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🕰️TIMECODES
00:00 At a Glance Calendars
00:44 Level 1 - Most Miss!
02:51 Level 2 - FREE Download
05:27 Level 3
06:58 Level 4 - An All Time Idea!
08:10 Level 5 - THIS RULES THEM ALL

--------------
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00:07 - 00:00:24:17
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:34:14
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Have you been doing your planning and creation of your youth ministry calendars all wrong this whole time? Well, in today's episode, I'm going to share with you the five levels to create a solid youth ministry calendar, the one that will rule them all. While most don't make it past level one, you should stick around to the end of the video and see the whole thing because I reveal at the end the one trick that I've started adding to all of my calendars that it solves the communication problem once and for all.

00:00:34:16 - 00:01:06:25
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Oh, and plus there's a free calendar link down below in the YouTube video or the podcast description. Welcome everyone to the Hybrid Ministry show. Well, hey everybody, welcome to the Hybrid Ministry Show. I am your host, Nicolas, and excited to be with you. As we're talking through the five levels of a youth ministry calendar creation. And the reason we're doing this because we're actually, and we actually are and have been in a playlist where we've been discussing different questions that I have come across on different youth pastor Facebook groups.

00:01:06:25 - 00:01:30:17
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And today, this one, I have, a question that says, hey everyone, I'm looking for examples of an at a glance calendar that highlight your major annual events. Pictures, please. You don't need to include spontaneous or smaller events, just the main ones that plan each year. And so we're going to be looking at what I have been passing out historically, and how we've tried to not only solve the communication problem, but it also helps with our, our visitors and all that sort of thing.

00:01:30:17 - 00:01:51:27
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
So actually, there's a carefully curated playlist with all of those elements, calendar discussions and a welcome box that we have and communication issues linked right here. Tap the video. Go ahead and check it out on YouTube. But step number one is you need to have and this is the one that most skipped. But you need to have a reputable website okay.

00:01:51:28 - 00:02:17:08
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Because if you want a quote as this question says an at a glance calendar, then you need to have a website that is actually up to date that when people don't have the information that they need from your calendar, they know where they can go and what they should do. In fact, everyone in our student ministry knows and understands that like the calendar doesn't exist with this this piece of literature that they're bringing home.

00:02:17:08 - 00:02:43:03
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
This is, again, as the question as this is high level, this is simply highlights. This isn't every single thing. I've seen calendars designed with every single thing, the entire calendar for the year. But like that, that is not what we pass out. And I'm going to share multiple different reasons why. But one of the reasons is because our website handles a lot of the rest of the stuff that is going to be needed in order to communicate that.

00:02:43:05 - 00:03:04:29
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
So you need to make sure that you have a website that's actually like navigate. Well, that's decent. It's a decent guest experience and it's up to date. The second thing is you want something that's designed well. If you look at the one here on screen, this is one that we, are giving away. Link down below. The templated, the blank version.

00:03:05:01 - 00:03:29:13
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
This is within our church's approved brand color palette and guides. So like, these are the student ministry colors within our church's color palette. So that's the first step of it. The second thing is like when I'm designing it, I typically choose a font or two that are like our fonts for the year. And then I'm just gonna be honest, like, icons are fun, but like, emojis are great.

00:03:29:13 - 00:03:50:09
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And I try to just like link an emoji to some of the different events that we have. And that does a great job for it. The other thing is, like you see off to the side, here's like I also try to create some sort of icon that goes with like this season. So for fall we've done like coffee cups or we've done football helmets for the summer, we've done suns.

00:03:50:09 - 00:04:11:18
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And we, you know, in the spring we've done flowers. And so it gets tricky, especially if you're trying to do different ones and you're like doing them year over year. But you'll see the one linked right here. And you can go ahead and get the templated version link down below in the description. But you want your design to be something that, like, feels a little bit familiar but doesn't feel identical because you don't want them to think I've already got this.

00:04:11:18 - 00:04:28:15
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Like they need to understand, like, no, this is a new one. Hey, quick break. Let me ask you a question. Are you still waking up every day? Is youth pastor scrambling to figure out what you need to post on your social media? Blurry dodgeball. Pick a video that your leader sent you that's a little bit pixelated, because iPhone still hasn't updated fully to RCS yet.

