Technology is changing the way we share our faith. As churches and ministries look to integrate technology into their strategies, they can be frustrated at the quality of tools available. A few weeks back, we released a guide that evaluated web-based church management software (click here to download it for free). Now, I want to take some time and look at some online software for church youth ministry.
Software for Church Youth Group can help you manage the masses and make your life as a youth pastor much easier. You may have a ton of tasks, but software has been created to help you manage even the most complex operations, like registering your kids in camp, to easy things, like posting weekly events on your church website…
While you may be all set with church management software to run your church as a whole, is it possible that maybe your ministry groups are a little neglected?
What do you do when each group has its own processes and events to manage, and you want to be able to provide them all with the best tools suited to their specific needs?
Software for church youth group includes tools that help pastors and administrators lead their youths through their Christian life. The software considered are either integrated with the church software or are specific to the needs of the youths. This can include planning programs, keeping religious schedules, tracking attendance, raising money and working with sponsors.
Using church management software for youth group to help you keep track of church finances and membership is critical for the growth of your youth ministry. There are many types of church management software programs that you can find to help you manage everything from church finances for youth group to setting up a registration form. Here are a few different programs that are built specifically for churches that want to use software for their youth groups.
Here are 11 great tools for you to consider—some of them are geared specifically towards church ministry groups, and others are tools strictly for certain processes that ministry groups could find very helpful:
1. YapTap
This system was created to meet the communication needs of youth pastors. Yaptap was developed so that pastors could send messages to parents, and manage and track costs and events.
Features include content attachment, message scheduling, and group and leader management tools. All YapTap plans are $20/month.
2. Youth Track
Youth Track is a software tool to help you organize your events, classes, ministry teams, events, and resources.
Features include tracking, notifications, contact information, sending group emails, and scheduling events and resources. Youth Track is $185 for a full installation.
3. Simply Youth Ministry
Simply Youth Ministry has a suite of tools for managing your church ministry—it helps you to manage your volunteer team, events, communication, and it allows you to organize all of your contact information.
Each ministry tool (there are five different tools that are offered separately: Contact, Communicate, Team, Events, and Jobs) has a different pricing structure. The Communicate tool is $10/month for up to 50 contacts and allows for 30 group messages per month, $20/month for up to 100 contacts and up to 60 group messages per month, $30/month for up to 250 contacts and up to 120 group messages per month, and $40/month for up to 1,500 contacts and up to 240 group messages per month.
4. Tuggle
Tuggle is an online community for your ministry that includes event management as well as communication tools. It helps you manage individuals and groups, as well as send mass texts and emails.
Tuggle is $15/month for up to 50 members, $32/month for up to 250 members, and $65/month for unlimited members.
5. Groups Interactive
Groups Interactive is a Christian technology company whose search tool helps ministries to connect individuals to small groups. This tool is placed on your church website for people to find small groups in their neighborhood and then connect with a leader to become part of the group.
Groups Interactive has an introductory offer of $25/month or $250 annually for unlimited groups. There is no setup fee for this offer (normally $50).
Other tools
Here are some other tools that are not as ministry specific as the ones above, but are great tools for different aspects of ministry management, such as managing your group’s budget, presentations, calendars, schedules, and tasks, and are especially great for ministry pastors:
6. Present.me
Present.me is a tool for adding video and audio to any of your presentations—it allows you to take your presentation document (it can be a PowerPoint, Prezi, PDF, or Google Docs file) and then upload them straight into Present.me. Once you do that, you can record what you need to say and add it to your presentation file. After that you’re free to share it—embed it into your website, email a link to it, or make it private—you have many options for how you want to share.
Present.me is $3.95/month for the basic plan (3 active recordings per month), $17.95/month for the pro plan (30 active recordings per month), and for unlimited active recordings per month, they request that you contact them for a price quote.
7. Wufoo
Wufoo is a drag and drop form builder that helps you if you need to take online prayer requests, do surveys, run an online newsletter, or register people for an event. Wufoo lets you create the form and put it straight on your website—it will write the script for you, and is hosted in the cloud.
Wufoo is $14.95/month for one user, $29.95/month for five users, $69.95/month for 20 users, and $199.95/month for 60 users. A free account is offered for one user, three forms, three reports, and ten fields.
8. Evernote
Evernote is a cloud-based database that helps you to sort out and search for anything that you put into it. It can also sync all your devices and lets you have access to any of the files and documents that you need.
It’s there for you to put your thoughts in one place, remember things and save resources. Evernote offers their tool as a free download.
9. Reeder
Reeder is a great place for ministry members or pastors to organize blogs and news in one place and stay informed while you’re on the go—you can also click on a blog and easily save the blog post into Evernote, if you have it.
Reeder is a tool for pastors or ministry leaders to stay informed of what is going on in the Christian world through blogs. This is really helpful for pastors so as they can more easily inform their parishioners and speak to them about current events, and also ministry leaders can speak to their groups and encourage them to stay informed as well—keeping up to date through these blogs helps ministry groups to know and to focus on where their efforts are needed the most.
10. YNAB
YNAB (You Need a Budget) is a great tool for managing your budget—great for ministry pastors to organize their budget and keep on top of their own personal budget as well as the budget they have for the ministry group. YNAB is $60 for the license to install it on either PC or Mac.
11. Mint.com
Mint.com is another budget management tool. Mint is completely free, and it can be used for group budgets and business budgets as well. It will automatically organize your spending into specific categories (such as rent, groceries, restaurants, etc.) and then uses charts to show you where your money is being spent.
A growing number of churches are using software for church youth ministry as a way to increase efficiency and cut costs. Software can help oversee budgets and finances, manage volunteers and communicate with parents, communicate with students, and keep in touch with congregation members. This technology is designed to increase the effectiveness of a youth ministry so that your efforts are maximized.
Conclusion
The church where I’m on staff has a youth outreach program every summer. Each year, it gets bigger and more popular. As the youth director (youth pastor), I’ve been asked to put some programs together to help us do that in an effective way. In this post, I give you what software we have found to be useful for church youth group.