Last year I felt kind of scattered in some of my communication to students here at Brandywine Valley Baptist Church.  I played around with various social medias, texting, email, snail mail, and more.  Mostly I wanted to see what kids seemed to respond to best here – in Maine my best bet was Myspace, but that’s what the kids there were using.  Here it’s a little bit of a different story.  This year we’re coming into the fall with three focus points for communicating with students:

• Snail Mail.  The catch all that isn’t going away any time soon.  Regardless of whatever else students might be using, they all get mail.
• Texting.  This is a biggie.  Kids just don’t bother with email like they used to, but they all use texting!  It’s great for last minute reminders, building excitement for upcoming events, and other communications.  I use Simply Txt; it enables me to do mass texting to youth leaders (they love it, too), junior high kids, senior high kids, and even parents (they loved itduring our last mission trip!).  In addition to mass texting, it also enables me to do individual messages to kids, as well as receive replies.  Over the last year they’ve really improved the service as well – I used to have to do it all from my computer, but now I can blast out messages to the different groups directly from my cell phone.  Sweet!  While there are some free mass texting services out there, I don’t like the idea of ads I don’t have any control over being blasted at the kids with my messages.  If you’re curious about trying it out, you can try it for a month for free here.
• Facebook.  For high school students in particular, this seems to be the one common social media outlet.  In the last year, Facebook has jumped from 100 million users to 300 million.  EVERYONE is one it.  And with the ability to create groups, it’s a great resource for mass messaging, group interaction, posting photos, announcing and advertising events, and more. 

So there you have it!  Our big communication push will be collecting cell phone numbers and pointing kids to our Facebook pages!