Leadership, Technology, Innovation, Campus, City
I need to know.
The interweb needs to know.
What is the best new idea you’ve implemented for this season of ministry? What shiny new idea do you feel like God has laid on your heart. Is it a new technology or a new direction or emphasis? Is it simple, is it complex? What is it? In what new area are you trusting the Lord for something new? Light up that comment section!
Photo courtesy of Northcountry Boy
I created a landing page for our PDX Cru Facebook page the other day. (Thanks for the inspiration U. of Central Florida).
It’s got a giant welcome picture along with links to our “Connect with Cru” page and info on all of our meetings. I’m hoping its a better way to translate Facebook advertising into people actually getting involved. Especially as we blitz the city with some advertising at the beginning of the school year.
It was a little bit of a confusing process and involved inputting some HTML. Start here if you’re interested and then you’re on your own.
Is this a good idea? Do you use Facebook advertising at the start of the year?
Here’s what I’ve been paying attention to and thinking about this week.
9 Reason why Failure is not Fatal – From the 99% blog that I love! I haven’t watched all the videos yet but they look great.
The Five Ministry Fronts of the City by Tim Keller – Applies to a church but definitely should influence our urban campus ministry.
The Five Posture Toward Ethnic Minority Ministry - Really good article for people that aren’t experienced in ethnic ministry like me. Super helpful for me.
Tim Casteel on how he does ministry at U. of Arkansas – Great idea of creating a document to succently explain your ministry to a new staff or student leader. Makes me want to make one for Portland Metro.
With our tech savvy and urban students I want to put a QR code on our promotional materials that has a link to information and a video from one of our staff welcoming them. How cool would that be? Anybody have any information on this?
Checking out the social media icon wordpress plugin. I might add this to our city website.
I added a landing page to our PDX Cru Facebook page. It welcomes people who are checking out the page for the first time, gives a link to fill out a “Connect with Cru” form as well as some other info. This will be helpful as we advertise on Facebook to connect people early in the term. (I copied a UCF Cru image on this …I’ll eventually make my own)
Have a great week!
I like things to be easy. I see a good idea and I immediately want to to install it into my ministry here in Portland. I like to cut and paste. It’s easy. It’s also reassuring, because somewhere out there someone else is doing the same thing I’m doing. If the idea fails I can blame someone else.
Sure there are Biblical principles that translate across time and locations, but straight up copying another ministry….that’s way to safe.
What’s our prayer you say? Simply this, ”Lord, what is it you have for THIS ministry THIS year? Show us your heart for the students of Portland.”
I don’t want to just copy another ministry, too easy and to safe.
Meet Fancyhands, my new assistant. At least for the month anyway.
Go ahead laugh it up. I’ve gotten all kinds of fancyhands jokes since I threw down $35 big ones for 1 month and 15 tasks. Then I showed my regional director the task results of finding the total university population and demographic breakdown for our entire 7 state region. Totally worth the money.
I’ve also made them find a Fall Retreat location for me and call individual locations to check dates. Saved me at least a half day and a headache already.
I love my fancyhands.
Lot’s of April Fools jokes buzzing around the internets yesterday. I appreciated this one.
Here’s some video inspiration for your next project. Plus it’s of one of my favorite places…New York City. Thanks @benUNC for the link.
Last week we hosted almost 30 staff and students from around the Northwest for a spring break urban immersion, Portland style. Many thanks to Chicago Cru for the inspiration. It was a blast.
Here’s why we did it:
Here’s a brief summary of what we did:
Overall the feedback has been really good and I think we might do it again next year. It was a huge win for us and the students who joined us. God moved in their hearts. Feel free to join us next year 
.
Recently I ran some ad’s on Facebook for everystudent.com in the Portland area. My purpose was to add an element of broad exposure to our evangelistic efforts and well as test the response. Keep in mind that I’ve set up our ministry email to receive any everystudent.com questions that come from students at schools in the Portland area.
I targeted 18-21 year olds who are in college in the Portland area. The ad’s ran for a Sunday and Monday at about $1/click. Here’s the results.
Yada, yada, yada got 58,962 impressions and 5 clicks.
Human Kindness Matters got 400,649 impressions and 59 clicks.
Questions about Life got 9,970 impressions and a whopping 0 clicks.
Out of all of those clicks has come three emails. One person with a real question, one with no question and one that was belligerent.
On a side note this ad was dissaproved from Facebook. Haha!
Long story short, I’m still not sure how I feel about this strategy. I love the thought of reaching students that we don’t have access to right now, but was this worth the $60 I spent? How could I make it work better.
I can’t mandate it, but I can tell you that there is value to having a smart phone on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ. Here’s my top 8 reasons why.
