Childrens Ministry Online

Communicating with parents while at camp

Posted on22. Jun, 2010 by Kenny.

Over the years I’ve used a variety of ways to keep parents in the loop of what was going on at camp. In the early days, I’d shoot my admin a summary email that she would forward on to all the parents. Then in 2003 or 2004, I took a big jump and started using a yahoo group, which worked pretty well. I’ve found that the more I help parents feel connected to what was going on with their kids at camp, the more excited they’d be about the ministry that happens to their kids, both at camp and back at home. A lot of parents are nervous about being away from their kids, so they just want to see pictures of their kids all happy and having fun. These days, it’s so easy to do this, easier than ever.

Our Kids Ministry already has a facebook group, facebook.com/kidsquest. All we did was update the facebook page like crazy. Last year I did a lock-in and I gave 5-8 of my leaders access to the Kids Quest twitter account. It worked well, but only for parents on twitter. If you’re using a facebook fan page, your status updates will sync to twitter, but not the other way around. So, I had a few of my staff just posting status updates with pics as often as they could. As soon as the update published, facebook sent it out as a tweet as well.

The parents loved the updates. We told them where we were on our travels, showed them pictures of what the kids were eating and let the parents know where we were on the drive home (so they could know what time to arrive). I even created “notes” every day with the content of what I would be teaching that day and giving the parents prayer points. It was a good system and the parents went nuts. They felt like they were a part of the camp.

Next year we plan to have even more interaction. On one day we held a contest asking the parents whether they thought the girls room or the boys room was cleanest. A few hours later we uploaded a video. The parents really got into this. Next year I think we’ll do even more stuff like this to keep the parents extra engaged, even creating opportunities for parents to interact some with their kids. I also want to play with the idea of a live feed. I’m not 100% sure you can actually do a live feed with the internet service there, but we could possibly upload the services a few hours later just so parents and families can see what their kids are experiencing.

Click here to jump over to our facebook page and see the kind of content we were posting.

Below is the clean room video contest we posted while at camp.

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I just need one more friend

Posted on17. Mar, 2010 by Kenny.

As you can see, I just need one more friend. Can you help me out? I’ll sleep better tonight knowing all is well.

Thanks for your support!

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Fixing Facebook

Posted on08. Mar, 2010 by Kenny.

I love a good hack. Facebook’s a pretty incredible application, but it’s not perfect. Sometimes the best way to fix an application is to let someone else other than the original creator have a go at it. Last night I discovered a little thing called Facebook Fixer and I think I’m in love.

Facebook Fixer is a script (or underscript rather) that causes web pages to do things they’re weren’t intended to do. Don’t get intimidated, it’s easier to do than you think.

Depending on what browser you’re using, you may need to enable your browser to run underscripts. Click here for a listing of browsers and what you need to do. I use both Firefox and Chrome. For Firefox I had to install the GreaseMonkey add on and Chrome didn’t require anything as it natively allows underscripts. Once your browser is ready, click here to install Facebook Fixer.

Once installing Facebook Fixer, you’ll notice a difference immediately. However, you might want to first visit your “account” from the top right menu and select “configure Facebook Fixer.” This will allow you to totally customize your Facebook experience. Here are a few of the things you can do:

• Big Profile Pictures and Photos
• Big Album Pictures
• Video Download Links
• Load Full Albums
• Homepage Customization
• Localization
• Translation
• Age and Sign
• Calendar Integration
• Keyboard Shortcuts
• Re-Title
• Error Page Reloading
• Menu Bar Transparency
• Automatically Check for Script Updates
• and more…

What interested me the most was the calendar integration. It’s really nice having facebook tell me when everyone’s birthday is, but I really like having birthdays in my personal Google calendar. Now I can click on any friends profile and there is a link to import their birthday directly to my calendar. Since Google is my primary email and calendar, as soon as I click that link, their birthday is scheduled on all my calendar devices. I love it!

I’ve only played with a few features so far. A few seem trivial and some annoying, but I can simply turn them off. Other features are down right amazing. Thanks hackers!

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The facebook children’s ministry experiment (part 2)

Posted on03. Sep, 2009 by Kenny.

Children’s Ministry | Promote Your Page Too

Thanks everyone for jumping on board. You can see the viral affect already at work. Yesterday morning we started with four fans. I posted the badge on this blog and threw out a link in a twitter update (which did get re-tweeted twice). However, as of right now we have over 75 fans. Many of those came from the viral nature of pages. Those who became fans essentially advertised the page to all of their friends. A few of you promoted the page by “sharing” and that too promoted the site.

The funny thing I noticed was that many of my leaders and volunteers from Gateway were fans. Many of them I didn’t expect to be fans becasue they may not follow my blog. However, on of my leaders became a fan and she updated her status and invited everyone she knew that worked with kids and she got a great response (even one or two members of my staff). Ha!

