One of my favorite things about YL is our focus on relationships. Because of that many of the clubs I have been a part of have a natural limit of how many kids will be at club. That is because most of the clubs I’ve been in are relationally-driven. One of the clubs I was in was more about the "scene". This brought in more kids just because it was the thing to do. This is not to say that you couldn’t do both.
I’ve been at my current club for seven years now. It has always been a good size, but nothing huge. I like how it is. This semester we want to give it some hype. To try to get it big, even if just for a little bit. Kinda like a shot of steroids, but legally. By the way don’t do steroids.
- What have you done to hype-up, or get more kids to your club?
4 thoughts on “Hype! How to Get Lots of Kids to Club”
Teach campaigner kids how to do the same thing that leaders are doing. Have them utilize the relationships that they already have with peers/young students/siblings etc. and equip them with vision and tools to get their friends to club. Give THEM responsibility – let them run club, lead cabins, etc. If kids are doing it then 1.) you have more free time at club to hang out with new kids 2.) more kids want to come because they get to see friends up front 3.) those kids learn how to lead 4.) other kids get the vision and want to lead. Hope this helps.
We’ve had our biggest clubs last year when we decided to try to have at least one or two leaders at as many events as possible. We didn’t all need to show up at one baseball game or Friday night football game, although sometimes we did. Several of the students were surprised we they started seeing us around all the time, and commented to a few of the leaders that “you guys are like God, everywhere, all the time…” When we started doing that our numbers grew quickly.
We also let some of the student leaders know what our goal was (at the time we wanted to have 100 students show up). This seemed to give all of us a realistic and attainable goal to aim for.
We hopped on board the “campaigners-centered model” detailed in Bob Perkins book titled “No Banana Splits!” (www.nobananasplits.com) Perkins was an AD in Pennsylvania awhile back and the premise of his book is that we are a relational ministry, and our main responsibilities are to love kids, and proclaim the Gospel clearly. In short, we are called to a no-gimmicks ministry, and when we try and use gimmicks to get kids to club, in the long run it will hurt our ministry.
As our team took off with the campaigners model, we saw our students catch the excitement and fullness of sharing the aroma of Christ with their friends at school. Not only that, but campaigners really took off with making sure everyone at club was having fun by singing loud, including everyone, laughing their faces off, etc. so even if club is lame (which when you think about it, club is pretty lame) it’s actually the most hilarious and fun time of that kids week.
When that happens, word spreads at the school of how fun Younglife is, and in turn, kids that vowed to never show their face at Younglife just might ask you where and when it is next week. We saw our club nearly double and camp spots fill up, and the best part was it had nothing to do with something we physically did, but with relationships we cultivated.
We did a promo for club last week among seniors (our strongest class) to see who could bring the most first-time freshmen. The prizes were gift certificates to a restaurant.
Two seniors each showed up with 16 freshmen in their car! (for safety, they parked just outside and crammed them all in just for the drive into the parking lot)
A great class in our school will see 40 people in their grade show up. We have already gotten to meet at least 58 freshmen from this class! That is over half the freshmen in the school!
Club has been awesome and the buzz is huge!