Is Your Ministry Website Ready for Pinterest?

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Get Your Website Ready for Pinterest

I have been playing around with Pinterest for the last year or so, but have always failed to gain any traction with sharing on the site. Recently there has been a spat of articles and podcasts released that look at Pinterest and how to set yourself up for greater success on the service. The most recent one that I listened to was over on the Blogging Your Passion podcast.

For those of you that don’t know, Pinterst is a social network that works similar to a bulletin or pin board. The sharing is extremely visual and every item that you share features an image from the post. Think of social bookmarking with photos. It also works like a visual search engine of everything people have pinned.

Here are some things that you should do to increase the possibility of your items being shared on Pinterest:

  • Use high quality and attractive images
  • Embed text on the image describing the article
  • Infographics seem to be very popular on Pinterest
  • Put the title of your article as text in a header image
  • Portrait images show up better than landscape on the Pinterest feed
  • Make it easy to “Pin” with integrated links and plugins

Unfortunately one of the worst YWAM sites for being hard to share on Pinterest is the current YWAM Global website. The images on many articles are too small and of low quality. In fact, Pinterest will not even allow some articles to be pinned on their site because the images are of such low quality.

If you were wanting to share a photo from an article about the new YWAM Ship the Pacific Link, which would you be more inclined to share?

913887_435497919878776_1581877528_o

or

YWAM Ship MV Pacific Link First Outreach

Not only has the second image been enhanced, the text also tells the viewer what they can expect when then proceed to the actual article.

The second image was edited using a free online service called PicMonkey. It makes it super easy to make changes to the image, add text, add a border, and use other effects. The edit that I did above probably only took about 5-minutes, and that was with it being the first time I used PicMonkey.

A few things that I could do to enhance it even more for Pinterest would be to find a portrait style image and make the text a bit larger so it’s easier to read as a thumbnail on Pinterest. That said, it is still a large improvement over the original image.

So how about it, do you think that it’s worth the little bit of extra effort to possibly increase your reach into the Pinterest audience?

What’s In a Name – Why The Accidental Missionary?

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The Very Worst MissionaryIn picking the name for this podcast, The Accidental Missionary, I was trying to be a bit edgy and ironic, kind of like Jamie the Very Worst Missionary. The idea was to show that I felt like I got here by accident, even though it was always God’s plan for my life. Even though that is what I wanted it to convey, no one understood it…

After listening to a great episode of Podcast Quick Tips by Ray Ortega, with Dave Jackon from the School of Podcasting guest hosting, I am thinking about renaming my podcast.

Do you think that I should rename the podcast? If so, what should I call it?

Links:

Is Your Missions / YWAM Centre on Tumblr?

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Social media has been a real boon in connecting missions organisations with missions minded people. Whether it is connecting with supporters, churches, friends, other ministries or prospective participants social media can be a great way to connect and have a conversation.

Discussion of social media tends to revolve around the three big ones:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn

Each of the three big networks has their own audience and way of working. A network however that I think is being ignored, to the detriment of our missions centres, is Tumblr.

Tumblr

Tumble has 101+ million blogs, 44.6 billion posts (90.2 million daily), and provides a fairly effortless way to blog and connect with it’s millions of users. It also makes it easy to connect with your other social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Tumblr is different than other social media sites because it is a micro-blogging site. When posting to Tumblr you have seven different options for your posts …

  1. Text
  2. Photos
  3. Quotes
  4. Links
  5. Chat
  6. Audio
  7. Video

Tumblr Demographics

As the name implies Youth With A Mission attracts many young participants, many under the age of 35. Tumblr is a social network that seems to attract a younger audience, with over 50% of it’s users being under the age of 35 (as opposed to Facebook where 65% of it’s users is over 35). (image source)

Tumblr Age Distribution 2012

Tumblr is one of the top 20 sites in 8 different countries, including Philippines, Mexico, USA, Chile, Singapore, UK, Canada and Portugal. (image source)

Tumblr Usage Per Country

Using Tumblr for your Missions Centre

I think that the best example, or at least my favourite example, that I have found is the Doctors Without Borders Tumblr Blog. Social Media Examiner had a great write up about businesses using Tumblr that had this to say about the Doctors Without Borders page:

Doctors Without Borders uses a combination of photos and quotes to convey their humanitarian message. Using a two-column format, the majority of posts are split between photos with short captions and quotes from longer field reports from trouble spots such as Somalia and Pakistan.

Most posts link to larger reports or slide shows on their main site but the combination of the quotes and pictures can be quite effective.

Doctors Without Borders on Tumblr

The way that Doctors Without Borders is using Tumblr I feel could transfer very well to a missions or YWAM Centre to raise awareness and to get other involved. In addition to the photos and quotes they are also using video and audio quite effectively on their site.

Like any social network before you head over there it is important that you have a goal in mind for your Tumblr blog. You need to know what you want to do with it, and how you want to connect with other and connect them with your centre.

You will also need to work out who will run your Tumblr blog. It takes an investment of time and staff to do Tumblr well, and if you are going to get into it you will want to be willing to invest that time and man power. When you set it up you will want to set it up as a “secondary blog”, not as your primary blog. This allows you to set it up so that you can have multiple users managing and contributing to the blog.

