Tech Geek

Jacob Smith (@j8ke on Twitter) believes it is no longer necessary for a youth group to have a webpage or website. A web presence is vital but, the ubiquity of Facebook has made it unnecessary - and ineffecient - to have a separate youth website.

There are five questions I use to judge the effectiveness of church websites, these same questions can be used to judge the effectiveness of youth websites:

• Does our website meaningfully answer “The Big Three”? The first three questions most potential members ask are: “When is the next event?”, “Where do you meet?” and “Will I fit in?”.
• Does our website clearly articulate the Gospel? This will be different for every youth group, but a visitor needs to understand that this community is a community of faith.
• Does our website have a defined audience? Is this for youth, for parents, for all members for potential members?
• Is our website seen as valuable by our staff, volunteers and church members? If people at all levels don't see the website as a valuable tool, it is likely to be displaced by other communication methods.
• Is our website sustainable? Once an effective website is launched it has to be able to maintained or it will fail.

A Facebook Fan Page or Facebook Group can be set up to meet all of these criteria. The choice between a Facebook Fan Page and a Facebook Group is an important one. A Facebook Fan Page makes your youth group's information more public and discoverable. This can be a good thing if you are encouraging your youth to tell others about the group, but has a significant downside - you can't message page fans. They can sign up to receive SMS status updates from your Fan Page, just like they can receive your personal status updates via SMS.

A Facebook Group allows you to send a Facebook message to all members, an important way to contact youth. As with the Fan Page, this also gets you mobile communication "for free." If youth are set up to receive updates from Facebook on their cellphones, then messages will reach them wherever they are.

With the ability to have discussion, share photos and video, post events and send messages a Facebook Group provides everything I can think of that a youth group website needs.

Of course it's not all (root) beer and skittles. This method means your youth (and parents) have to have a Facebook account in order to participate. While that may seem like not a big deal now, five years ago it would have been obvious that everyone had a MySpace account. The popularity of social networks will wax and wane and their closed nature means that if Facebook is replaced by another network your content may be "stuck" and you'll have to do a good bit of work to re-create it.

Additionally, there may parents who don't want their kids to be using social networking.

Both of these objections can be overcome by the fact that your group's Wall can generates an RSS feed (for more on RSS feeds read Andy's post here). Using free tools like Widgetbox you can turn that RSS feed into a feature on your church's website in moments. This makes sure that everyone can have access to some level of updates from the group. If you're using Google Sites for your page, there are multiple Google Gadgets that will link to an RSS feed as well.

So instead of having to maintain yet another website, consider ditching your youth website and "leave the driving to Facebook." Would this fly with your group? Have you tried it and have something to add? Comment it up people.

Jacob Smith's big idea is Every Church Online, a way to provide low cost, effective websites to churches. You can find out more at http://everychurchonline.org. He lives with his wife, Erin, a Lutheran Pastor, in New Castle, Pennsylvania. You can contact him at jake@shoeinthedoor.com.

Last week you may have noticed the Twitter T along with Tweet the E! in the sidebar of the e-news, right below my post. It's inviting those of us who tweet to go ahead and add the #ext10 hash-tag into our tweets that are connected to the Extravaganza. For those of us attending, this will be a great way to stay informed about plans. For those of you who aren't able to be there, you can follow these tweets to get a little flavor of the event. And if you want to learn more, keep reading, and attend a workshop while you're in Charlotte.

We've claimed the Twitter hash-tag #ext10 for the Extravaganza in Charlotte. If you use a Twitter client of some sort (there are tons of them listed at http://twitter.com/downloads) it should be fairly easy for you to add a search for the hash tag. Using twhirl by Seesmic, my current client, I clicked the search icon, entered the #ext10 hash-tag, and clicked Activate.

If you don't use Twitter, or if you don't use it through a client, you can visit http://search.twitter.com and enter the hash-tag, or just click here. Or you can go the the ELCA Youth Ministry Network homepage at http://www.elcaymnet.org and there is a widget there that is scrolling all the tweets with this tag. You can also follow @elcaymnet, the ELCA Youth Ministry Network Twitter feed.

Scott Hensley over at Shots, the National Public Radio Health Blog, just posted an item about the Centers for Disease Control's new nine-page Twitter primer. The whole primer, http://www.cdc.gov/SocialMedia/Tools/guidelines/pdf/microblogging.pdf, is a bit bureaucratic, but it does raise some good best practices that are usable everywhere. Shots summarizes these best practices at the bottom of their post.

If you're a Twitter user and have a connection to the network, post your name below in the comments. You can see a bunch of us by looking at http://twitter.com/elcaymnet/followers (after signing into Twitter).

See some of you in Charlotte!