You are here: Home / Archives for Mission-Trips

The Best Youth Ministry Fundraiser Ever: The Wall O Money

By Leave a Comment
Mar 28 19

Fundraising. Ugh.

That’s what I think every fall when I realize that we have some awesome mission trip opportunities, but that we’re going to need to raise some money. So, if you’re like me, you start to make a list of all the “standards” when it comes to fundraising: pancake breakfasts, car washes, rummage sales, flamingo-ing, etc. It’s a bit depressing, and I never look forward to the work that goes into these types of fundraisers.

As I was preparing to come up with a list of fundraisers for this year, I asked my network on Facebook & Twitter what their favorite fundraisers were, and a friend sent me a note about the Wall O Money. She had told me she made close to $10,000 on this fundraiser the previous year, and so of course, I was all ears!

« Continue »

How to Best use Social Media to Enhance your Church’s Mission Trips: Part 4

By Leave a Comment
Oct 15 3

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.

Allowing others to share their mission experiences

Some of you might be thinking to yourself, “Well – this is all good and everything when you have an iPhone 4 and you’re all into technology and everything – but what about other lay people who go on missions?”

We have continued to use our Posterous-powered Missions Blog for two other mission trips since the summer. We had a multi-generational mission trip from our church go to the United Methodist Committee on Relief Depot in Salt Lake City, and one of my co-pastors ran the Missions blog while they were there. With Posterous, you can simply add other email addresses as Contributors, so now each time someone goes on a missions trip, I simply add their email address to Posterous, give them the email address to write emails to and attach pictures to, and then their emails get magically turned into blog posts and sent out through our various social media sites.

« Continue »

How to Best use Social Media to Enhance your Church’s Mission Trips: Part 3

By Leave a Comment
Oct 12 0

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.

High School Trip: aka “The Trip where I HAD NO BARS!”

I will say that  finding good ways to use social media on our trip up to Klamath, CA to work on the Yurok Indian reservations was much more challenging, for a variety of reasons. First of all, these were our high school kids who had been on numerous other mission trips, and so the “no cell phones…..EVER” rule was very ingrained into their idea of what a mission is. And the fact that we were in Klamath, CA – where AT&T apparently has no signal – didn’t really help either.

« Continue »

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

By Leave a Comment
Oct 8 3

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.

« Continue »