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How Youthmin.org did in February, and Goals for March

March 1, 2012 in social media, youthmin with 7 Comments

I’m wicked excited that Kolby Milton has joined the team of Youthmin.org Collaborators. I love his blog and his stuff, and can’t wait to see what he brings to Youthmin.org. I mention him because every month he does a goals review, and though he’s certainly not the only blogger to do it, I tend to like his quite a bit because A) he’s a fellow Youth Pastor, and B) he doesn’t come off smug and arrogant about his goals.

Last month, I laid out some of the goals I had for youthmin.org for February, and here is a report on how we did, as well as adjustments and additions to the goals for March.

Goal 1 | January 1st, we had 360 twitter followers, and today (January 31) we are at 531. I would love to be at 1000 by March 1st. Want to be one of the 1000? Follow @youth_min

Failed : As of March 1st at Midnight, we were at 722 twitter followers. I know there was a lot more I could have done, and we could do some of the easy things they say will grow a twitter account, but I’m trying to keep it organic in that sense. the Goal remains: 1000 followers.

Goal 2 | Along those same lines, we are currently are at 281 Fans on our Facebook page. I would love to be at 400 by the end of February. With this, though, I am trying to find a balance. We have a specific strategy with what we tweet with our buffer, but along those lines, I don’t want our twitter streams and Facebook stream to be too identical. Im learning, though, that not all of our Facebook fans are on twitter, so we are missing out, I feel, on traffic when we don’t post on there. Im doing some tests this month about that, and will share them in March. Want to help us out? Like Youthmin.org on Facebook!

Failed : But so close! We had 386 Fans at midnight, and we’ve been adding 4 fans a day on average. So I’m upping the goal, and because of some things we have that may or may not be going on in March, I’m setting the goal at 750 Fans.

Goal 3 | Decemeber was our soft launch, and we had nearly 38,000 views. January was our official launch, and we had 8,000. We’re starting something in February with some of our top contributors that Im hoping pays off, and I’d like to get back to 25,000 views in February.

Failed : Once again, so close.  We finished February with nearly 19,000 views. So maybe not that close, but still, compared to the 8,000 in January, significant improvement. Same goal for March, to have 25,000 views.

Goal 4 | We did 2 or 3 weeks of a weekly round up, a popular flavor on many blogs, where we posted our posts from the week and 10 favorite posts from others. In February, I’m hoping to do this through an email newsletter with some other things incorporated in it. Would love to have 50 people sign up by the end of February for our weekly newsletter.

Failed : We didn’t get this one started.  We only did one weekly round up and and never sent a single newsletter, but we got to 45 subscribers of our email newsletter. For March, I’d like 100 newsletter subscribers.

Goal 5 | Our bi-weekly #youthmin #tweetchats have been awesome. I love hearing the feedback from people about how great they are for youth pastors, and I couldn’t agree more. We only had one in January, but had over 30 people participate. We have a few in February on the books, and I would love to have 50 people participate in our #youthmin #tweetchats.

Failed : Could have gotten closer.  The latter part of February got insanely busy for me and we only had the one tweet chat, but it easily had 35 involved. So the goal lives on for March to have 50 people participate in our #youthmin #tweetchats.

Goal 6 | Adding a goal. Currently we are at 560 comments on just 130 posts. By the end of February I hope to be at 160 posts and I’m aiming big - 1,000 comments

Failed : Made Great progress, but ultimately fell short at 766 comments. Again, with what we may be doing in March, I think 1000 comments will be achieved this month.

Goal 7 | New for March, our Pinterest account has been bringing in a lot of traffic already. Currently were at 27 pins, but I’d like to be at 100 pins by April.

The Vision Turn

February 14, 2012 in Leadership, social media, Student Ministry, Virtues of a Youth Pastor, youthmin with 1 Comment

Vision in Ministry

Vision in Ministry

When my Brother and I first started talking about youthmin.org last summer, we had a lot of dreams for it, some of which were realistic and some maybe not so much, at least not for now.

But if you had asked me in October, when we were heavily working on getting the site up and running and ready for launch, what my vision for the site was, you would have gotten what now seems like a very shortsighted answer.

I wanted to create a site in Youth Ministry that would amplify the voice of the “Everyday Youth Pastor” and create dialogue about things in Youth Ministry.

In talking to a friend recently, he asked me “What would you define ‘Success’ as for youthmin.org?” And I had to think long and hard about it, and truthfully, I’m still not done thinking.

Two months ago, I would have said success would be getting 1,000 views a day, 20 comments a day, 20 ReTweets a day. And as I thought about that more, I realized that specifically with a blog, these are some of the only metrics you can use for judging the effectiveness of what you are doing. To me, Success is all about Effectiveness, and when I look at the above, I would say  if our site was doing those things, we would be Effective in starting dialogue in relation to Youth Ministry.

But then I wrote my goals for February post after a “Poor” month in January for the site (Poor in relation to the above metrical goals, I still think we pumped out some great content last month). It’s almost like I willed things into happening, because we went from an average of 350 views a day in January, until the day I wrote that I wanted to hit 25,000 views in February, when our stats doubled and we’ve been closer to 1000 views every day this month, sometimes more sometimes a little less.

All that to say, we are showing signs of “effectiveness.”

But are we really?

I read a lot of posts about Youth Ministry, but I also read a lot about social media and blogging, and one thing I have come to see as being true is that the best blogs know what product they are selling. Now, I don’t mean they are selling a literal product (though many are) but they fully understand why their Readers read their blog specifically over the thousands of other blogs out there, and they know how to capitalize on that.

I would put forth that these bloggers have made the Vision Turn. I don’t think there is a single thing a person has started without vision. For all the talk about the word by Leaders in whatever industry, I would say Vision is not what lacks from most leaders. It’s easy to have. I mean, literally, thinking back, how hard was it for my brother and I to have a “Vision” for a new Youth Ministry site? We saw a few needs, and saw a way to fill them, and have been working at that.

But the problem comes when organizations, be it blogs, Youth Ministries, Churches, Companies, whatever, reach their vision turn, when the “What are we going to do?” turns into the “What are we going to do next?”

I think back to an article in Group magazine this past Spring/Summer about a Youth Worker who was fired from a church, and in his article he talked about one of the things he believed led up to his release was the lack of vision in the church after finishing a huge building campaign. I would put forth that this church failed to make the vision turn.

Coming up with a dream is only a fourth of the battle. The hard part is figuring out what to really do when you get there.

I don’t know whats next for youthmin.org. We’re not there yet, still a long way off. But I also know, if I don’t start planning for it now, then Youthmin.org will be a pretty cool site for a few months and then die off.

Just like in Youth Ministry. It’s easy to see a Youth Pastor who says “I want to build a building and it would look like this, and it would have this purpose, and were going to have 200 new kids this next year, and 50 baptisms.” Thats a great sounding vision. But when it happens, when those things are true, what are you going to do?

Prepare for the vision turn before you get to the curve.