Tech Geek

Those involved in youth ministry understand that communicating effectively and easily with teenagers and parents is one of the most important parts of the job. Even though a perfect solution to the communication conundrum doesn’t exist, Tatango makes the process significantly easier, and best of all — free.

Before I say any more, I’ll let the CEO of Tatango describe their utility for youth workers. Check out the video below:

Like Derek said, Tatango lets you send out group text messages and voicemails for free, which for youth workers might as well be manna from heaven. Although the free version is supported by ads, they are unobtrusive and the message you send is still communicated, so who can complain?

One of my favorite things about Tatango is the different ways available for you to promote your group and get members to join. You can embed a widget in your website where users can type in their information, and every group you create has a unique web address where users can sign up as well. But the greatest tool, in my opinion, is using customizable keywords. For example, I set up a customized keyword of “EIKON” (the name of my high school ministry). All I have to do is tell students to text the word EIKON to a five-digit shortcode number, and they’re immediately subscribed to any updates I send out for that group.

Of course, Tatango has paid subscriptions ranging from $5/month to $100/month, which give you some benefits, such as using customized widgets and personalized keywords, but it’s an expense I think many youth workers will easily be able to justify.

On top of everything else, the guys running Tatango are great people, and they have offered readers of JakeBouma.com a 10% discount on any of their paid subscriptions. Just enter the word Tango in the “Coupon Code” box on the payment page, and you’re all set.

If you have any questions about Tatango’s services, be sure to check out their Frequently Asked Questions page, follow them on Twitter, and/or leave a comment below. And, in the interest of full disclosure, I am not receiving anything from Tatango in exchange for blogging about their company. I simply feel strongly about their services and believe that other youth workers could benefit from them as well.

Thanks to Jake Bouma for giving me permission to share his article. Jake blogs regularly at JakeBouma.com. He currently resides in West Des Moines, Iowa, where he works as both the director of youth and family ministries and contemporary worship leader at St. Mark Lutheran Church.

I just got back from a great gathering of young leaders and adult mentors at the Council of Synod Lutheran Youth Organization Presidents at MountSequoyah Retreat Center outside of Fayetteville , Arkansas. It was a great weekend of sharing, fellowship, and worship as we explored the theme of Uni-Diversity, the things we have in common and the things that make us a diverse group of people, as well as how we can more fully appreciate that diversity.

During one of our exercises, we were moving around the room to show whether or not we fit into a variety of different categories. Many of the questions were around labels that we put on other people or on ourselves. Some of them were of the "Do you own" variety. One question, "Do you own a cell phone?" was answered "yes" by every participant, youth and adult. I expected the majority of participants to answer yes to that question, but I, along with other youth and adult participants, was a little surprised to see that every person there owned a cell phone.

Why do I bring that up? Well, do you own and use your cell phone in ministry? Are you using text messages to stay in communication with the youth youminister to? Are you using text messages to remind people of events and opportunities? Are you exchanging cell phone numbers so that you can always re-group if you get split up while doing something? Your group may not have 100% cell phoneusage , but it may be closer to that than you think. I also was chatting with an adult participant marveling at the ability of our young people to text message while engaged in just about any other activity. We may use them for voice, but they are very definitely text devices to our young people.

The ELCA Youth Ministry Network has a new partnership with TxtSignal, a permission based text messaging service. You invite your young people to sign up to receive your texts. You can send group messages immediately, or schedule them to go out at a specific time. Send out reminders, daily devotions, or electronic pick-me-up notes. The plan works with all of the major and almost all of the minor phone services.

There are a variety of plans to match the size and needs of your group. Plus, TxtSignal is giving members of the ELCA Youth Ministry Network 10% off of the monthly cost for the first year, plus is adding an additional 15 days to the standard 30 day free trial. Just go to the TxtSignal web site and when prompted for a promotional code, please enter ELCA. Thanks to TxtSignal for their partnership!

I have also written before about Pinger. They are currently free, and they provide not just text messages, but voice messages to your contacts. You call the magic number, it sends a text message to those you want it sent to that invites them to call a magic number. When they call, they hear the voice message you've left for them.Pinger also lets you transfer your voicemail from your cell provider to them. That means you can listen to your voicemail on your computer, helping hold down the number of minutes you use. (Although, the calls that get forwarded to yourPinger Voicemail may cost you minutes because they were forwarded. I'm not sure about that yet.)

God's blessings and peace,
Pastor Andy Arnold

I keep track of lots of expenses and I generally do pretty well at it. I save receipts so I can meticulously match them up with my credit cards online, so I can turn them in for reimbursement, and so I can track them for tax purposes. I yell and stomp my feet whenever my wife forgets to give me a receipt from the grocery store. I could tell you how much we spent buying salt for our water softener. But tracking mileage for reimbursement purposes drives me nuts. I've tried everything, from the little red book calendar to programs on my Palm, but after a few weeks, I'm back to ignoring the miles again. This may not work any better, but I've got two new things to try!

