Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

Last night we did a fun club, iClub. Basically everything had some kind of technology or Apple twist to it.

The mixers was a Words with Friends type game. Everyone got a label with a letter and point value, put it on their forehead and then the guys played the girls by making a word, lining up and grabbing a knee. To do the game you will need this file I made with letters and points, print it out on standard address labels.

Then once again we used the wonderful Polleverywhere web site to do live polling via text message. We did:

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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.

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Everyones doin’ it! They are text messaging. No big surprise, sorry. Lots of you might already have a flip phone, a Blackberry, a Motorola Brick, and some of you might even have an iPhone, but I know a lot of you have a Treo. I do.

For the last year or so I have been using a group or bulk text messaging program with my Treo 650 and then Treo 700

(they replaced the 650 when I dropped it… oops). It is fantastic. I have several groups, my club team, the other leaders in my area, my campaigner group. But best of all, a group called “Monday”. I text all my kids on Monday in about 30 seconds. BTW, here are a couple tips for texting…

Anyway, here is the link to the file. Another leader uses it and it works pretty good for him. About 5% of the time it doesn’t work though. Overall it is a great tool.

http://mytreo.net/downloads/grouptextmessaging,730.html