00:04:28:15 - 00:04:50:24
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
You see, you don't need that kind of stress this fall. That's why I created these the fall seasonal social media pack for youth pastors. It is three months worth of done for you content done for you, paired with some customization so that you and your leaders and your students are the faces and the personalities on your student ministry Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube shorts feed.

00:04:50:29 - 00:05:10:25
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
So here's the thing. You can grab my pack right now over on Patreon. And did you know that monthly hybrid here? A Patreon members who only pay $4 per month and get a bonus podcast? They get this pack completely for free. So if you do the math for three months worth of social media content, it's only $12 where the pack is 1799.

00:05:10:25 - 00:05:37:27
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Either way, it is a steal for you and it will take away the stress of posting. And you can grab that pack right now and start becoming a master at social media and hybrid ministry. In your youth ministry context, rooting for you as you are crushing it this fall in your student ministry. And another major thing that you're going to want to do here, which is level three, is you only want to include events that you, particularly and specifically choose.

00:05:37:27 - 00:06:00:21
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And want to highlight. You don't want to put every single thing on your calendar. No, no, you want things that you only want at a high level. And so the way to make it visually appealing, in my opinion, and in my book, and to make it small and concise, is to not overwhelm it with information, but to only make it things that are noteworthy for families to know.

00:06:00:21 - 00:06:23:26
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
For example, we a lot of times say we meet every single Sunday. We meet every single Wednesday. However, these are ones you want to know about, and these are also ones that you want to know that we're not meeting because we meet every single week. But these in particular take note. We are not meeting. Additionally, and especially as it pertains to our spring calendar, we will post things about our, about our like winter weekend.

00:06:23:26 - 00:06:44:09
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And we'll also post, say, the dates for our summer camp communications already gone out for that. By the time this calendar gets in the hands of our students mid-year and like December. But this one is important that it just, you know, it gets on there because it's actually going to happen during this cycle, which I should say, for context, we produce three calendars per year.

00:06:44:09 - 00:07:05:20
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
We produce a fall one, we produce a spring one, and then we also produce a summer one. And so in light of that, we're pumping out calendars three different times per year to get into the hands of students. The fourth level, and this I think, is, one of them, the most impressive, like, decisions that I ever stumbled into.

00:07:05:20 - 00:07:24:22
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
I honestly can't even tell you how I stumbled into it. And I would say that this is the key. However, level five, is a new one that we've recently unlocked, and I think it's even better. But number four is we make this design and then we print this using like sticker mule. We print this on a magnet.

00:07:24:25 - 00:07:43:07
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Here's the psychology. Here's my thought behind it. Right. Everyone passes out a calendar for the year. There's the sports calendar. There's the academic calendar. And in a lot of cases, there's the youth group calendar. But what I want and maybe this is just my competitiveness, but like I want my calendar to be the thing holding on other calendars.

00:07:43:07 - 00:08:05:03
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Right. Like if you got your sports calendar, I want the youth calendar to be the thing that is keeping the sports calendar affixed to the fridge. That puts us on top of it. And they're probably going to choose sports over student ministry. But I just like to think in my own head, like, think about all of these calendars that are on magnets, that are on people's fridges, that are at the top of line, top of sight.

00:08:05:03 - 00:08:33:21
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And hopefully they're seeing, and remembering and keeping us again, top of mind. The fifth and final level, which I think is like the ultimate is, you'll see here. And you've probably noticed that we actually and this is helpful because of our website, we build our website and our calendar on our website, on the provider of, of nucleus, and on nucleus, what you can do is you can link in a dot ICS, which is an iCal calendar extension.

00:08:33:21 - 00:08:48:27
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
So it's all you put in like your phone. But it's also like a shareable option out of like even a Google calendar. So we create just like a Google Calendar, we keep the Google Calendar up to date. That auto populates to our website, right? Which is like again, and I said, like, you want to make sure that your, your website is up to date.