I used to use an application called Quickmile on my Palm IIIc. It worked for tracking reimbursable miles and fuel economy. But when I upgraded to a laptop with Windows Vista, it stopped working. I found it really odd that I couldn't find anything to replace it, and maybe if my Palm was newer it would work with Vista, but I was stuck. I also found that there were times that I didn't have my Palm with me and so the trip didn't get logged. Before I knew it, two weeks had passed! So I wanted something that was with me all the time and let me only enter data once. I also needed a way to review and recreate trips that had happened in the past.

The first thing I discovered, and have been using for awhile, was Mileage Calculator, a mash-up that uses Google Calendar and Google Maps to calculate your mileage. You enter in a default starting address, the XML Private Link to your Google Calendar, and a date range. It gives you a list of all the items and you can delete those that don't have mileage. If you put everything into your calendar (and use Google Calendar), it could be a good solution. I have used it to review and make sure I'm not missing something else. It's easy for me, since I already synchronize my Palm with Google Calendar and almost any trip I take is reflected there. I suppose I could even create a new calendar called Mileage and then track my trips that way. I decided that I didn't like the amount of review work necessary with this method, since there are lots of things on my calendar that don't require any driving. I did like the idea of using Google Maps to calculate mileage for trips I had already taken and have used that to recreate mileage figures after the fact.

For all sorts of reimbursement purposes, Xpenser seems like a good fit and it is my current tool. It is designed to allow you to enter an expense and forget it. The tool allows you to interact with it in a variety of ways. You can send expenses via e-mail, IM (Yahoo, MSN, or AOL), SMS text message, direct message on Twitter, or (my favorite) Jott. Once you set up an account, click on the keywords tab and turn on mileage tracking and enter the reimbursement rate provided by your congregation or employer. Now if I run into town to meet someone at the coffee shop, I reset my trip odometer at the beginning of the trip and when I get back to church I send a message that is as simple as mileage 4 coffee with high schooler. My expense report will have a new line: 5/5/2008 - mileage - 2.02 - (4.0 miles at 0.51) coffee with high schooler. (Even though it says 0.51, it calculates correctly on .505.) At the end of the month, I print out the report and give it to the treasurer and set the status on Xpense to submitted.

P.S. - For tracking fuel economy, another simple tool is MyMileMarker.com. You let it know whenever you fill up and whenever you get an oil change. It tells you how many miles per gallon you're getting.

P.P.S. - If you are tracking mileage for the IRS and not for reimbursement purposes, you need to be careful to record odometer readings and not just trip distance. You should probably stick to the notebook!

The posts that are the most work, but also the most fun, are the ones that I write in response to questions posed by you! This week I received a question from a friend who wondered if it were possible to send text messages to a group of people easily. Of course, one shudders to think of thumb-typing the same message out dozens of time, so I went looking for another way! I thought this should be possible, but didn't know if it would be easy or not. Some phones support sending text messages to groups, but depending on your plan, you may be dinged a dime or so for each one you send. Thankfully, I have this tool called the 'internet' which I can use to do research! :)

It seemed to me that this is technically a fairly easy thing to do and there should be tools to help do it. One option that came to mind was sending e-mails to the SMS gateways that most cellular carriers have. For example, you can send a message to a Verizon user by addressing it to {phone-number}@vtext.com. Wikipedia has a list of many of the e-mail and web gateways here. The challenge to this method is that you need to know which carrier each of your youth is using. I suppose you could ask each of them, but that seems like a pain. There are some online tools that might help, but because of number portability, they are not always accurate. (If I sign up with one carrier originally, then port my number to another carrier, most of these tools still list the first carrier.) One blog I stumbled upon suggested that you e-mail to all the carriers in your area and then see which messages do and do not bounce.

There are also websites and services that allow you to send messages to groups of people at a per-message cost of a dime or more. This could quickly get expensive, although I suppose it is quite a bit cheaper than the postcards I'm using now! For example, Skype (a great tool for on-line calls) will let you send text messages for about 11.2 cents per message. You can send text messages to phones from Yahoo Messenger for free, but I'm not sure it supports sending to a group of people all at the same time.

So I kept researching and looking for a better way. I found a blog called Life in Student Ministry: Conversations among those passionate for teenagers. On this blog was a post that seemed to fit what I was looking for. It was titled, Sending youth group announcements as mass text messages. I read through both the article and the comments that followed and then went to the sites that were linked too. Most of the conversation made a lot of sense to me as it raised the pros and cons of the ideas I had had. Here's what I found out, sort of ordered in what I found least interesting to what I found most interesting.

