discipleship retreat planning | More Than Dodgeball

Josh GriffinMore Posts GUEST POST: Promoting Winter Camp

Every event the question comes up: How are we getting the word out? And, of course, every few months the answers morph and change as the world of communication evolves. What we’ve learned is that there is no one answer that suffices. We have to repeatedly communicate to both kids and parents in lots of ways. We utilize our website, posters, invitation cards, text, Twitter, but far and away the most effective the past few years have been Facebook and YouTube. I work with middle school students, so some of them are not old enough or their parents do not allow them to have a Facebook page yet. However, the majority of families in our community either have a student or a parent who’s on Facebook, so we have a profile for our ministry that we update daily. The challenge is to keep up with where students are at and be creative in capturing their attention. Every week we have students make announcement videos, and when we have a special event like camp we’ll make special promo videos. Here are 2 fun, creative videos we made to promote our winter camp this year.

Kevin Mahaffy is the Middle School Pastor at Southwest Community Church in Indian Wells, CA. Check out his blog and more at http://revkevjr.blogspot.com/.

1 View Comments February 19, 2012

Josh GriffinMore Posts Video Blogging/Confessional Idea for Your Next Retreat

Genius! I loved this blog post from Paul Martin about making retreats more effective. One of his ideas there is ripe for stealing and claiming as your own (I do that all the time – doh!). Check this one out below, and head there for the rest:

5. Bonus, bonus – Also, I set up a video camera in a private room to let each person check in, a la The Real World, so that they can talk about their experience in private. When each of our students graduate, they get a video edited down of each of these “check ins” so they can see the growth they had over the years.

Love, love, love that.

JG

4 View Comments November 25, 2011

Josh GriffinMore Posts How to Set the Price for a Youth Ministry Event

Thought this article from Luke Trouten on youth ministry events was fantastic – it goes into practical detail about planning and preparing a big event. Some really great stuff here – read the little bit I’ve stolen here, head there for the whole piece. Awesome!

Find Your Range
Because of all those variables, you won’t be able to nail down an exact per-person cost for any trip. To make sure you don’t lose your shirt (or your job!) it’s important to figure out the best-case and worst-case scenarios for sign-ups. You want to make sure that if you sign-ups are particularly low you can still afford the event. It can also give you an idea of the minimum number of students you’d need before the event can pay for itself. Likewise, it’s important to know what happens to the price if everyone brings 5 friends to the retreat.

Our parent church goes to the same convention we do each spring, but they charge much less than we do. I assumed it was just because they have a larger budget and could afford to subsidize it more. Out of curiosity, I plugged in their numbers to my formula (they bring about 5 times as many students) and was amazed to find that the price plummeted for a group that big. Sometimes the per-person costs don’t work how you’d think.

Don’t Apologize for the Price
It can be tempting to apologize when an expensive event comes up. While it may feel like you’re winning points by sharing in the sticker-shock, ultimately you’re devaluing your own event. You should be confident that the trip or retreat your planning is worth every penny it costs (and more)! To be honest, most youth trips are a bargain, and planning a similar event for your family or school group would cost even more. When you apologize for the price you convey that it maybe isn’t worth that much to go to the event. People are willing to pay if they are confident they are getting a good value for a fair price. Don’t undermine it by insinuating maybe the event costs too much.

Offer Assistance
While you shouldn’t apologize for the price, you also shouldn’t let the price get in the way. The reality of trips is they cost money. The reality of life is that sometimes money is tight. If your church does fundraisers, that can help offset some of the cost. Our church has a few reasons why we don’t do fundraising. But we still say, over and over, that money should not be the only reason a student can’t attend an event. That’s right, if the only thing keeping a student from signing up is the cost, we take away that obstacle. We ask if they can afford part of the fee, and the church covers whatever is leftover.

If we are going to tell students to that God provides if we trust in him, then we better put our money where our mouth is. This has been our policy for years and it’s provided many opportunities to see God come through in powerful ways. One of my favorite sayings is, “If it’s God’s will, then it’s God’s bill,” and he’s picked up the tab (and created some great stories) more than once.

JG

2 View Comments September 15, 2011

Josh GriffinMore Posts Links and Videos from Today’s Radicalis Youth Track: Individual Life

In the last of our 3 youth track sessions we focused on the individual student. We talked about everything we do outside of the large and small groups that are options for individual students to take steps forward in their faith. Here’s a few links for more depth on a few topics:

JG

Add Comment February 27, 2011

Josh GriffinMore Posts GUEST POST: Rethinking Retreat Planning

Like many of you, when I signed up to be a youth pastor, I signed up to help students do life with God. I also believed then, and still do today, that there is no shortcut. It simply takes time. I also know that there is no greater way to spend big chunks of quantity time with students than the retreat setting.

So far, so good.

But what I didn’t know was that in order to do those retreats, I’d have to sign contracts that would cause me countless nights of stress leading up to them. I had no idea that 12 months out I’d be asking my church to leverage thousands of dollar on the belief that students will eventually express interest and sign up. And for me, times have been a changin’…

Gone are the days where if a student went last year, had a great time, and even connected with God on the trip that they’d automatically sign up and bring a friend next year.
Gone are the days where families could afford to send students to special retreats and functions with relative ease.
Gone are the days where I am willing to roll the dice and sign random contracts based on faith and my “guesstimations”.

So what am I to do?

I still believe the same basic premises that started this post. I still believe in retreats and life change. But I no longer believe that camp contracts (or even doing contract-free retreats) is the only way, and certainly not the best way to get this done. I’d like to propose that youth ministries can learn a lesson from places like coupon based websites. If you’re unfamiliar, coupon websites that offers services that become active once a minimum number of people buy in. For example, someone offers a deal on tourist attraction or something for 50% off. If you’re interested, you sign up and give your credit card and then once 15 people buy it, the “coupon” is on and they charge your card.

So, in youth ministry, this might look like:

Summer camp brochure is made months earlier than normal. We promote the trip and encourage students in the same ways we always have.
But now, students are told 2 things. #1. The cost for the first “x” number people is “$$$”. Maybe we could offer some kinda early buy in discount. All prices could be refundable and the trip is tentative until we have ______ people going. Once we have ______ people going and maybe by a certain date, then the trip is on and a deposit of “$$” is non-refundable, but is transferable.
Here, if you need a minimum of 10 to do the trip, the onus is on the participant to invite friends and push the retreat. They want to go, so they’ll encourage friends that if they don’t go, he or she can’t go either.
As a youth pastor, I don’t have to pay now, and pray like crazy later. Or at least I can do way less of that.
I can spend more time encouraging students and less time being a travel agent.

Brian is a youth ministry veteran of 16 years, currently the student ministries pastor at Journey Community Church near San Diego, CA. And he blogs!