I’m employed by an organ­i­sa­tion (the one I referred to in my first post about this project, wherein I didn’t bother explain­ing exactly what was going on, but hoped it would be clear to those who already knew) that exists to — amongst other things — resource youth ministry.

One thing we’ve noticed (“we” is myself and a hand­ful of oth­ers with an inter­est in the web) over the past twelve months is an uptake in web usage by youth min­istries — for obvi­ous rea­sons: that’s where kids are spend­ing their time, and it’s a great com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool, and every­one else is doing it.

When I say every­one else is doing it, I actu­ally mean every­one else is try­ing to do it. Every­one has, for the last six to twelve months, been writ­ing the same appli­ca­tions, inte­grat­ing the same soft­ware, pay­ing for the same soft­ware, attempt­ing to train the same peo­ple, and gen­er­ally doing a lot of the same stuff, sep­a­rately. With no point of inter­sec­tion or shar­ing or intel­li­gent resource management.

This is under­stand­able: after­all, the web presents a rel­a­tively new front for churches in gen­eral, and whilst kids have been wast­ing time online for years, only with the rel­a­tively recent advent of social net­work­ing web­sites (I refer to it as ‘Soc­Net’ in these parts — no-one else seems to, but I like it, so what­ever) have the less computer-inclined began spend­ing sig­nif­i­cant amounts of time in front of a keyboard.

There’s also a bit of a catch-22 when it comes to build­ing these things. Peo­ple ask, what are the ben­e­fits? We’ve never had some­one come along to youth group because of our website! — well, no, you’re right. But you also don’t have a web­site, so that’s hardly fair, is it? Nine times out of ten peo­ple will not come along to church (gener­i­cally) because they’ve searched for a church in a par­tic­u­lar sub­urb in Google (though, speak­ing of that, I’ve got to do a bit of SEO work on the Matthias site — it’s not on the first page for a “Church in Padding­ton” query. Changed the title, it’ll be a while til that kicks in. We’ll see.)

They’ll come because a friend asked if they wanted to, or they were walk­ing past and heard peo­ple inside, saw them going in, and won­dered what it was all about.

But this is hardly exclu­sive to hav­ing a web­site. If they have those points of con­tact, a web­site is a great way to invis­i­bly inves­ti­gate fur­ther with­out need­ing to make them­selves uncom­fort­able. It’s easy to find these sorts of web­sites through search engines — you walked past a church and noted its name, you remem­ber the name of your friend’s church, etc.

The same goes for youth groups, obviously.

Peo­ple have just been start­ing to realise this, or at least think of it at all and decide “yeah, we could do that”. So, there’s the ratio­nale for it all. Most peo­ple with decent web­sites already may not have con­sid­ered ratio­nale in any great depth — they’ve got a good web­site because they know some­one who makes them, and vol­un­teered their time (maybe they’re a leader), throw­ing some­thing together with Xoops in an after­noon. It’s quick and dirty, but effective.

We’re try­ing to spend a small but not insignif­i­cant amount of money to equip peo­ple to do these sorts of thing, so it’s only sen­si­ble that some more time is spent con­sid­er­ing what on earth we’re try­ing to achieve. Hence the lengthy pre­lude to what it actu­ally does.

Now, the fea­tures. We have too many tar­get audi­ences for it to be an alto­gether com­fort­able project, but that’s half the fun of it. The prod­uct is being mar­keted to churches (who pay for it) through lead­ers (who want to use it) and for youth (who actu­ally aren’t the cen­tre of the uni­verse on this one, but we need to give them UX that says they are). Out­side of these three, there are also the friends of the youth already in the appli­ca­tion who are just check­ing out the youth group page.

Of course, it’s not quite that sim­ple. We’re also mar­ket­ing this to camps, high school scrip­ture groups/lunchtime bible groups, and maybe bands/events. Which is great and tech­ni­cally only a small step, but it does pretty hor­ri­ble things when you try and explain who’s pay­ing for what in a con­cise business-like fash­ion. If you’ve read this far, chances are you’re well aware that concise-ness has never been my strong point.

So, with these tar­gets in mind, we are (firstly) going to equip them with web­sites. Big woop. WordPress.com and Blog­ger eat your heart out. Cue yawns.

No, seri­ously. We’re going to give them (‘them’ being the var­i­ous enti­ties described above, not indi­vid­u­als so much — there’s no way I’m posi­tion­ing this against other Soc­Net sites because I reckon it’s too frag­mented to last… Face­book or Myspace or Bebo or.… yes.) web pages. Wel­come to 1999.

They’re going to have web pages with cal­en­dars they can chock full of the sched­ule for the term, though. So that’s exciting.

And everyone’s going to have their own user­name, so they can leave com­ments on the inevitable blog­ging ele­ment with iden­tity — this is won­der­ful for com­ment– and generic form-spam. Inci­den­tally, I read a few blogs that Wild St peo­ple are writ­ing and was really excited to see they’re actu­ally enthu­si­as­tic about doing it. There’s quite the bunch of them on Blog­ger these days, and it’s all com­pletely autonomous — so far as I know, no-one has pushed them to start doing it. I was so proud of their keen­ness and inno­va­tion for build­ing up com­mu­nity and spread­ing the gospel! Another aside, my copy hasn’t arrived yet but I believe there’s some­thing about blog­ging in The Brief­ing for Decem­ber (it’s not on their web­site yet, either). My copy arrived today, and I dis­cov­ered the cur­rent issue is in their web­store, just not on the main site. It’s The Brief­ing #339, if you’d care to read it.

