Category: YMX

  • Reflections on Online Community

    Reflections on Online Community

    Last week I sat in on Kent Shaffer’s session on “Communicating without Words” at the Internet Ministry Conference. And tucked deep in the session were his “7 Steps for [creating/managing] an Online Community”

    After all, if Seth Godin said this is one his top new jobs of the future, it’s worth talking about.

    I wanted to take a few minutes to apply those thoughts… letting them play out.

    1. Define your purpose. For an existing community, I would swap the word “define” to “defend.” I’ve found that to be the hardest thing with managing YMX. There are both internal (mostly from myself) and external pressures to take the community in an unintended direction Effectively managing an online community takes overseers who are willing to guard the purpose. I think this has been one of the strengths of YMX, but it’s tough sledding too.
    2. Define the user experience you want. This is actually pretty important. Because taking the time to map out both what you want the community to be and how you want to form that community are two entirely different things. The platform your community uses is tremendously important to this. For YMX, we use a forum software package that really compliments the type of community we want to be. Open source, willing to try new things, secure, and flexible. That kind of paints a picture for who we are as an online community. But YMX is so much more than just our forum community… and as that picture gets more and more clear for us… we’re able to add features and remove features based upon our user experience design.
    3. Evaluate the system. We do this all the time. Better yet, our users do it for us. Every time I add a feature to the site I start a thread asking for feedback. If people try it and don’t say anything I presume that it worked. If they don’t give us feedback I take it to mean they tried it, it worked, but they didn’t like it. But if it doesn’t work, we always hear about it! Another important element of evaluating the system is noticing how people are using your online community in un-anticipated ways. When you notice that (for us, this was our recipe section) you have to decide… do I kill this? Do I allow it to be an abnormality? Or do I embrace it? For the recipe section… we decided it would be within our purpose to embrace it. And it’s taken off.
    4. Tweak it. Patient users of YMX will know we constantly tweak stuff. Features, design, layout… we tweak big and small things all the time.
    5. Observe it. Often times I perceive something as not working when it really is.
    6. Tweak it.
    7. Observe it. Getting the idea this is an ongoing process? I think this is one of the reasons why MySpace failed so hard. Once they got big they never added features, got rid of abuses of the system, or listened to customer feedback.

    I’ve had loads of people tell me that online communities are just a fad that will quickly fade. Well, as someone who manages a community (rather, I’m part of a team who manages a forum) I feel as though if we just continue a process similar to the way outlined… we’ll just continue gaining steam.

    YMX just crossed the 200,000 post mark. We’ve got about 1100 members. And overall I see us as “just getting ready to go public with our service.”

    At the end of the day… any organization would be wise to obey this process. It isn’t a God-ordained, perfect process. But it is a process that works.

  • Review of Remedy by David Crowder Band

    Remedy3This weekend I had a chance to finish my review of Remedy. Of course that’s a good thing since the CD comes out Tuesday and we really push to get reviews published before the CD actually comes out. About this review, I’ll just say that it wasn’t an easy one to be concise on. This is one of those projects that I think is a "game changer." I  think that you will see a lot of bands try to emulate Crowder because of their success and because of their innovative style.

    Here’s my review, now live over at Youth Ministry Exchange.

    Remedy1
    Dr. Pepper. Ted Nugent. Squirrels. Banjos. World change. What do these things have in common?     Remedy
    by David Crowder Band. For the band, this much anticipated release is
    also the proclamation of a new challenge for the band. They challenge
    audience members to infect positive change in their communities and
    around the world in the name of Christ.     Remedy confronts the
    most common critique of Christian music–that it is too happy–with a
    mission-driven body of work that is sure to set the Christian music
    world on fire.
    Click here to read the rest and hear a sample

  • Working Together to Teach Students

    Recently I submitted an article to our ministry friends at Simply Youth Ministry about communicating a single complimentary message from the church as opposed to many competing messages. And I am pleased to see that they have decided to publish it. Here’s a sneak peak:

    On a staff retreat last
    summer, a light bulb went on for our team. After reading a series of
    articles and books about strategic leadership, we came to a simple and
    profound conclusion: We are going to teach complimentarily and not
    competitively across ministries in our church from now on. I’d like to
    walk you through our team’s process so that you can see both how we did
    it, and how our students have benefited as a result.

