One of the really inter­est­ing things com­ing out of this lat­est CYIADA sur­vey is a really amus­ing (but kind of sad) dis­par­ity between what peo­ple know when asked, and what they under­stand and do.

Take, for exam­ple, e-mail & SMS communications.

Respon­dents were asked how much the youth they lead use mobile phones/e-mail ser­vices. In one case, a respon­dent said that “nearly all” youth used mobile devices, whilst “about half” of them had an e-mail address or used MSN/other IM plat­forms. Fre­quency of use was not polled.

The same respon­dent, when asked about their exist­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions, said that whilst they sent out e-mail mes­sages, they did not use SMS at all.

There are less cases in the oppo­site direc­tion, which is encour­ag­ing. There does appear to be an under­re­port­ing of mobile usage occur­ring in some instances, but this is only ver­i­fi­able where mul­ti­ple respon­dents from one church give data. Gen­er­ally, the higher fig­ure will be accepted as author­i­ta­tive, as higher fig­ures are — for the most part — those sup­plied by more knowl­edge­able respon­dents, mea­sured accord­ing to expo­sure to podcasting/use of video, and aware­ness of exist­ing church web activity.

Either alarm­ingly or encour­ag­ingly (encour­ag­ing given the state of some of these web­sites), respon­dents’ aware­ness of their church’s web prop­er­ties is, speak­ing gen­er­ally, quite low. This is not only for rea­sons of stale con­tent — some web­sites, despite aes­thetic defi­cien­cies, have up to date con­tent but appar­ently lit­tle in the way of vis­i­tors. This could be taken to sug­gest that the con­tent is up to date but remains irrelevant!

One web­site vis­ited had as its most recent forum post a dec­la­ra­tion that it had been three years since the last post was made on that forum.

Youth web­sites have been slightly under-reported but not sig­nif­i­cantly so, and this may be attrib­uted to the word­ing of this ques­tion: “Does your youth group have a web­site (sep­a­rate from your church site)”. There may be instances where there is a web­site sep­a­rate in design and main­te­nance but exist­ing under the same domain name in a folder or some­thing, where this has not been reported. One or two cases of this have been detected.

Fur­ther, there was no ques­tion on Myspace/SocNet pres­ence (for rea­sons of sim­plic­ity as much as any­thing — the aim of the sur­vey was emphat­i­cally not to con­fuse!). Usage of these is not even mod­er­ately com­mon, but enough are pop­ping up to make me wish I’d at least left space for it some­where (“Other web sites of note:” type question).

Still got about a third of responses to process still. This will be reposted at CYIADA.com when I setup a blog there (prob­a­bly this week­end, or early next week… depends some­what on what’s hap­pen­ing in Fiji the next cou­ple of days)