So, on this page we’ll try one or two more things like this. I’ll send a message (which shows up as a notification) to all the fans and encourage them to come kind of action (post on the wall, invite another CM friend or respond to a discussion question). All of these things promote the page. Whenever a fan does something on the page, all their facebook friends will see it in their time line. So, we’ll take a look at how the page grows into the weekend and early next week we’ll take a look at advertising and see how that works.

Oh, and if you missed all of this, read my post yesterday about this experiment or click on the badge above to become a fan of this new facebook page.

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Facebook pages and twitter

Posted on02. Sep, 2009 by Kenny.

Over the past year I’ve loved the integration of twitter in facebook. I can update my facebook status from twitter which is BEAUTIFUL. Having this same feature for facebook page would be equally awesome. However, it’s not quite there yet. Quite frankly, I can’t get it to work. I have friends who say that they’ve installed the selective twitter app on their page and they have gotten that to work (this is where you type #fb at the end of all your tweets and it updates your facebook status). I haven’t though. I’ve even offered people money to get it working on my page, yet no one has been successful yet. I think it is becasue I use the twitter app on my regular facebook profile and I’m trying to use the selective twitter app on my page and the two just don’t like each other.

So, what can you do? Well, the people at facebook would like you to integrate with twitter, but they’d rather have it the other way around. They’ve created a twitter app for your pages that will update your twitter account whenever you write on your page’s wall. Not nearly what I was looking for, but I guess it’s okay. So, when it comes to the twitter integration that I love with my personal facebook page, I’ll just have to wait until they have this for pages.

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The facebook children’s ministry experiment

Posted on02. Sep, 2009 by Kenny.

Okay, we’re going to play with this a little. A few weeks ago I started learning more about pages and I created one to play around with. I just called it Children’s Ministry. Then I realized an opportunity I had with an upcoming lock-in and created a fan page for the children’s ministry at my church. I launched it on a Thursday evening and by the next day I had over 50 fans. After the weekend I had 100. It’s been a little over two weeks and I seem to have maxed out at a little over 200. However, my market is kinda capped by location and access (those who attend my church, have kids/volunteer and are on facebook).

So, let’s play around with this page I created a few weeks ago. It already has 4 our 5 fans and those are only from people who we’re probably searching for something children’s ministry related on facebook. But if you’re interested in learning more about pages, this week we’ll play around with several of the page features and document it for this blog tutorial if you will. We’ll see the viral nature of this page as it grows through word of mouth, badges like the one below and we may actually do a little paid advertising just to see how it works. Interested in taking this journey? If so, do the following things below this ad.

Children’s Ministry | Promote Your Page Too

Let’s experiment:

• Click on the badge above to link to the Children’s Ministry page and become a fan.
• Just below the image at the top-left, click “suggest to friends.” Don’t suggest to your mom, uncle and brother-in-law, but to people who are chidlren’s ministry minded. This way we’ll see the fans increase the way they are supposed to.
• At the bottom of the left hand column, click on “share.” It will allow you to either send a message or post to your profile. You may have already sent a message through “suggest to friends.” Instead, post to your profile and tell people why they should become a fan.

We’ll give that a day or two and see what happens to the fan base. Also, if you’re interested in seeing the behind-the-scenes of a fan page, I’ll make you and admin so you can play around, add links, upload photos and create discussions on this experimental site. I don’t think there is a limit to the number of admins, so if you want in, just comment below (when you fill in your “email” to comment, use the email you use for facebook and I’ll invite you to be an admin via your email… don’t worry, no one sees your email on comments except for me).

*** Disclaimer. If I decide to try the advertising for this page next week, I may bump everyone as an admin. I’m not sure how the advertising works, but I know that it’s something you pay for and I don’t want a curious admin adjusting my advertising budget… that wouldn’t be funny.

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Comparison of facebook pages and groups

Posted on01. Sep, 2009 by Kenny.

Yesterday I wrote about pages as opposed to groups in the facebook universe. I guess I’m just encouraging people to take advantages of pages for all they have to offer. Groups has been around longer and most of us have more experience with groups. Groups make more sense. They feel safe and community like. However, that’s just becasue we don’t completely understand why you’d use a page. Like I said yesterday, groups have their place and you’ll still use them. However, there may be some things you want to use pages for instead of groups.

So, here’s a little comparison. Here are the things that both groups and pages can do:

• Wall discussions
• Discussion boards
• Photos
• Videos
• Send messages to members/fans
• Create related events

What can a group do that a page can’t?

• Be obscure – remain totally hidden to everyone but those in the group.
• Be exclusive – only allow who you want in the group if you roll that way.