00:08:48:27 - 00:09:09:00
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And if people land on your website, that's information is not on your your big calendar, your highlight calendar, your magnet calendar that they do end up on your website, they're able to obtain the information that they need and that they're looking for. But then we've created a QR code where they can simply subscribe to the calendar in their phones.

00:09:09:07 - 00:09:32:15
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And so this is, in my opinion, the penultimate, because this makes these, at a glance calendars great, but not the most crucial thing. I think a lot of youth pastors treat this calendars the most crucial thing. But what happens when students don't have access to it? What happens when they lose it? What happens when you give it to them and they accidentally set it down before they get it into the hands of their parents?

00:09:32:18 - 00:09:56:22
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
If a parent can subscribe to our calendar, then they will never miss an event. They'll never miss an update. It will be populated onto the very device and onto the very app that they use to manage and control their entire life. Their calendar app. And what a better place than for your youth ministry and your church calendar to be on parents phones and on students phones.

00:09:56:22 - 00:10:18:01
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And so put a QR code, put some sort of link where they can go and they can subscribe to the events. And so all of the events are exactly where they're supposed to be and where you ultimately want them to be at the end of the day, remember, the goal of this is communication so that people know what's going on and that they then also hopefully choose to attend your church and your event in your youth group.

00:10:18:04 - 00:10:39:25
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
The the goal and this is not a beautiful calendar. Hopefully we can help you create one. And once again link down below free in the in the podcast or YouTube description. But the goal is communication at its core. And so that fifth and final layer adding adding a QR code so that people and parents can, subscribe to your church and your youth ministry calendar.

00:10:40:01 - 00:10:54:15
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Such a game changer. Well, hey everyone, the next episode is linked right here on the screen as well as the subscribe button. If you found this episode helpful, a payment for this free calendar would be amazing. A like a subscribe and share it with a friend. But until next time. And as always, don't forget. Stay hybrid.

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🕰️TIMECODES
00:00 Post Event Debriefs
00:25 Your Complete Fall Strategy Session
01:33 Proven Debrief Strategy
04:02 This Strategy was GENIUS!!
07:22 Your Fall Social Media Strategy is HERE!

--------------
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:06:12
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Post-event debriefs can feel like a roast session if we're not careful. That's why I recommend this

00:00:06:12 - 00:00:19:29
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
proven three part strategy for evaluating and making sure that your events not only get the proper evaluation that they deserve, but are even better on into the future

00:00:19:29 - 00:00:26:00
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
for your next year's event. Welcome, my friends, to the Hybrid Minister show.

00:00:26:00 - 00:00:29:06
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Well, hey everybody, welcome to the Hybrid Minister Show.

00:00:29:07 - 00:00:57:10
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
I am your host, Nicolas. And in this episode, episode 163. If you want to head to the show notes with transcripts. Hybrid Ministry dot xyzzy slash 163. That would be incredible. And a subscribe while you there would also just do us wonders. But if you have been following along here on YouTube, we are in a playlist for your complete fall like strategy guide and strategy session for, not only your upcoming fall outreach event.

00:00:57:12 - 00:01:22:29
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
How we run outreach events. And it's all kind of been centered around like some principles for like, fall outreach and fall launches. But if you're looking for one, and one of my favorite kind of strategies is a, month long, ongoing, like, bracket style event, and I'm giving one away or I'm giving away an event guide, to one of my products over on download this ministry called the World's Greatest Donut Bracket Event.

00:01:23:01 - 00:01:42:05
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
We've been walking through what those nights look like, how to include and incorporate free time, how to welcome your new guests. But now that all the dust has settled, now that all of the donut madness is over, you're ready to evaluate your event. So whether you're evaluating this particular event or just any of your fall events, this is my proven three part strategy and framework.

00:01:42:05 - 00:02:06:12
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And I mean, I'm just going to be honest, like you've maybe heard this before. It's not unique or original to me. I've I've used it in a couple of last churches that I've worked in. But there's a few kind of like tweaks and adaptations to it. And so you might have heard this, but the first, you know, the first question worth asking in an event evaluation debrief is what went right, like, let's celebrate the wins straight out of the gate.

