No, it doesn’t exist yet, but I wish it did. If any super web-savvy people (who also happen to have a ton of money or can get people to invest) could pull this off, they could make a killing off of this idea for an application. It would be especially helpful in youth ministry but organizations of all sorts could benefit. Heck, maybe it’s out there and I haven’t found it yet. Here’s my idea:
The Concept
The idea is a one-stop place online to manage all contact information for everyone that needs to get information from you: parents, students, whatever. With all the information on that site, you go to one place, type in information you want to send to everyone, and then it sends it out in whatever format it needs to depending on which avenues of communication people have signed up for.
Outputting Information
In order to streamline communication, one input on the site (i.e. “Mission Trip deposits due tomorrow”) would be automatically converted as necessary and distributed through the following avenues to each member of the group depending on what accounts they have set up. I think with all the APIs and third party apps floating around out there that most, if not all of the following would be possible.
- Email – Obviously teenagers don’t use this but their parents do. Still the best way for me to communicate en masse with parents. Depending on your platform you could also email your own youth ministry blog and automatically create a blog post.
- Facebook wall post – I don’t think Facebook messaging is as effective as a wall post.
- Twitter – If people have a twitter account, it gets sent there.
- MySpace – I’m not sure if this is possible, but I still have a few kids left on MySpace and it would be nice to include them in communication.
- Text Message – One of the best ways to inform teens of things is through texting.
- RSS – That way if you want to do any fancy RSS-to-newsletter or automatic blog posting you can set that up.
- Voice: phone tree message – Especially with some parents, the answering machine or voicemail is still a good form of communication. This would likely have to be input separately from the text information (but maybe not, see below), but likely wouldn’t take but a minute.
- What else am I leaving out?
Inputting Information
So, getting the information out would be pretty sweet, but inputting information could be streamlined as well
- Website administration interface – Obviously, you should be able to log in to your account and send out info to other people, but that may not be the more efficient way of doing things.
- Email – It would be pretty easy to give each main account certain email addresses (different ones for each distribution group perhaps) that administrators could send an email to that would automatically be sent out through the program.
- Text Messaging- Same goes for text. On vacation in the Bahamas and forget to remind everyone youth group is canceled? Text the info to your group’s number and everyone gets the info.
- Voice – There might be some way to integrate this with Jott.com so you could convert voice to text and email it up to your account. And/or it could save the voice audio and automatically send that out via a phone tree while the transcript is sent out via the text avenues.
- Twitter – Twit an @reply to a unique profile and it’s sent out to everyone.
- Other?
User Management
This would be one of the cool features. Each person could login with either their email address, their Facebook name, their cell phone number, whatever, and manage their communication options. They can input all of their account information and update things as it changes. You could have different lists set up for devotionals, announcements, Confirmation, High School, Junior High and people could subscribe or unsubscribe to them as they like. With this setup, the whole church could be on the same account and people just subscribe to the relevant information. Then, when you want to tell people to bring cookies to Youth Night Out, the program sends it out to everyone on the appropriate list via all the communication avenues they selected.
The idea is once you do all the front end work of setting up user groups all you ever have to do past that is send out information to people. No more moving people into different email lists, keeping your phone records updated, remembering to add the kid who just got a cell phone to your text messaging group. Everyone can manage all their own information.
Can it happen?
Well, I think it can happen. I just don’t know if it’s cost-effective to do all of this together. I know some of these features are available as stand-alone programs that cost $20+ a month or more. That could mean $100+ a month. Is this worth $1,000 or more a year?
I know that a program like this would make my life much easier and allow me to hit everyone in whatever medium they use to stay in touch with people without having to go through three or four different avenues. What do you think?
Adam McLane, Tim Schmoyer, are you listening?
I would pay lots for this application.
What if the program had an option to take you inputted and formatted it into postcards where 4 would fit on a page? I like to supplement a lot of the info I send with postcards…
As an aside, Tatango.com does mass text messaging and voicemails and does it really well. Email me if you’re interested in a discount code… if not, they have a free account where ads are inserted.
Great idea, btw.
Wow, I haven’t heard of Tatango. I thought I’d searched high and low for a good option. I’m going to give this a shot.
Love the postcard idea… they are still pretty good for reminders.
If we wanted to make things super complicated you could input an event date and the information, then it sits in que until it began sending things out in predetermined intervals: postcard PDF to your email ten days in advance to print and mail, emails 5 days in advance, voice message 3 days ahead, and a text message/facebook the day before.
this application will appear in the NEW CREATION.
Haha, it’s an eschatalogical app.
