Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

Here are ten links and apps that I have found helpful recently:

1. The Young Life Leader Blog – Wow! I can’t say enough good things about this blog. My friend Drew is posting great resources and ideas. Every YL leader should check it out.
2. YL Playbook – These guys keep updating the games, skits and club ideas. I’ve mentioned it before, but I use it often. I use the search feature a lot when I’m looking for an idea about a certain theme (i.e. balloons, or bananas), or for an explanation of a game I already know. Little known fact: one of the guys on this team can clean your teeth and fill a cavity on your teeth. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh I remember the days of sending out postcards every few weeks to kids to tell them about club. It sure beat calling their home phone number, which was often busy (that is before call waiting!). Then came call-waiting, then you might have to talk to their parents. Then came cell phones, but only adults had those… Fast forward to today and now we use Facebook and text messaging almost exclusively to keep in contact with kids about events and small-talk.

There are plenty of text messaging tools out there. Here are some that people I know are using with success:

iPhone

Group Text

For a long time Apple did not allow any apps to interface with their text messaging app. This meant that texting groups of people on an iPhone was a tough task that lacked flexibility. Recently this functionality was changed and there are now plenty of apps that will allow you to make a group and choose that group again. Some apps even allow you to pick a group of people and then, just for that text, remove someone from the list, which is handy feature for my club. I have been using "Group Text” and it seems to do the job nicely. Here are some screenshots. After you pick your contacts it moves the contacts you picked to the native iPhone texting app, which makes it nice for replies.

Read the rest of this entry »

I just got an iPhone and I love it! The interface is unbelievable. Some of the applications like the Google Map integration and the Facebook iPhone web-app have been really useful.

There are a couple things I’m trying to figure out to maximize it for YL usage. Maybe this will be in the iPhone 2.

1) Is there a better way to group text message? Right now you can pick the individuals for a multi-person text, but not a way to manage a group. The Treo had a great free program to do this.

2) How to best organize my contacts on the phone. I have a lot of contacts, over 1100. As far as I know the iPhone doesn’t do any sorting or categories. One of my leaders enters club kids phone numbers with "YL" in front of the name. (i.e. YL – John Smith) This way they are all together and easy to find.

QUESTION: How do you organize your club kids names for easy retrieval? Also, any iPhone tips would be appreciated.