    Click to continue reading the article

    A funny sidenote: I kept wondering if they were going to ask me for a picture since I knew they would use the article for their email newsletter. To my surprise they chose a picture from my blog here that Megan took. Funny surprise.

  • Some smokin’ stuff at Youth Ministry Exchange

    Ymx_nofullnameWith fall in full swing all over, things at YMX are rockin’ along. And I don’t just mean the forum community, but all over at YMX things are doing quite well.

    We’ve got better content than ever, better access to artists and new music, better reviews of books and other stuff, and quite nice free giveaways.

    And people are noticing! There is nothing more exciting for a small publisher than seeing people finally start to recognize that you are a producer of good content. And it’s fun from our point of view because we can see that loads more people are signing up for our free weekly newsletter and getting our stuff delivered to them on their feed reader.

    I may sound like a dweeb, but it is just plain fun to see stuff go from idea, to development, to implemtation, to "consumers" consuming and liking what you’ve produced. It’s kind of a little boy high.

    Perhaps again, I’m a dork. But it’s also very exciting for me to see that this infant site, which wasn’t more than a crazy idea 2 years ago… now is getting first class content from people like Thousand Foot Krutch, David Crowder, Erwin McManus, Shane Claiborne… and of course youth ministry "names" like Jeremy Del Rio, Dave Rahn, and Len Evans.

    Ateam
    All the time the YMX team just kind of sits up and looks around long enough to say… "Are you kidding me? Is all of this good stuff really happening? We’re just learning how all of this works!" YMX is clearly a God thing because we really just worked hard and dreamed and the rest of everything has fallen into place for us.

    The best part of where we are right now is that this isn’t the end of our dream for the site. In fact, this is just a milestone… a point of celebration from where we were on the way to where we want to go. Gotta love crazy goals!

  • The Matrix of Goal Achievment

    It’s one thing to have goals
    It’s another thing to hear the language of goal realization. And it’s another thing to be able to show your team that you are, in fact, achieving your goals. (See picture) See, somewhat meaningful to say "Let’s meet our goal" and it’s indeed significant to hear your team say "We are achieving our goals." But the most power comes in looking at the obvious data and showing your team they are achieving a goal.

    The YMX Goal
    Feedburner
    Earlier this summer we made a decision. While we had way over 1000 members and steady core traffic to the site, especially the forums… we only had 22 subscribers to our feed. That simply means that while the site is putting out great content, not very many people were reading it.  (My belief is that feed subscribers are quickly becoming the true measure of a sites power instead of old matrices.)

    So we set a crazy, stupid goal of getting 1000 feed subscribers to the site by December 31st, 2007. To go from 22 to 1000 meant that we were going to have to change how we were doing things… so we did! We rearranged a lot of what we were doing purely for the sake of growing this measurable goal. And, if you look at the chart you will see that we are steadily achieving this goal. Since starting on this goal, we’ve grown the feed count by more than 300%!

    (more…)

  • 2 More Reasons I Love Being a Part of Youth Ministry Exchange

    Sometimes I am just in awe of the group of people God has put together at YMX. Patti and I were chatting tonight about it and two words come to mind… "amazing" and "humbling." It seems our little place on the internet… a virtual world… is bringing about real results in members lives. Here are two things that just make my jaw drop.

    1. Members complete fund raising so a member can adopt a child.
    2. A member needed a kidney transplant… and I think we have a match!

    I’ve always said "you can’t own a community" and so I can take zero credit for this. (I didn’t even know about it until it was mentioned to me!) This is just more proof that YMX is an amazing resource for youth workers. Not to sound too cheeky, but this week we see that YMX brings family’s together and may even save lives.

    It’s my prayer for YMX that we continue being the church to one another. Amen.

  • New Innovation: Youth Ministry Classifieds

    Over at Youth Ministry Exchange Headquarters Patti Gibbons and I had a board meeting where we decided to launch a brand new line of business. In truth, Patti and I chat over AIM all the time and we came up with this idea Friday morning and ran with it. We don’t have an office and we don’t have meetings. We’re way more progressive than that. 

    It’s a totally new, from scratch, ground up idea. What is it?

    It’s not 100% ready, but check out the Beta release of www.youthministryclassifieds.com.

    Here’s a couple reasons I’m really jazzed about YMC.