Any­way. Blogs will fea­ture. Cal­en­dars will fea­ture. All the stuff you’d rea­son­ably expect to be able to do with a CMS tool these days will fea­ture. Blogs, cal­en­dars, gal­leries, con­tact forms, sta­tic pages. Yay. So that’s the bor­ing stuff that we’ve just got to do the grunt-work for at some point (I’m sure it can be fun, but, just between you and me, I’m not really look­ing for­ward to the cou­ple of weeks we have to spend on that bit).

Now, for inter­est­ing and inno­v­a­tive fea­tures — because, let’s face it, the above is hardly enough to con­vince any­one to switch their exist­ing web­site (if indeed they have one) across to a hosted plat­form for a nom­i­nal (to be deter­mined, but prob­a­bly only payable by church groups, and not for camps/events on account of these being once-off) monthly fee.

Con­tact tools. Yummy. We’re going to give them mail­ers that make it easy to send a mes­sage to, say, all the kids in year 10. Or just guys. Or girls in year 8. Or only to your co-leaders (we’ll have a resource area where they can share files — Word doc­u­ments, PDFs, slide shows — on the site, too: that’s some of the fun CMS stuff). But email’s been done before. Everyone’s used email. Admit­tedly, some­times you just wish there’s a bet­ter way to store and man­age lists of peo­ple, and this tool will cer­tainly do that, but it’s a lit­tle bor­ing still.

So we decided it’d be a good idea to throw SMS into the mix. It’s not just a gim­mick: again, this is in response to what peo­ple are already doing. The only dif­fer­ence is it’s paid on a shared account (used by the lead­ers — the youth kids won’t have access to these tools, for fairly obvi­ous rea­sons) and inte­grates the same con­tact man­age­ment fea­tures as the mailer app. We’re hop­ing con­ve­nience will draw peo­ple across to this tool. Use sce­nar­ios are basi­cally just that you’d use this tool to inform peo­ple of what’s going on this week at youth group, or remind­ing them that the group is on bring­ing sup­per this month, etcetera. The orig­i­nat­ing num­ber will be that of a sin­gle leader, or it could even be that of that person’s own leader.

For exam­ple, one mes­sage is sent to all kids by the group co-ordinator, but that mes­sage is altered depend­ing on who the indi­vid­ual recipient’s bible study leader is, so that it appears to orig­i­nate from them. Obvi­ously com­mon sense would say that you wouldn’t do that with­out con­sul­ta­tion, so we’d prob­a­bly have a check box in the leader’s “my account” page that would say “Allow mes­sages from other senders to orig­i­nate from my mobile num­ber”, or some­thing to that affect.

Beyond con­tact tools, we want to take advan­tage of the fact that this is a service-based prod­uct and entirely a hosted solu­tion. Part of the rea­son we’re strongly pur­su­ing that is it gives an oppor­tu­nity to equip and direct in a way that decen­tralised sites can’t be. So, a few things we’re think­ing of doing are cen­tralised offer­ings like weekly newslet­ters (sent to lead­ers two days in advance so they’ve got an oppor­tu­nity to see it first) and global blog prop­er­ties that give reviews, cur­rent affairs com­men­tary, etc.

That’s the end of the uni­ver­sal fea­tures that are great for kids and lead­ers alike, but there’s lots more for lead­ers. As I’ve already said, we want this to be self-funding. Part of this is sell­ing elec­tronic ver­sions of dead-tree prod­ucts, as DRM’d PDFs, or as unen­cum­bered PDFs with watermarks/obviously time-sensitive adver­tis­ing (so vio­la­tion of copy­right is glar­ingly obvi­ous). The other part is (for me at least) far more excit­ing, and that’s reselling user generated/contributed con­tent (UGC) under an iStockPhoto-esque model (Basi­cally, profit sharing).

This isn’t just about words on a page — I want to get plenty of video stuff hap­pen­ing, too, because (espe­cially in reformed evan­gel­i­cal Anglican/Baptist/Presbyterian, etc. churches) that doesn’t get nearly enough of a work out as is. It’s a really effec­tive tool for sup­port­ing preaching/bible stud­ies, and it’s been largely over­looked until prob­a­bly early this year (I had my first con­ver­sa­tion with some­one about video resources for small group bible stud­ies as late as July or August this year, I think! They had used a Matthias Media resource which I haven’t encoun­tered, and thought it really helpful).

Pric­ing mod­els for all that are still a lit­tle up in the air, but, from a consumer’s point of view, it’s def­i­nitely going to be afford­able. The project will ulti­mately sit on a server main­tained gratis and depend largely on vol­un­teer labour to admin­is­ter con­tent. The only “costs” are those to the estab­lished Youth­works pub­lish­ing divi­sion, but hope­fully we can tran­si­tion the way they do their high-school level con­tent effec­tively, so they’re com­mis­sion­ing con­tent for the web and sell­ing it there. Some­thing that’s really excit­ing is the pos­si­bil­ity that, instead of com­mis­sion­ing con­tent, it’s pos­si­ble to pur­chase it directly and already cre­ated from a pool of resources on the website.

There’s def­i­nitely a work­able model here, somewhere.

Prayer is greatly wel­comed for:

• wis­dom try­ing to fig­ure that model out
• energy and resources to make it hap­pen (in what­ever form)
• adop­tion and enthu­si­asm from youth lead­ers and kids
• effec­tive­ness in web strat­egy as we attempt to use it as an evan­ge­lis­tic out­reach tool, and a tool for the growth of exist­ing ministry
• and, hand-in-hand with that last point, that God’s will be done and if He wills it, that growth would be given!