Well… I’m listening. And what is funny is that we negotiated with a person who has developed an application which does about 90% of your requirements above… plus some other functions you didn’t dream of. It wasn’t made for youth ministry… but I think it could be changed a little to be STELLAR for a youth worker.
So where is it?
1. The bad news is that the economy sucks. We couldn’t offer what the person wanted to sell it to us for. The crux was that it was an awesome tool but we couldn’t figure out how to make it pay for itself fast enough. It was just too much risk.
2. The good news is that the economy sucks. So the person who created the application has begun working for a major media company and a condition of his working there was that he shed this applications development to work for his new company. So, he’s planning on releasing it to the open source community.
Does that mean this software will pop-up somewhere for youth ministry use? I don’t know!
I guarantee you this… find me enough people willing to pay $1k/year for it and I think I can make it happen.
Adam, well, the bad news is the economy sucks. Getting most churches to pay $1,000 a year would be a pretty big leap, especially if the app is initially in beta and has a few bugs and kinks. I wonder how scalable the price structure could be.
I know our church of 150ish people likely could not eliminate enough cost in other areas of communication to justify a big price tag at the moment. This app would be a completely added expense because most of the above happens for free (or just doesn’t happen at all); you would just be paying for the convenience of automating the whole process and the benefit of blanketing the entire population. It’s not like you can eliminate certain expenses to help pay for this new app.
To even get churches to think about paying out big bucks would require a few things:
1.
Super-click(no more writing comments before 6 AM) Super-clean interface for administrators and users. If it’s cumbersome and unintuitive, the church secretary will hate using it and people will get frustrated when they try and sign up or manage their preferences.2. It has to work without any bugs. This may be the hardest part. Turning emails with all sorts of HTML code embedded into it into a 140 character text message or a facebook wall post is, I would be willing to bet, not as easy as it ought to be.
3. Ultra-secure. With this much personal information floating out there in cyberspace, you need almost bank-levels of security.
Until the above three happen, I don’t think you can reasonably expect people to shell out a significant amount of money. It’s kind of weird, but it seems to me that the complexity of it means it has to be almost perfect because anything less just isn’t worth the hassle or risk.
What else am I leaving out?….I heard telepathy can work really well 🙂
What I tested didn’t seem to have any major bugs. If you couldn’t use this… it was about as easy as farting.
@Grahame – Haha, sometimes it seems like we’re supposed to be able to do that already.
@Adam – Farting. Nice youth ministry tie-in.
Now you’ve got me curious (but not because of the farting).
Yeah, this wasn’t a Micky Mouse deal. Not something that a guy played with to create, real project, real money invested, it just flopped because of monetization… when it was shown to me several months ago I told him it could be bigger to YM than the invention of chubby bunny. Like I said, it did some things you haven’t dreamed of but would go… well that makes sense.
I’ll see if I can dig up more info.
Sweeet.
broadtexter.com is pretty good for the text message. also txtsignal.com
Sorry I’m a bit late to this conversation. Sounds like a good concept in theory, but I think we’re missing one essential element: you’re assuming that just because you put the information where you THINK kids will see it then they must somehow look at it. Makes sense. I mean, it sounds logical, but I’m learning more than more that it really isn’t.
For example, I though Facebook messages were the perfect way to communicate youth group information with my kids because they’re all active on the site. So, I formed a group and we have a lot of kids in it. A couple times I decided to put some tracking links in the messages to see if people were actually lookging at the messages or not. Turns out that only 2% of the actually look at the messages! Freakin’ 2%! That’s not even worth the two minutes it takes to type it up.
Fortunately, I’ve found that video works great for communicating information for our group, so I’m sticking with that until it morphs to something else.
Consider how well-trained our kids are at shutting out ads and marketing pitches. Sometimes they throw YG in the same category, unfortunately. Just because you put it in front of them, don’t assume they’re looking at it. In fact, I bet you’ll find that using multiple venues of communication isn’t as effective as actually training them to use only one or two that you choose.
I’m speaking on this very topic at the National Youth Ministry Conference this weekend. Maybe they’ll let me record it for you guys.
Tim, good thoughts.
It would be nice to just train people to go to one place for information, but I tried that for a while and haven’t had success doing that. Maybe I wasn’t using the right medium.
I guess the reasoning behind my idea is that even if only 2% of our kids (or adults) use facebook to keep up with youth group, a program like this would put that information where they are most likely to see it without any extra work on our part.
However, video integration would be cool as well. You could record a video, upload it, and it would automatically post to your youth group website and then the audio would go out through a phone tree.
http://www.tuggle.it ?