00:02:06:12 - 00:02:26:05
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Like, what were the wins? What were the good things? And kind of go that route. The next question that I like to do and, you know, one of the church that I worked at, we call these questions the for hopefuls, but I like to combine these next two. And so that's why it's only three, three questions because I think these two, are cousins of one another.

00:02:26:05 - 00:02:46:15
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Right. And so, I like this one of, like the broken what was broken slash confusing. So, broken and confusing can kind of get, like I said, close to one another when you're kind of passing them out, you're like, oh, is this one broken? I'm not sure if that thing, that QR code was broken or if it was just confusing.

00:02:46:15 - 00:03:04:09
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Right. And and maybe the Q QR code was actually broken, or maybe students just don't know what they're doing, and it made it confusing. And that's kind of how I found that question to kind of land. And so just sticking those two together really like will help you in this question right here. Here's the thing I want to encourage you, don't make this personal.

00:03:04:09 - 00:03:35:01
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Don't take these things personal, but really like lean into these right here because this is how and this is where, and this is when and how and why you can make this event even better next year when you pull this thing together. Right. Like, this event becomes so much better when you take care of the broken and the confusing parts and you can really turn around, you can optimize, your next event or your next year's event or, some elements of this event that you're going to bring to, like the next Wednesday night, whatever the case might be like, but this is your chance to optimize it.

00:03:35:01 - 00:03:53:11
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Perfect. It really kind of like hone it in. And then finally, this last question, what was missing? And so it could be like, you know, while we were in the middle of the event, I thought it would have been great if we had this. We didn't think of it ahead of time. But let's next year, let's let's kind of plan to make this happen now a couple different ways that you can handle debriefs.

00:03:53:11 - 00:04:11:00
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And I think probably the most common is just like an in person. Right. Like you get together, you talk about it with your team and you, you know, take notes and you go off to the next one. And for major events like big events like this ones you spend maybe a lot of budget money on, I would recommend doing some sort of like in-person debrief.

00:04:11:00 - 00:04:30:21
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
However, if you're debriefing every single event, you're never not debriefing because let's just be honest, like, if you meet once a week in youth ministry, there's always one time a week we got to get together and get a debrief. And then if you're meeting twice a week, say Wednesday night and Sunday morning, you're also getting together another time to kind of look back at Sunday morning.

00:04:30:28 - 00:04:54:20
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And what if you're meeting Sunday night then now you're meeting three different times for three different evaluations. And so it can become a lot and it can become a lot of meetings. And sometimes it's just like, man, we just got work to do. Right. And so, one of the things that my boss, has instituted is we use base camp, and he instituted this idea, and he just cause, our debriefs sometimes, we keep them all digital.

00:04:54:21 - 00:05:19:17
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
So it's a digital debrief. We go into base camp, into the the message board there, and he'll ask three different questions. Sometimes he'll ask, right, right. Wrong, broken, confused. Like all that. But other times he'll throw in, like a curveball or, you know, like, and I think like this question, for example, is a good example of like, missing, you know, but he'll be like, what's one thing that we could have done to really take this event over the top?

00:05:19:19 - 00:05:35:20
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And so it just get your brain thinking in a little bit of a different category, though, it is probably like an answer to the missing question. But it's framed really well. That makes you like, think in a different kind of way, you know what I'm saying? So but what we'll do then is everyone on the team has to complete that digital debrief comment done when they're done.

00:05:35:22 - 00:05:51:17
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And then, he'll take those and he'll, he'll archive the, the plan. So it's out of our, like, base camp. But then next year, as we're getting ready to pull that back together, he'll, he'll go grab those archive notes. Because who in the world can remember what we did a year ago, let alone a month ago?

00:05:51:17 - 00:06:16:14
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
All right, take those archive notes and add them to the upcoming plan. So then, when the upcoming plan is coming, we look back and say, what did we say last year? And like a great example of this is like at summer camp, people said like last, like not the most recent summer camp we did, but the one from the summer last summer, people said something small like, hey, we should have a lost and found, or we should have more trash cans.