It is important that you use Tumblr as a place for interaction and not just as another way to “broadcast” your messages. One unique way that Tumblr helps enable this interaction is with an “Ask a question” option that Tumblr allows you to enable on your blog. You can then answer the question publicly, or privately, depending on the nature of the question.

What’s your experience with Tumblr?

Last week I set-up a Personal Tumblr Blog and a YWAM Global Tumblr Blog to experiment with the platform.

I would love to know what your experience and thoughts are about this growing social network? Is it something that you have used or are considering using?

Let us know in the comments below, and if you have a tumblr blog let me know as well so that I can follow you over there.

Relaunching the YWAM News Podcast and an Update

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After over a month and a half of no Accidental Missionary Podcast episodes I figured it was time for an update about what we have been up to and the ministry that we’re involved in…

YWAM Podcast Set-upMinistry wise I’ve been getting into a groove and starting to figure out a good routine for getting my YWAM work done. I have produced six-episodes of the YWAM News Podcast, which is being released every Thursday. This takes up probably close to 20-hours a week of putting together the content, editing, producing, recording, and publishing the audio and the show notes.

In addition to the YWAM News Podcast we have also been producing webinars and YWAM Teaching podcasts on the YWAM Podcast Network web-site. This has been good as I have been learning some new skills and technology, and also been growing the online community through these events. We have had two live events so far, a teaching on Support Raising, and a round table discussion about the state of information technology in YWAM.

One of the things that came out of the round table discussion about IT is the need for more resources and discussion about Information Technology in YWAM. As part of this I have increased my writing for the YWAMIT.com site that we set-up while I was still on staff with YWAM in Townsville. Hopefully in the coming months we will have some other contributors to the site, but in the mean time I’ll hopefully be able to contribute some decent content to the site.

Ikea Furniture to be assembledOn the home front we are slowly getting settled into the house. Sometimes it’s too easy to forget how long we were in our house in Calgary before we finally started to feel settled. The two stores that I feel I spend most of my time at are either Bunnings (hardware store) and Ikea.

One thing that has surprised us since arriving in Adelaide is that the cost of living here is significantly higher than it was in Calgary. We are adjusting and figure out different ways to cut costs, but we were not expecting quite as big a difference as it is.

I’m hoping that as I get more used to my current work routine that I can produce these podcasts more often, but in the mean time most of my recording effort will continue to go into the YWAM News Podcast…

Burnout in Christian Youth Ministry

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I found an old article that I had written back in 2006 dealing with Burnout that I wanted to repost for you to read.

It is interesting, given my own burnout at the end of 2010, to read what I wrote back then …

It’s an unfortunate thing that burnout is common in Christian Youth Ministry, and YWAM is not immune to it.

Burnout and OverworkUnfortunately burnout can too often be pushed aside as “spiritual warfare”. While this can be the case in some situations, often it is not and it requires a certain level of wisdom, discernment and trust from the leadership to work this through. As we grow as a ministry at YWAM – Reef to Outback I have seen it handled well and in the past I have seen it handled poorly.

When Linda Warren came through she spoke to us a bit about burnout in Youth With A Mission and what they have experiences in YWAM Denver. To help their staff deal with burnout before it happens one of the things that they do in their training is to get all of their staff to read Stephen R. Covey: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I’ve actually had that book sitting on my bookshelf since I staffed a GENESIS School at YWAM Lausanne back in 2001. I haven’t read it yet, but I hear that it is good…

One thing that they really try to work on with their staff is their time management (which is one thing covered in Stephen Covey’s book). In Denver, and here in Townsville, we see that a some of our staff just don’t know their own limitations and “burn the candle at both ends” by staying up late and then being tired at work during the day.

Something that was not discussed during Linda Warren’s meeting with us was when very high expectations and responsibility are placed on our staff. Depending on how these expectations are communicated to our staff, and how the staff react to it, they can leave them with such a strong sense of responsibility that they simply can’t shut off during their non-work hours. This is where I have seen YWAM fail some of our young leaders in the past.

I’ve been here for almost eight years and know of a few people that have worked themselves into the ground trying to do everything that they could to further the vision here. I was close to burnout myself last year (that was back in 2005) and was actually released by the leadership for a three-month sabbatical. I was unfortunately not able to take the time away because we were in the middle of selling our house, but that’s how bad it got for me.

For my situation God provided another way out, and that was by bringing along Sam Werner to join me in my work in communications. I don’t think that Sam really appreciates how much of a blessing he is to me and to the base in the role that he has taken on. Tamara and I are still planning on a sabbatical for about three-months next year to refresh ourselves, raise some support and visit friends and family, but we won’t be in as desperate a state as we were last year.

Here is a final quote from my notes about how YWAM Denver works with their staff to assist them to achieve what God has placed in their heart to do:

The base needs to give people place / space to pursue what is in their heart and not hold them back. But this needs to be done within the vision of the base. If the vision does not fit in with the base then either the base will need to change or the person should be released to pursue what God has placed on their heart.

Update:

There are a few other articles about there about burnout in Christian ministry that I’ve seen in the last few days, including these ones:

Photo Source: Mark Magnusson