Christmas from me and Dana!

How to make a video like this
It only takes about 5 minutes to create a video like this, and it’s extremely simple — anyone can do it! Just upload your pictures to Animoto.com, add some titles and music, and the website does the rest. Sign up at Animoto.com for free using this link so we can share videos together. It also sure beats boring PowerPoint slideshows of youth group events.

This week’s resource is a bit of encouragement from The Skit Guys, not just for you, but for all the youth workers on your team. This skit really comes from their heart for adults who serve teenagers. On the original DVD where I got this video, The Skit Guys encourage us to copy and distribute this video to other youth workers, so feel free to spread it. Download the original file below, burn it to DVD, and give a copy to each of the adult youth leaders on your team. Tell each one how much you appreciate them and remind them of the tremendous Kingdom impact their dedication is having.

Download the original video file of The Skit Guys performing “The Chair”

Or download it in iTunes
[display_podcast]

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Join our LIVE YM Talk today at 2:00 PM EST! The topic is pretty loose and will NOT be recorded as we share, off the record, about our struggles in youth ministry. Come talk with other youth workers, vent if you need to, share your struggles and seek advice and wisdom from others who have been where you are. Join us using either your telephone or your computer microphone!

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 ]

In case you missed it, see Part 1 here about benefits of using video for youth group announcements and how to utilize it to it’s full potential.

Here are my two latest youth group video episodes to serve as finished examples of what I’m about to explain.

• AlexandriaYouth.com News for October 16, 2008.
• AlexandriaYouth.com News for October 22, 2008.

This post is not intended to teach you how to use whatever video editing software is available to you, but rather to give you resources and directions for how I created my youth group video episodes in case it’s helpful for your ministry’s communication.

How much time will it take to create videos?

The first one took me about 8 hours to put together just because I had to search for video clips, figure out what transitions I liked, choose fonts, and everything else. Now that the basic framework is put together for each episode, every consecutive video takes about 1 to 2 hours. It’s just a matter of shooting a new video of myself, L.T., and inserting different video clips from YouTube and such.

Video editing software

I used iMovie for pretty much everything except for one or two scenarios, which are indicated below. Fortunately, iMovie comes free on every Mac computer.

If you’re on a PC, the Microsoft’s free Windows Movie Maker may be sufficient for your needs as you begin to experiment with video editing.

1. Intro video

It looks cool, but I’m not that good. I actually purchased it royalty-free from the video section at iStockPhoto.com for about $20 (15 credits on their site). It came without a sound track, so I purchased a royalty-free audio track to go along with it from TheMusicCase.com , which cost me almost $38 (€30.00 EUR).

NOTE: Royalty-free means you are free to publish and use the material over and over again without paying royalties to the creator. ["Royalty Free" on Wikipedia.]

In iMovie, I simply laid the audio track over the video, made the final frame of the video last for about 10 seconds longer (called a “still frame”), and threw the “AlexandriaYouth.com News” text on top.

2. Recording myself

This is probably the easiest part of making the video: I just record myself talking to my Mac’s built-in iSight camera using iMovie’s “Import from camera” option. When I click “Done” it automatically imports the video to the iMovie project where it’s ready to click and drag to the video timeline.

Again, if you don’t have a Mac, almost any webcam will do. Although a webcam’s video quality isn’t as high as using an actual video camera, it certainly is a lot easier and a lot fewer steps to get the video to your computer. And, as you can see from my videos linked above (and every youth ministry training video on this site), my Mac’s iSight camera is completely sufficient.

3. Adding lower-thirds

Lower-thirds are the little text banners that display at the bottom of the screen while L.T. or myself talk. I’m just using one of the default lower-thirds available in iMovie. Click and drag it to wherever you want it in the video, type in your text, and drag the ends of the text section in the timeline for whatever duration you want the lower-third to appear.

4. The short transition clips

Again, it’s just a still-frame from the end of the intro movie I purchased. I put some text over it and used a quick static audio clip from iMovie’s extensive sound effect library.

5. Using L.T.

This is actually just as simple as recording yourself in the step above, although it requires some extra software. Fortunately, L.T. works on Windows, Mac or Linux and best of all, he’s FREE! Download him from the free section of CrowdControlGames.com.

Read my tutorial from last year about how to make fun video announcements in 3 easy steps with L.T. (Check the comments there for a link to free Windows software to use in place of the Mac program I recommend.)

Green screen option with L.T.
In the first AlexandriaYouth.com video epsidoe I actually put myself on the screen with L.T. and talked with him through the announcements (although, I obviously messed up my script a bit in the beginning lol). This is thanks to the green screen background that comes with L.T.. Unfortunately, you’ll need a more advanced video editing program to filter out the green screen so the background video/image can show through. I used Final Cut Express and learned how to do it by following this tutorial on YouTube.

6. YouthBytes devo (jr. high preview)

You can get the 1 minute versions for free from YouthByte’s YouTube channel. Or, if you purchase their DVD series, you can rip the high quality versions straight from the disk. (Don’t worry, I’ve talked with Chad Daniel from YouthBytes about it and he thinks it’s a great idea.)

DVD ripping software for Mac
On Mac, I look at the DVD’s file contents in Finder, find the VOB file of the video I want, copy it to my computer and use ffmpegX (free) to convert it to MOV file for iMovie. Another (and easier) option for Mac is to use Handbrake (also free) to scan the DVD, find the video you want, and export it to the format of your choosing.

DVD ripping software for Windows
For Windows, you can also browse to the DVD’s contents through My Computer, find the VOB video you want and use a program like SUPER (free) to convert it to WMV or whatever video format your video editing software wants. (If you have a better recommendation for Windows, please post it in the comments below — I’m not as familiar with Windows as I used to be.)

7. YouTube video of the week

There are a lot of different services available for downloading videos from YouTube and other video sites. Two easy web-based tool are MediaConverter.org and KeepVid.com. Just copy and paste the YouTube URL to it and click through the steps.

Personally, I use a free program called TubeTV (Mac only) just because it’s fast and seems to encode the video at a higher quality than web-based services. Another good Mac program is called VideoBox, free to try for 5 days (thereafter, $15 to buy).

Once your clip is ripped from a DVD or downloaded from YouTube, import it into your iMovie project and place it wherever you want in the video’s timeline.

Let the questions commence! Post them in the comments below.

Although originally posted at YouthMinistryIdeas.net earlier this month, I have permission from both BlueFishTV.com and Steve Blanchard to share with you this special coupon code for a free video download. Choose from a variety of different $1.99 videos that illustrate Biblical truths and concepts that you can use in your teaching at BlueFishTV.com. Then use the coupon code BF199 at checkout to get the video absolutely free. Cool! Thanks Steve and BlueFishTV.com!

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Join our LIVE YM Talk today at 2:00 PM EST! The topic is, “Planning a meaningful youth event.” Terrace Crawford will be our featured guest teaching us how to plan, coordinate, market, and even team up with other ministries to pull off meaningful youth events. He’s done many big events both for ministries and radio stations and has a lot of experience and ideas that will be beneficial to us. Join us using either your telephone or your computer microphone!