00:06:16:16 - 00:06:33:07
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And so, you know, a week or two before we went, really? Hey, let's let's look back at that. Those debrief notes were like, oh, yeah, that's right. The lost and found in the trash cans. We pull those together quick. There are small things we were going to completely forget to do them, because we were so focused on all the other kind of like things and elements of camp.

00:06:33:14 - 00:06:51:26
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
But we looked back at our debrief notes and those two little small things like, really help. Like I said, kind of like May made the difference, right? And so however you choose to do it, one of the words that my boss always kind of used was, we need a place to memorialize these thoughts, right? So like we say them, write them down for us.

00:06:51:26 - 00:07:21:06
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
It's base camp. You can use whatever kind of project management tool or software that you want to do and go ahead and take that to the races, but you should use these right? Broken slash confusing and missing. Use them in your next event evaluation. And here's the thing. If you go ahead and download my donate, event guide, come back to this episode or check this episode out right after your event is over so that you can really, truly lean in to, these questions and make your event as good as it can be, on and off into the future.

00:07:21:06 - 00:07:38:22
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Now, here's the thing. All of this has been ramping up. This is a this has been focused on one night, right? One night of like a big event, one night of like bring your friends. And you know, we talked about in the first episode, but the the spiritual CPR strategy. So cultivate and then plant and then reap. That's a cultivate event.

00:07:38:22 - 00:08:06:18
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
That's a cultivate night. How do you then carry on that momentum on into the next coming weeks? One of the elements, one of the small slivers component, but one that I really think has been super huge in our student ministry around, reaching, frankly, reaching more students, and reaching more lost students in an effort to be, both like planting seeds of like, spirituality as well as just like having fun is, is through using, the means of social media.

00:08:06:18 - 00:08:26:08
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And so obviously, here I am. It's a hybrid ministry podcast. You probably saw that one coming, but that's been a hugely beneficial and hugely big piece in our overall strategy. And it's become one of our primary evangelism mechanisms. And next week I am dropping the fall seasonal social media pack. Now here's how this is going to work next Thursday.

00:08:26:08 - 00:08:47:29
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
If you're subscribed, you're going to get it as soon as it drops. It's over on my Patreon. So is Patreon.com slash hybrid ministry. And over there there is a tier of podcast, a bonus weekly podcast where I'm just detailing an outline, all of my events, and all of our Wednesday nights, our programing, what's going well, what we're doing on social media, moves are making changes that we got going on.

00:08:47:29 - 00:09:03:13
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Here's the thing. This week at time of of filming that one, this episode drops. So at time of filming, my boss actually just submitted his resignation. So I'm actually stepping into a new role and I'm stepping into a new seat. And so I'm going to have the opportunity to share some of that with you. And I'm really excited.

00:09:03:13 - 00:09:34:06
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
But that podcast that patrons hear is $4 per month. Now, here's the thing. The seasonal social media pack is like 1799, and it is meant to last for three months. So if you do the math, you actually come out ahead on the, on the tier. And so what I would recommend right now, if you're listening to this week leading into launch, go over to Patreon, give me the $4 per month, getting in on that tier, and then you will get everything in the store, not just this upcoming seasonal pack, but you can grab the summer pack.

00:09:34:13 - 00:10:02:02
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And then, on Thursday, you can grab the fall pack, and there's actually a free week trial there, for you to check it out. So click the link down below. Become what we call a hybrid hero at that $4 per month tier. So excited to do that. And we're going to be dropping not only that pack next week and kind of walking through what that is, but then we're also going to start looking at how can you build and create a social media team within the the gathering in your in your context as is, that's fully and completely run by teenagers?

00:10:02:02 - 00:10:19:10
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
I'm going to walk you how we did it and how you can do it in your youth ministry to reach students, but also create momentum for your students that are attending your church in person as well. So once again, thank you guys so much for being here. I hope you found this episode helpful. If you did like it, subscribe, share with the friend.

00:10:19:10 - 00:10:23:15
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
But until next time and as always, don't forget to stay hybrid.