    1. It’s a totally free resource to the Youth Ministry Community.You can list and buy stuff with no transaction fees.
    2. It’s going to fill a gap of something that is not already out there. There simply isn’t an "after-market" anywhere for Youth Ministry stuff.
    3. It’s very simple to use. It’s actually a very "plain" site intentionally.
    4. It’s totally independent of our main site, www.ymexchange.com. Other than being owned by the same company… they are independent sites with different goals, different audiences, and different measurements for what makes it a success.
    5. It integrates all that we are at Youth Ministry Exchange. It’s a compliment to so many other things out there and competing with nothing. How cool is that?

    So… even if you aren’t in youth ministry. It’s worth checking out.

  • Site issues at YMX

    From a site development perspective, we’ve had a couple very stable years at YMX. That seems to be unraveling right now because two major groups of people aren’t getting along in the "open source" world.

    The people at Joomla and Simplemachines aren’t co-developing a bridge anymore. To existing members, they may notice a couple of old features aren’t working anymore. But the major annoyance is that our system of paying for stuff (like subscriptions) seems to be busted. I’m in the process of looking at a solution to get that working.

    So, our bread and butter main things for our existing members are working just fine. But we’re going to have to be creative to sort out a couple other issues. Right now I’m looking at a forum module that will allow people to take care of their subscriptions right through the forums. This may actually be a blessing as it handles renewals and everything.

    More on this later.

    In other news, there was a power outage at the church last night and I get to get reset the network there. This is the first real test of our new server system. If it worked correctly, the battery back-up should have shut down the server correctly. If it didn’t work… my day off may be ruined.

  • When Goals Wake You Up

    SuccessA lot of people make goals and set benchmarks. I am the same way. No matter what area of my life, I hear a little birdie telling me "You need to get ____ done by _____ to know that you are accomplishing ____ goal." I’m not sure where it originated but I that little birdie doesn’t come naturally… I’ve learned to listen to the little birdie. I am where I am at today because I listened to the birdie and got stuff done.

    A good goal will wake you up in the morning. It’ll make you stay up late at night. And it’ll be within your reach.

    A bad goal leads to fatalism as you realize that not only can you achieve your goal, but you were stupid to even try. It won’t keep you up late are wake you up in the morning because deep inside you feel like your goal is unattainable.

    I’ve made both kinds of goals in my life… I’ve given up on good goals to strive for bad ones and I’d like to think that as I become a better, smarter leader… I am refining my ability to distinguish. But I think choosing a good goal over a bad one will be something that I struggle with for the rest of my life!

    Ambition
    I have goals for all the major parts of my life.     My marriage, my job, my business, my home, my own development. Along the same lines, I have benchmarks… little celebration moments… that go along the way as well.

    My observation is that most people say the have goals… and they probably do. But they either have goals that are actually dreams or they have goals set with no benchmarks for achieving their goals so they give up. And this lack of benchmarking leads to failure.

    My focus in accomplishing goals is never to work to finish the goal. I think in focusing on the big goal too much, you act like a dreamer, instead I just focus on reaching the next benchmark.

    When you are focusing on getting from benchmark to benchmark instead of focusing on the big goal… you accomplish that goal faster plus you are still looking to work hard on future goals when you cross the finish line.

    Gettowork
    Too vague? Think of it like this, a goal can be a dream…     "I want to be more effective in reaching students in my community." A benchmark is a measurable success… "I will start 4-5 house small groups in September 2007." The goal isn’t to start house small groups but I’m going to celebrate that as a benchmark towards accomplishing my goal. Celebrate the benchmarks and you’ll accomplish your goals.

    And I mean celebrate… there is nothing worse than seeing someone not celebrate a benchmark in their life. They brush it off as no big deal… why? Because they are too focused on their goal to enjoy the benchmarks! You see it in sports and you see it in high school students when a success just isn’t good enough. Take a few moments to enjoy the benchmarks and it’ll energize you to keep going. Skipping that step will just contribute to another year sliding by stuck in the same place you were a year ago. Don’t do that.

    Got goals for 2007-2008? If so, what are some of your benchmarks?

    p.s. The photos come from Despair.com.

  • Mike Yaconelli’s 65th Birthday

    I’m sure at least half of the people who will read this won’t get why I’m posting this. I caught this over at Think Christian and I thought it was a tribute worth looking at again. Mike was the founder of Youth Specialties and a guy who made a lot of people think differently about youth ministry.

    I never met him personally but heard him speak a couple of times. Here is a tribute video that was put together shortly after his death in 2003. The last words of his last National Youth Worker Convention are a fitting closing to the video.