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I am always amazed when my students don’t know about a particular upcoming event. Between the e-mail, the video announcements, the postcards, the bulletin inserts, and the website, I figure it should be the only thing that is ever on their mind. But alas, fighting for a precious spot in the conscious memory of a teenager is a difficult battle. Fortunately, you have a very powerful ally in Facebook Events. Today we’ll take a look at how to create them.

What Are Facebook Events?

Simply put, Facebook Events are the easiest way to promote an upcoming event to the students in your minister, the most convenient way for them to invite their friends, and the best way to raise awareness about what your group is up to. Who doesn’t like that?

Why Use Facebook Events?

By creating an event, you get a digital invitation, attendance sheet, a direct line of communication with attendees. It’s a simple process that is often more effective than most other promotional methods combined.

How to Create a Facebook Event

Fortunately, setting up Events is pretty easy once you have all your basic info. Start by clicking “Events” in the menu beneath your profile picture. Then click “Create an Event” in the upper right-hand corner. This takes you to the event creation page.

Enter your basic information such as date, time, place, etc. You can add a simple description that will show up on the Event Page and any invites you send out. You can also add a picture for the event, which is a great way to tie in a logo or theme you might have for the event.

Alternatively, you can use a simple photo editor like Picnik to add text to a photo of some students or something that represents what your event is about. A photo size of 200 x 300 pixels is a nice balance between big enough to notice without being overpowering.

Once you have the information set and the picture chosen, just click “Create Event” and you’ll be ushered to your fancy new event page.

From the event page, you can send out invites. Beneath the event picture on the right-hand side, just click “Invite People to Come” and a window will pop-up from which you can choose who should get an invite. You can even pick from one of the handy Lists you’ve made and then select all for a quick and painless mass invite.

Your students will then be able to RSVP by saying they are Attending, Not Attending, or Maybe. It’s been my experience that the majority of students who say Maybe really won’t show up, but want to let you down easy.

A few other neat tricks once your event is setup:

• You can send a message to everyone who said they are attending or maybe attending. Perfect for last minute reminders, schedule changes, or other important information.
• If you make a change to the time of the event, each attendee is notified automatically.
• You can print a guest list.
• Your event gets a wall where people can talk about it, and post pictures afterwards.

Lastly, one of the greatest effects of a Facebook Event is when a student RSVPs, it shows up in the News Feed of all their friends, that means a lot more bang for your buck in terms of promotion.

An email invite sent to 50 students will probably only be seen by 20-30 people (that’s if you have a very healthy open-rate for email newsletters). And those people are unlikely to forward that email on to their friends. But, send that invite through Facebook, where an average user has 130 friends, and your event information might make it in front over 3,000 people in the same amount of time.

And a final hint, you probably don’t want to use Facebook as your “official sign-up” for events that require you to collect money. Culturally, a Facebook RSVP is not a particularly binding agreement. Plus, it’s hard to know what to do with those Maybes. In our group, we send out Facebook invites, but the “official sign-up” is done on our website.

That’s it. Facebook Events are the perfect and most effective way to promote an upcoming event to your student ministry.

Texting is the number one communication method for teenagers. Joshua Griffin recently posted about the fact that they have fully embraced SMS as the primary communication method for the group. That makes sense, students always have their phones and are almost guaranteed to check them the moment you ping them.

There are many services out there that aim to streamline the process of sending mass texts. Simply Youth Ministry has SimplyTXT. It’s really just a repackaged version of TXTsignal. There’s also Tatango. All fine services, and fairly reasonably prices. SimplyTXT starts at just $10 a month. But that starts to add up, and for a group my size, I still can’t find an extra $240 in my budget to start using one of these services. Fortunately, I don’t have to.

Earlier this week Twitter announced a new feature called Fast Follow. It allows people to sign up for SMS alerts for any @username on Twitter, without needing an account, for free! All a person has to do is send “follow [username]” to 40404 and it’s all set. Anytime someone tweets from that account, it will show up as a text message on their phone!

That’s the basic gist, here is the detailed play-by-play of how to set it up.

How To Set It Up

1) Sign up for a new account

Head on over to twitter.com/signup to start a new account. You may already have a Twitter account for your youth group, but you will probably benefit from having a separate account just for sending SMS updates. Our youth group uses the acronym NSL, so I just set up a new account as NSLtxt.

Optional: Once your account is set up you may want to visit Settings>Mobile and go through the process of setting up your own mobile phone. Once completed, you will be able to “Tweet” (thereby sending out a group SMS) from your own phone. Very helpful when you’re behind schedule on the way back from a retreat!

2) Tell people to follow

Using all your soon-to-be-outdated methods of communication, encourage everyone to sign up for text updates. All they have to do is text “follow [username]” to the number 40404. So, for my group it would be “follow NSLtxt” and they are all set.

They should get a message with the most recent tweet you’ve sent. They will also get one confirming their text along with instructions on how to un-follow.

3) Start texting your group

Now you’re ready to go. Every text will start with whatever username you selected. For instance, mine would say, “NSLtxt: Thanks for signing up for txt updates from NSL. You are now awesome.” There’s many different creative ways to use SMS with your group: meeting reminders, schedule changes, prayer prompts, motivational quotes, Bible verses… the list goes on. Try not to overdo it, you don’t want to train them to ignore any message you send their way.

The Downsides

As with many things, you get what you pay for. There are a few downsides to opting for this free method over one of the excellent pay services mentioned above.

Not Interactive
Students & Parents will receive text messages, but they will not be able to reply directly to the messages they receive. It’s a one-way street.

No individual messages
Each pay service offers a way to text a single person in your address book, that can be handy.

No groups
Messages will be all-or-nothing. The pay services let you set up different groups so you could send a text to just Parents, or just Leaders, etc. Conceivably, you could set up multiple Twitter accounts, but that would get cumbersome pretty fast.

As SMS becomes a more central part of your communication strategy you may opt for a more full-featured service. But for the average youth worker with no money to spare, this is a simple and elegant solution for setting up group text messages.