🎬 THE ULTIMATE CHRISTMAS MOVIE SHOWDOWN
https://www.downloadyouthministry.com/p/the-ultimate-christmas-movie-showdown/christmas/christmas-games-9784.html

DESCRIPTION
🎄 It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Ready to throw the BEST Youth Ministry Christmas Party ever? 🎉 In this episode, Nick Clason of the Hybrid Ministry Podcast spills the peppermint-flavored tea on how to make your event unforgettable! 🏆 Whether it’s the Ultimate Christmas Movie Showdown, hilarious games, or social media outreach, this guide has it ALL.

🌟 Grab the downloadable Christmas party resource on Download Youth Ministry—complete with voting brackets, social media assets, and everything you need to pull off a high-energy, crowd-engaging event that doubles as a killer social media strategy. 🎅✨

👇 Grab the resource now: DownloadYouthMinistry.com

🎬 Watch till the end for tips on engaging Gen Alpha and crushing it on YouTube. And as always, my friends, stay hybrid! 🚀

📓 SHOWNOTES
http://www.hybridministry.xyz/126

//10% OFF CO-LEADER
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🕰️TIMECODES
00:00 Make Your Christmas Event Pop This Year!
01:59 How to Use a Bracket?
03:56 The Ultimate Christmas Movie Showdown Explained
05:25 The 16 Movies
06:20 What's Included in the Download?
10:00 How do you Crown a Winner?
12:27 Our Hybrid December Plans
14:14 YouTube for your Youth Ministry

--------------
✍️ TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:01:16
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Student

00:00:01:16 - 00:00:06:05
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
ministry Christmas party. I mean, it is the preeminent

00:00:06:05 - 00:00:08:18
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
event of the year. You play

00:00:08:18 - 00:00:19:09
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
dozens of games, you eat even more sweets, and you serve hot chocolate. Maybe you play a Christmas movie. What if I told you that I had the

00:00:19:09 - 00:00:26:09
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
event that was going to make your Christmas party? Absolutely pop? Well,

00:00:26:09 - 00:00:26:29
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
here it is. It

00:00:26:29 - 00:00:31:09
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Oh.

00:00:36:02 - 00:00:40:29
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
and incorporate this style of event, along with all of the other ways

00:00:40:29 - 00:00:50:00
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
that if you don't want to use it for your party, or it's a little bit too late to lead in to your party, that you can use this style of resource if you scrub ahead,

00:00:50:00 - 00:00:55:04
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
I am going to go ahead and offer this resource to you so you can go ahead and check that out.

00:00:55:08 - 00:01:18:21
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
If you're watching here on screen, you can see that timestamp. If not, just hit the link down below in the show notes or head to Hybridministry.xyz/127. But we are going to talk Christmas party. We're going to talk outreach and we're going to talk social media. And this event has all of those. And this product has all those wrapped into one single thing.

00:01:18:21 - 00:01:18:27
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
If you're

00:01:18:27 - 00:01:23:03
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Oh.

00:01:23:03 - 00:01:36:03
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
meetings and things you have to do. You got to come up with games and lessons and and manage parents and volunteers and senior pastors and oh yeah, social media and oh yeah, the Christmas event and. Oh yeah, and oh yeah. And oh

00:01:36:03 - 00:01:36:19
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
yeah.

00:01:36:19 - 00:01:48:01
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And oh yeah. But in this event guide, you will have the ability to crush, social media outreach and your Christmas party all in one fell swoop. It is going to be amazing.

00:01:48:01 - 00:01:52:11
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Oh.

00:01:54:25 - 00:01:56:15
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Ow ow ow! Oh!

00:01:56:21 - 00:01:58:14
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Tis the season. Let's hop in.

00:01:58:14 - 00:02:00:26
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
So in

00:02:00:26 - 00:02:02:16
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Ow ow ow! Oh!

00:02:18:19 - 00:02:25:08
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
here at the top of the YouTube video, I did the ultimate event guide to the World's Greatest donut that,

00:02:25:10 - 00:02:42:17
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And in that video you can download my event guide. It's complete with a shopping list and all those types of things. And also sends you to download Youth Ministry where you can buy this voting style event. But this has been something that has been a staple of my ministry and a staple of honestly, what I've done for years.

