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Question for the Community: Student Ministry Website

by Seth Bartlette
Thursday, August 09, 2012
All, Blog
6 comments

We’re counting on you to help us answer this question from a fellow youth-worker:

What are the benefits of having your own external student ministry website versus a static part of the church website?

Time to weigh in with your thoughts, YMG Team. Help Josh by commenting below. Thanks!

Tags:Question for the Community

6 comments

1
MarkThursday, August 09, 2012 1:42 PM
Josh, I think that having a good looking webpage is important for a few reasons. Most folks with jh or sh kids searching for a new church will look at the church website and probably the student site or page within the main church site. For that alone it is important for outreach and web exposure. Not many of my students have ventured to our youth site, though their parents occasion the site to check out the calendar. A site is pretty easy to set up and keep maintained with static and changing info, depending on what you use. Having an external youth site that isn't just static also shows that things are happening in your youth group-that it hasn't been relegated to the back fold of the bulletin, or that it is a small group of people that really don't have any fun or do anything of any real value. That's my two point 5 cents.
2
JeremyThursday, August 09, 2012 4:23 PM
I think an essential question that must be asked has to do with the ministry's "identity" and the relationship with the church which your youth ministry represents. A lot of youth ministries have an "island" or "isolation" approach.. Like a brand... I battled that when I first moved to the ministry I'm at. There was "Lifepoint Church" and "Fuse Youth Ministry'. I think branding can be cool--but only if it has a true purpose and aligns with the overall mission of the church. One of the first big-decisions I made here was to kill the "fuse" and just have "Lifepoint Youth Ministry". If the student ministry doesn't reflect the over-all church ministry, you're probably serving in the wrong church to begin with. So creating a website because your church's website is stale--is absolutely understandable... However, would a better idea be to help the church understand the importance of having an updated / vibrant site? What you do not want to do is create a silo of ministry.. The reason being, if our goal as student pastors is to create disciples, not just students addicted to our youth ministry programs-- we have to understand that the "next step" is involvement in the sanctuary after they graduate youth ministry.. This is why I feel that having an updated church site (not just a single youth website) is the best bet--that way they are used to navigating around the church's website.. You could buy a domain name ($10/year) and have it re-directed to the sub-domain of your church's site.. this is something I do (www.LifepointYouth.org) that way you could still have an online-custom-identity, but then a familiar site for the entire congregation. Either way, if you are committed to having a website (external or attached to the church's site) you must commit to regularly scheduled updates (at least monthly) with important dates, updated pictures, series topics, etc.. good luck with your on-line ministry journey!
3
Jimmy HudsonThursday, August 09, 2012 5:54 PM
We have both a presence on our main site, our own .com site and a Facebook page. Out of the three I think the Facebook works best. It is where the teens already are. I don't have to get them to come to a different site. The main church one works for visitors and parents. The least effective is our separate .com I just don't think there is a real reason to go there. I guess if we put exclusive content there it could drive traffic but ultimately our sites are for information not traffic so I end up just pushing info to the Facebook Page because the teens are there already.
4
Erik WilliamsThursday, August 09, 2012 6:32 PM
Our youth page is constantly updated. The church site is static and stale lacking info on current events. We need to be in control of our own site to keep the info fresh and current for parents and students.
5
Brian SeidelSunday, August 12, 2012 4:49 PM
I agree with Jimmy. We have had all 3 of the same things; facebook, our own web site, and a page on our church site. We just closed down our own youth website, mainly because the students never went to it, and all our visits were from the church site so we are just going to put our effort there and save some money. The students are already on facebook, so we are going to "fish where the fish are". By eliminating one of the three I feel like we can do better by doing less.
6
andy lawrensonTuesday, August 14, 2012 4:30 PM
We used to have a separate youth site. Over the past few years with Facebook most of our students have been going there for information. So we created FB group pages. This year we did away with the separate site because of budget reasons plus most all of the students and parents were going to FB or the church site for info. I did set up a blog page for posting videos, announcments, downloadable medical release, brief description about who we are. We also use google docs to create online registration for events and link that on our blog page and in our FB page.