New YWAM Web-Site

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After spending the past 12-months working with a team from nine different locations, in six different countries, last month we launched the new Youth With A Mission Worldwide web-site at www.ywam.org.

There were 26 of us working on the site, each with our own specialities and responsibilities. It has been a great team to work with and many of are going to continue on the new site adding content and features as time goes on.

Below is the official announcement about the new site…

We’re excited to announce that we’ve just launched a new version of YWAM.org. Please have a look and tell us what you think.

This new YWAM.org offers:

  • A simple design focused on helping visitors take action.
  • A smartphone and tablet-friendly layout. The site will shrink to fit almost any device.
  • A map that shows all public YWAM locations.
  • New content areas such as Know God, Make God Known, For Parents, and For YWAMers.
  • A lot more personal touch. We now provide a thank-you email to everyone who inquires and our Help Desk team seeks to answers questions within 48 hours.

Check out the new web-site at www.ywam.org.

Why I Didn’t Quit YWAM After the First 6-Months

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When I first joined staff in Youth With A Mission I committed to six-months. Near the end of that six-months I had enough and didn’t really want to come back after staffing my first Discipleship Training School.

God however had other plans, which he revealed to me on the back of a bathroom door in Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia …

Let your Yes be Yes and your No be No Frog

Amazing Grace Intro Music by Amanda Bryde

Original image by ToastyKen

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.