• TXT Signal is a service that people on the blog post seemed to be quite fond off. It allows you to send messages to a group of people after they enter their numbers on line. You need to send a sign-up e-mail or post a link on your website that your youth need to respond to to opt-in to the text messages. A basic 100 person plan with 60 messages per month is $14. This service does not allow people to reply to you.
• Jabber*Text charges 3 cents per message and allows you to manage your contact list online. They say on their website that they "started this service with church youth groups in mind -- giving youth workers the power to communicate to their students easily and affordably."
• Club-Texting has a page devoted to how their services can be used by religious group. I couldn't find pricing information on their site.
• Broadtexter mobile clubs were originally designed for musicians, but they have opened membership to others as well. For groups, Broadtexter is free with occasional advertising included in messages. They also have a premium, ad-free product.
• Zemble is a free service that does exactly what we're looking for. It lets you create groups and send text messages to them. You can send messages to people who have not signed-up for the service. From the poking around I've done today, this looks like the best and least expensive (free) service to send text messages. However, they don't seem to offer an easy way to import contacts, so you'll have to enter them one by one. The focus of Zemble seems to be on social networking (like Facebook or MySpace) using text messages. It could work for you if you can survive the setup process!
• Jott, a service I use and talk about often, will also allow you to send to groups. They use both e-mail and text message delivery. You could set up a group of contacts in Jott and send messages that way. Then you call and dictate your message to Jott and have it sent to the group. Some folks will get them as text and others as e-mail. Jott allows you to use CSV files to import your contacts.
• Pinger is probably the most interesting of the services that I have looked at today. It's similar to Jott in some ways, but it also gives you some other options. Instead of just sending a text message, it sends a text message that invites the recipient to call back and hear a voice message. It provides numerous ways to get your contacts into their system, including directly from Outlook or Palm Desktop. The website describes the service as one which lets you "send voice messages to each other's mobile phones without interrupting.  It's fast and efficient like email, portable like text messaging, and powered with your voice." Pinger also allows you to stop using your cellular carrier's voicemail service and switch to an online service (saving those minutes) instead. I haven't tried it since I just discovered the service today, but I am intrigued!

What has your experience been with getting the word out to the youth of your church? What tools have you used and how effective have they been?

Have you ever lost your cell phone? Or dropped it in a toilet? Or run over it with your car? Or just upgraded to a new phone? It's a pain, isn't it? All that contact information that you've collected on the phone but never copied into your address book, PDA, or Rolodex is gone. Then you have the joy of inputting it back into your replacement phone. I would be happy if I never had to do that again! Since I found Mighty Backup, I should not have to!

Mighty Backup is a service that communicates with your cell phone directly and synchronizes your phone's contact list with a website. They have instructions for using it to upgrade to a new phone and you can also use the website to add contact information to your phones contact list using a full sized keyboard instead of the one on the phone. I use it for free since I signed up for an online account with Verizon Wireless, which, thanks to IN calling may very well be the preferred carrier of the ELCA Youth Ministry Network. If it weren't free, it would only be $1.99/month, which is probably worth it for the peace of mind it provides. Verizon customers can visit www.getbackupnow.com to see how to add this service to their phones.

If you're not on Verizon, but you are on Alltel, Bell Mobility, CellularOne, Cellular South, or Midwest Wireless you can visit www.mightybackup.com/get to see how to install the application to your phone. They also say that they are working on developing versions of their software for users of "Cingular, T-Mobile and many other networks." Once you have everything working, you can even go onto the website and print out a hard copy of the information.

Your specific instructions may vary slightly, but what I did was the following:

1. Went to the "Get it Now" menu on my phone and downloaded the Backup Assistant application.
2. Ran the application and picked a PIN number.
3. Picked the time I wanted to automatic backup to run each day.
4. Ran the first backup and verified that it worked.
5. Visited the website and logged in with my phone number and PIN.
6. Printed out a good old fashioned paper copy of the information! (Well, actually, I didn't. Just not my style! *grin* )

Each day during the time window you configure the service sends a text message that triggers the program to run. You may want to disable the automatic feature if you pay extra for data services and only want to run the application when you manually start it. After it runs, any changes you have made online or on the phone are synchronized and your contact information is backed up! Visit www.mightybackup.com/how to see a bit more about how the service works.

I do some of my best thinking and planning while I'm driving. Good (and some not-so-good) ideas pop into my head and I ponder them for a few miles, then lose them before I commit them to long term memory or write them down. It might be an item for my to-do list, a person who I need to contact, or a program idea, but most of the time it used to be lost because I didn't keep it in my head until I could actually use it. Enter Jott, a free service that transcribes voice to text and sends it to a variety of places. It's also useful to keep track of those pesky expenses!

Don't forget, if you have questions or topics you'd like me to address, e-mail at techgeek@elcaymnet.org.