00:02:42:17 - 00:03:04:01
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And essentially I'm borrowing from the like, wave or the popularity of like a march madness bracket style voting. And so, like in our space, we have this big window that opens into like a small sort of like half court indoor gymnasium sort of deal. And we printed a custom size vinyl banner, for six, for a 16 team bracket.

00:03:04:04 - 00:03:22:26
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And then we put, those things we just, you know, print them out on computer paper or whatever, cut them out. And we do these, like, style events 2 or 3 times throughout the year. So like I said in that video linked, just a second ago, we have done like the world's greatest donut. We have voted on the best.

00:03:22:26 - 00:03:34:11
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
We did last March Madness. One year we have voted on the world's best, like, mascot. And then that mascot became our official student ministry mascot. Shout out to Pugsley

00:03:34:11 - 00:03:38:02
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
the platypus! We've done all sorts of different like voting

00:03:38:02 - 00:03:49:06
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
and challenge based style things. It's just like a fun way to sort of like, create, competition and conversation around something for like several weeks in a row.

00:03:49:06 - 00:03:50:29
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And in this particular instance, we're

00:03:50:29 - 00:03:56:04
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
doing the ultimate Christmas movie showdown. Now, by the time that this video drops, you're

00:03:56:04 - 00:03:57:24
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Ow ow ow! Oh!

00:03:57:24 - 00:04:13:20
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Christmas party or even slightly beyond your Christmas party. But if you have not made it yet to your Christmas party, then what you can do. And this is what we did. We did a Christmas movie watch party, but we're allowing the students to vote on the Christmas movie.

00:04:13:20 - 00:04:37:14
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And so that's what's really cool, is we actually at our costume party on the 30th of October, we revealed that the Christmas bracket was now live, and then the students could vote on it. And the best thing about this is, again, if this is already past, your party's already past. You can do something like this just very simply on social media, during sort of the holiday lull, you can do, every week is a new round or you can do it.

00:04:37:14 - 00:04:42:22
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Every day is a new round. And that's the thing. Like so even if like you download this now

00:04:42:22 - 00:04:52:24
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
and then you go and you play a movie at your Christmas event next week, you can do every day on social media as a round. And there's all sorts of different ways to capture

00:04:52:24 - 00:05:04:19
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Elf white Christmas elf faces off against White Christmas. That's the one seed versus the 16. They're not listed there. But you know, and once the students start voting, you can tell who the overall one seed is.

00:05:04:24 - 00:05:31:21
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Then in the eight nine matchup we have Frosty the Snowman versus the year without a Santa Claus. Then in the four I think 13 413 matchup, we have Christmas vacation pairing off against Christmas with the Kranks Muppet Christmas Carol versus Rudolph the Red-Nosed reindeer, Home Alone, which is the two seed versus It's a Wonderful Life A Christmas Story, which is a seven versus Polar Express, which is a ten, the Santa Claus, which is a three, versus Jingle All the Way, which is like a 14, I think.

00:05:25:00 - 00:05:26:20
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Ow ow ow! Oh!

00:05:31:25 - 00:05:42:17
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And then Santa Claus is Coming to Town versus How the Grinch Stole Christmas in the six versus, I think, 11 match up there. And so this PowerPoint file, you can very simply edit the winners. Right? So if elf beats white Christmas in the voting, you can move it ahead. And you can use that in your space to write these in.

00:06:18:28 - 00:06:20:18
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Ow ow ow! Oh!

00:06:20:18 - 00:06:26:25
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Right? So if elf beats white Christmas in the voting, you can move it ahead. And you can use that in your space to write these in.

00:06:26:25 - 00:06:35:13
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
So I have the winners sort of as like placeholders. In there that you can like, you know, make sure that you can move them on. But

00:06:35:13 - 00:06:43:25
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
here's the thing. Every single round in every single context is going to be different. Maybe you are a big white Christmas church, and all of your students are going to pick White Christmas.

