Thanks for checking out our youth group’s Twitter newsletter. If this is your first time to Pomomusings, please subscribe to the RSS feed here and you can subscribe to my Twitter Feed here. You can also find more of my youth ministry posts here, including the Top 20 All-Time Best Youth Ministry Games.
A couple of nights ago, I sat down to make the monthly newsletter. Not something I totally hate – but generally one of those “time-suck” duties of youth ministry. I use iWork’s Pages to design it and had been using a template for the past year – but with the fall starting up, I wanted to come up with something else. So, at 6:42pm I asked my tweeps a question about ideas for a new design for our newsletter:
And within a few minutes, I received two responses. One from a middle school youth and another from a high school student who does all of our video editing for the youth group:
So, when @missmadison got home, she promptly started getting to work on creating a template in Pages that would match up with the current Twitter user-interface. She did an amazing job – filled in all the info, sent it to me and I made a few edits and we had our newly designed newsletter! You can view images of the newsletter here (page 1 and page 2) or download the full PDF version here. I learned a few things that night:
- I think sometimes youth ministry folks feel the pressure to come up with all the cool, creative, new ideas. Why? Your youth groups are FILLED with youth who are creative and have some great ideas.
- Sometimes youth pastors feel the need to do everything themselves. I think this is especially true for youth pastors in smaller programs who may not have extensive volunteers and other leadership helping them. It’s easy to fall into that trap, but your ministry (and your life) will see radical improvements when you share the leadership and responsibilities – even with youth themselves!
- I’ve known this ever since I got here – but I have really creative and talented youth (and you do too!). Creating this Twitter newsletter template would have taken me HOURS – a really long time. But @missmadison put it all together in just a couple hours. She can also edit and put together movies in a FRACTION of the time that it would take me (even in iMovie). We need to continually find more and more ways to engage the creativity and gifts of our youth.
UPDATE: We have added a Microsoft Publisher version of a Twitter Postcard to this download. This post has gotten some great attention – it was posted at Rethinking Youth Ministry and was also included in the Church Mojo podcast (audio clip is below):
[audio:http://www.pomomusings.com/wp-content/mp3/Twitter.mp3]
Download the Twitter Youth Group Newsletter Template
I have put together this zipped file (20mb) that you can download that has the following things in it:
- Newsletter in iWork’s Pages format (this is what we designed it in)
- Newsletter in Microsoft Office format
- Postcard in the same Twitter-format in Microsoft Publisher format
- Photoshop file (.psd) for the Twitter-style logo for your youth group name
- Three Arista Twitter-Style font files
In order to create the Twitter-logo for your youth group name, you could try to use the Arista font after installed and just insert it into the document, or you could do the following:
- Open up the Twitter-Youth-Logo.psd in Photoshop. Change the text to your youth group’s name (might need to resize the image)
- Make sure there is no background selected and Save for Web and use the PNG format
- That will give you the transparent logo that you could then put over any background (we chose the dark grey)
I hope you enjoy this template provided here – created by one of our youth! So – you can download the template files for free. Or, if you’d like to donate something for this free resource, you can choose to download it and make a small donation. Totally your choice. All money raised will go to support the youth ministry of Asbury United Methodist Church! **If you do make a donation, after you you make it through PayPal, be sure and click on “RETURN TO DONATIONS COORDINATOR” and that will be the Download link.
Related posts:
- A Theology of Play in Youth Ministry: What About Youth Group Games?
- Top 20 All-Time Best Youth Group Games
- Renew America Together Video by Youth Group
- Top 20 Youth Ministry Blogs of 2010
Share This Post:
{ 23 comments… read them below or add one }
blogging this. dope.
oops i forgot to click on the return to donations coordinator after the donation!
pure dope…double dope
I adapted this into an MS Publisher postcard for “tweets” via post…seemed to make sense.
If you are interested, I can send it to your youth group to be included in the download. No credit needed and I can remove identifying info from the .pub file.
Here’s the pic:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=2513486&id=102074953510
Could you send me that file? I love it!!
Erica – that file is now included in the download file here on this page.
adam… any chance you could convert this back to Pages ’08 and email it to me… I’m not yet on the ’09 train. hopefully soon…
Matt – email me and I’ll send you the ’08 file. I have another file to add before I get the whole new folder upload ready – but I can just send you the ’08 file.
thanks adam, I’ve been wanting to do something like this for awhile but you know, time…
You know, I was actually kind of joking when I said I’d try. I also didn’t think it would look too good, but I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.
Thank you! This is very cool. My newsletter was looking… well… very 1990s. One question: I’ve installed the fonts just fine, but how do you get the white outline to show up?
Whenever I download the template the zip file is empty. 0 bytes. Anyone else having this problem?
Chris – I just downloaded the zip file just fine. It should be 28.4mb.
Is anyone else having this problem? You’re the first to say anything Chris, and there have been around 350 downloads.
Just tried the download on a different laptop. Still 0 bytes. I’ve tried downloading in both Firefox and IE8 and no luck.
Chris – I’m not sure what to tell you. No one else has said anything about it. If you email me exactly what file you’d like – I can try just emailing you the individual file.
In case anyone was having any problems with the download link – it’s back up and working now. Thanks everyone.
Also – if you do decide to use this – you should leave a link to an image of your newsletter so we can check out the various iterations of this great idea that @Nabsol and @missmadison came up with!
I was just thinking about this and here it is. Thanks Adam.
What are the fonts in the body of the newsletter?
They are Lucida Grande.
Nice work on the very creative template. Thanks for including a link to my podcast. Let me know what you cook up next!
sah-weet. good work adam. thanks for sharing.
–Terrace Crawford
http://www.terracecrawford.com
http://www.twitter.com/terracecrawford
any advice on how to get the white outline like you have behind the “Asbury Youth?” I’m having the same problem that Erica was having.
WOW!! Just wow!!
Everything worked perfectly! I preferred downloading the fonts and making it right there in Pages. I did it in PhotoShop but man it was so much easier to do in Pages with the fonts!
This is genius and awesome and thank you so much! I love it!
{ 2 trackbacks }