Mail Chimp is a great tool for tracking your mass emails to parents and volunteers. I am amazed that they offer so much for the free service. The free service allows you to store up to 500 email addresses (plenty for most churches) as well as send up to 3,000 emails per month. So if you had 500 addresses, you could send 6 mass emails per month free of charge. They also offer a 15% discount to non-profits.

I’m really looking forward to using this in a similar way that Jonathan Cliff does (only I believe he uses Constant Contact-a paid service). Jonathan sends out weekly update and leadership videos to his volunteers. He utilizes Vimeo for this. Mail Chimp will allow you to communicate things like this to your people as well as keep track of who actually has opened the email and who clicked on the links within it.

Do you have parents who wait until 3 days before VBS starts to register? Or perhaps like my church, they wait until the opening assembly has already started!

I sent out an email to our entire church body to grab their attention and get them to register. Feel free to adapt it and use it in an email, Facebook page, blog, tweet them individually, or whatever. Hope it helps.

Top ten reasons you haven’t registered your child for VBS:

10. The dog ate your computer.

9. You thought it stood for Vulcan Bake Sale.

8. You’re lazy.

7. You aren’t concerned about your child hearing the gospel.

6. The spirit of “weirdness” told you not to.

5. You’re still waiting to see the dinner menu.

4. Your overly American schedule has kept you too busy to think about it.

3. You know that it takes around 7 reminders for people to respond to something and you’ve only counted 6.

2. One word: YouTube

1. People say your kid would have too much fun—and fun is not what you’re about.

One of the priorities in my prayer and planning day earlier this month was to develop a communication time line. I started thinking that I not only need to communicate about events that happen from year to year, but I need to communicate other pertinent reminders throughout the year. I thought this time line might be helpful for you. It is in an editable format so you can adjust to fit your ministry needs.

What would you add to it? Send me some comments to make it better!

Eyejot is super cool. You log into their site, record a video from a webcamera, and email it out. I have used it for some personal messages, but I had some ideas about how to use it in ministry:

• Send an Eyejot to every parent in your ministry on Thursday, helping them to connect with their child about the material you will be teaching on Sunday.
• Have groups of children Eyejot messages to missionaries your ministry or church has adopted.
• Send Eyejots to kids (via parent email most likely) when you know they are sick or have been out for a while.
• Eyejot your volunteers with critical news or announcements. This way they see your expressions and emotions and don’t misinterpret email communication.
• Send Eyejot updates to parents when taking kids to camp over the summer.
• Use Eyejot to remind volunteers or parents of upcoming meetings.
• Send an Eyejot to a volunteer, kid, or parent  just to let them know you were thinking about them or praying for them.

What about you? Have you used this tool for ministry? What creative ways can you think of to use Eyejot?