I am not naturally an organized person. You might be. But for me I have to look for tools, apps and processes that will help me to get and stay organized. I have written before how I use Evernote for youth ministry. I recently starting using todoist as my go to to do list app. However the app that has made the most difference in my student ministry recently has been Trello.
What is Trello?
This is taken directly from their website: help.trello.com (https://help.trello.com/article/708-what-is-trello)
Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process.Imagine a white board, filled with lists of sticky notes, with each note as a task for you and your team.Now imagine that each of those sticky notes has photos, attachments from other data sources like BitBucket or Salesforce, documents, and a place to comment and collaborate with your teammates. Now imagine that you can take that whiteboard anywhere you go on your smartphone, and can access it from any computer through the web. That’s Trello!
How Can It Be Used for Youth Ministry
Trello is a very adaptable tool. This means there are many uses for it in student ministry. There are way too many to put in one post. So I’ll start with something you might need this summer and then I’ll add more uses and posts as we go along.
Summer Trips, Retreats and Camps
Whenever we go on a trip we need to keep track of things like: who is going, who has turned in forms, who has paid. So we create a list with the name of the trip and then a card for each student attending. The card has a checklist with each item needed. When students turn in forms or pay for their trip we check them off. We can easily look and see which students have completed everything and which ones still need to turn things in.
You can also store any other information you like as well. Include all of your stops, contact information for hosts, packing lists for vehicles. All in one spot and available to everyone it can help keep everyone organized and on the same page.
As I said the uses for trello in your youth ministry are almost endless. Through the summer I will continue to write more and share ways we have found. In the mean time Kenny Campbell of Stuff You Can Use has a great post about Trello in Student ministry on their site.
Finally if you do use Grow Curriculum and trello then check out my Annual Overview Trello Boards for Grow Curriculum Volume 1 and Grow Volume 2.
Do you think you would use trello for your student ministry?
Do you already use it? Share ways that you have found it to be helpful.
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