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How to Best use Social Media to Enhance your Church’s Mission Trips: Part 2

October 8, 2010 Adam Walker Cleaveland

This is Part 1 in my series, How to Best use Social Media to Enhance your Church’s Mission Trips. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here and Part 4 here.

First of all – I set up our church with a Posterous site that we now use as our Missions Blog.This was by far the easiest blogging/updating tool to use – and it’s all email-based, so I’d just attach some photos to an email, send it from my iPhone, and it would automatically update Facebook/Twitter/Flickr and any other service that I wanted. For more information on Posterous, read my post Posterous: The Perfect Solution for Blogging & Sharing Your Media Everywhere.

Middle School Trip: aka “The Trip Where I Had 3G Service”

On the middle school mission trip, being in an area that had both wifi and 3G service was obviously great. I could post live real-time updates/photos/videos, which was fun for parents to see. And I could just post a lot more as well. I would do some quick posts after we got settled in to a location or ministry site, and get some fun shots of the kids. Luckily, the place we were staying at night had wifi, so after lights out, I could lay in my sleeping bag + air mattress, type up a summary post of the day and upload some larger images and videos. It was a really good mix of both small, short, real-time updates throughout the day, and longer reflection posts at night.

I had a lot of fun with these kids and we found some fun ways to use social media while on this mission trip. We did a variety of different kinds of posts:

  • End of the evening video recaps
  • Prayer requests
  • Photos & Videos from the day

When I got home (and actually throughout the trip as well), I got emails and texts from parents who were so appreciative of being able to follow along. I even received an email from a grandparent of two of the kids who just loved being able to see her grandkids serving in this way. That was enough confirmation for me that it was worth doing.

I will say that I did have to limit my own use. I quickly checked Twitter/Facebook and any urgent emails at night, but didn’t spend a lot of time catching up on my own stuff. I found that I was pretty focused on the mission stuff, and that was good.

In the next post, I’ll share with you how I used social media on our next trip, which was quite different.

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Filed Under: Ministry, Technology Tagged With: Facebook, Mission-Trips, Sierra Service Project, social media, SSP, Technology, Twitter, Youth Missions

Adam is an artist, entrepreneur, pastor, husband and father. He lives in Skokie, Illinois with his wife Sarah (who is also a pastor), their son Caleb, and their dog, Sadie. Read More…

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