Ok, if you’re a youth pastor who reads this blog, my one piece of solid advice for you is, get a youth tracker.net account.
We have all our students in an online database they host. It is therefore password accessible anywhere in the world that I can get internet access. We have middle school, high school, and college in it.
I can enter tons of custom fields, tracks event attendance, write mentor notes, and all in an extremely user friendly format. Next week we start adding photos.
In about 20 seconds, I can send a text to our entire youth group database or any individual group I choose for 8.5 cents per text and I don’t have to know their cell carrier like a lot of texting programs. For me that means that I can remind our entire student leadership team or all our guys small groups of a meeting via cell for less than $4 and it even tells me who saw it and who did not. I can send out a text advertisement for an upcoming outreach event to the entire list of regulars and visitors for about $40! You can’t beat that in a day and age where texting rules with students.
Even our volunteer adults have access to their students by a special login. I’ve tried a lot of databases but none that I have found can compare with the usability, versatility, and simplicity of this program. I cannot recommend a better tool to manage students than this one. They even uploaded ALL our data from a previous pain in the butt management system we were using. We just exported it in excel and for a dismal $25 fee- whalla, instant online data.
And no… I don’t get bonus points and I can’t offer a discount if you mention my name.
Husband. Dad to 5. Student Ministry Pastor. Follower of Jesus. Yatta yatta.
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