What can pages do that groups can’t?

• Access to applications – certain apps have been developed exclusively for pages
• Page Statistics – kinda like analytics for you page
• Demographic messaging – send notifications to all your fans or fans of specific gender, ages or locations
• Vanity URL – Once you have enough fans, you can claim a vanity URL like www.facebook.com/yourname
• Advertising – You can drive people to your page through advertising where you determine demographic targets and pay by clicks or impressions

The other big advantage of pages are that they are more viral in nature. Unless the administrator of the group you belong to sends out a message, you may forget you are in it. Other people won’t know you’re in it either. With pages, all of your friends will see you interact with the page as it will show up in your feed. So, people find pages rather quickly. In addition, pages ave viewable outside of facebook. That means the information on your facebook group can be seen by anyone. That also means it can be indexed by the search engines unlike groups or anything else within the facebook walled garden.

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Facebook pages or groups

Posted on31. Aug, 2009 by Kenny.

Last week I posted a video about integrating social media in our ministries. One great way to do this is using facebook. I’m still a noob at using facebook specifically for ministry related stuff, but I thought I’d explain the differences between groups and pages and how you want to use both.

First of all, you probably want to use both. Both have different functions. Groups have been around longer and of someone has experience with only one, it’s probably groups. However, most people are using groups to do things where they probably should use pages. Let me explain.

Groups
Groups can be big or small, but they’re mostly suited around connecting people around ideas, thoughts or specific people. The discussion boards, photos, links and allow for great connection, discussion and collaboration. I’ve used groups for book discussions, a biggest loser group and for a Children’s Ministry collaboration group. The real advantage of the groups is your ability to control access and obscurity. I’m in some groups that are open to anyone, other groups that are close and you have to be approved to join. I’m also in an obscure group that no one can see except the people in the group. This is the primary advantage of groups. The disadvantage to groups is obscurity. You can join a bunch of groups and completely forget you’re in them unless the administrator sends everyone a message.

Pages
Pages are just like groups with a few unique features. People don’t join pages, they become fans. There aren’t any limitations either, anyone can join. Pages have access to discussion boards, wall posts and photos just like groups, so the experience can be similar. The idea behind pages though is that they are not designed to be obscure. They’re for everyone to see and intended to be viral. When an admin post on the wall, it shows up in every fan’s feed. So one update can be seen by every fan and every friend of every fan. That’s a huge impact. Pages were designed to be marketed too. A few months ago, facebook opened up vanity URLs. That’s when I snagged www.facebook.com/kennyconley. They also allowed pages with more than 1000 followers to get their vanity urls. Check out www.facebook.com/starbucks or www.facebook.com/mcdonalds. Oh, and when it comes to pages, you can advertise. For instance, you could advertise to age demographics for communities and such. Doing a big outreach event? Create a facebook page and advertise.

So, if your church has a presence on facebook, you want to use both. You might use groups to communicate with volunteers or certain ministries where you can share schedules, training and these kinds of things. However, your church needs a page. Your student and children’s minsitry needs a page. As you post updates, friends of your fans see learn about you and potentially become fans as well. Who knows, maybe they’ll come visit physically eventually because of what they experienced on facebook. Also, if you get enough fans, you could grab a vanity url and have the address: www.facebook.com/yourchurch.

So, go start some groups and pages people!

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The Facebook Landgrab

Posted on13. Jun, 2009 by Kenny.

By the time you read this, you may have been too late.

Facebook just opened up the ability to grab vanity URLs that point to your profile page. Up until now, your profile page would look something like this: www.facebook.com/394058872990049458 (or something like that). Now you can replace that meaningless number with something easy to remember, like your name!

If you’ve logged in to facebook anytime recently, they’ve had an ad telling about it. I have been thinking about it, but I actually forgot and was about an hour late. How big of a deal is this? Well, in the first 3 minutes, 200,000 URLs were reserved. Crazy. I guess it’s important to some people. It will be interesting to see how many end up going in the first day.

So, if your name is John Smith, you’re probably out of luck. Oh, and if you’re name is Kenny Conley and you’re not me… you’re out of luck too!

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A healthy balance of ADHD, Narcissim and Stalking

Posted on04. Jun, 2009 by Kenny.

This seemed to be circulating as twitpics yesterday as I saw it in two different places. Now I’m just passing it along to you in case you haven’t seen it. Twitter has evolved quite a bit. When I said twitter a year ago, 9 out of 10 people didn’t know what I was talking about. Now it’s gone mainstream (Conan O’Brien mentioned it the other night on the tonight show). Most people have heard of it, but several still don’t know why they would use it.

Not that this is convincing reason for anyone looking into twitter, there is a certain amount of truth to this diagram.

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