00:06:43:25 - 00:06:52:21
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
That's great. Then go with it. Go for it. Okay. Additionally, you can, use and use this, like I said, on social media. So a couple of my

00:06:52:21 - 00:06:53:12
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
favorite ways to

00:06:53:12 - 00:07:03:06
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
do it are on Instagram Stories. And also now for Generation Alpha, who is, widely and widely adopting YouTube as one of their platforms of choice.

00:07:03:09 - 00:07:08:29
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
You can post on your YouTube posts page section, a voting poll option with images

00:07:08:29 - 00:07:22:16
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
and stuff like that. And so I've included some social graphics that are still. And so it's your title to your overall bracket. You can write in the winners each round and then, round one graphic, an elite eight graphic, a Final Four graphic, and a championship round graphic.

00:07:22:19 - 00:07:43:26
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And then you just very simply stick the question sticker on that graphic. I also have social media videos which, pair and look similar to the widescreen video. So there's a title graphic with, you know, some kind of like distance sleigh bells chime in like some Christmas like, chiming things and then like a round one graphic, elite eight graphic, a final four.

00:07:43:29 - 00:07:55:00
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
All these are videos and championship. And then there are profile cards. And so these are really fun. Every single movie, there's 16 movies. Every single movie has four different

00:07:55:00 - 00:08:05:17
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
profile cards, both for social media and for, your widescreen in your room. And so, for example, in round one, you might put up the Elf profile card, the very

00:08:05:17 - 00:08:11:07
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
first Elf profile card versus this and next to the very first white Christmas profile card.

00:08:11:07 - 00:08:31:02
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
So like right here, if you're watching on the screen, you'll see it says like elf, released in 2003, Will Ferrell shines as buddy, a human race, as an elf who travels to New York to meet his real father. But there, like I said, there are four different profile cards because in the next round of elf advances, you will use the second, fact.

00:08:31:02 - 00:08:49:09
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
So you're not just sharing the same fact every single week, week in, week out. So this next one is about who Jon Favreau, who, helped. The movie grossed over 220 million worldwide on a $33 million budget, became a Christmas favorite. The third one's about, Will Ferrell's improv skills, and the fourth one is a fun fact that

00:08:49:09 - 00:08:55:13
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
his iconic walk through New York was done candidly and is capturing real reactions from New Yorkers.

00:08:55:13 - 00:08:55:28
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Now

00:08:55:28 - 00:09:17:10
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
you're like, okay, that's great, but what if White Christmas wins? That's why there's four for White Christmas. Now, if White Christmas loses, you're obviously not going to be using fact two, fact 3 or 4, right. But in the event that upsets happen, in the event that that movies keep moving on, there are four because there's four rounds round one, Elite eight, Final Four, and then championship round for you to share those graphics.

00:09:17:10 - 00:09:37:18
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Okay. And so we have that for social media for still graphics. We have social video graphics. We also have widescreen graphics that you can use and put in your space. Along with those profile card kind of things that you can also put in your space video as well as stills. And then there's paper voting as an option.

00:09:37:18 - 00:09:52:00
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
So we'll get to the ways that you can do voting here in just a minute. There's Photoshop files. If you do happen to have Photoshop editing skills. And then finally there are some just like transparent, no background, assets like the logo and the round one, elite eight, all that type of stuff. So

00:09:52:00 - 00:09:55:19
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
all of that is included in this download, just a few bucks.

00:09:55:21 - 00:09:58:03
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And like I said, how can you go about

00:09:58:03 - 00:09:59:23
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Ow ow ow! Oh!

00:10:08:26 - 00:10:15:26
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
of my podcast, Hybrid Ministry ten as a discount code, and you get 10% off your purchase of either Premium or Premium Plus.

00:10:16:01 - 00:10:32:00
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
But if you're using sidekick, you can use the phone connections and the voting option, and students can vote live right there directly in the room. And so you can do all of your matchups right there. And you can do that week in, week out. Now, what do you do about students who don't have phones? Well, that's one of the reasons why I included the

00:10:32:00 - 00:10:39:10
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
paper printable bracket so that those students aren't left out and so that they have an opportunity to also let their voice be heard.

00:10:39:12 - 00:10:57:29
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Well, you might be thinking, well, what happens if, my Christmas party has already passed or I don't have a way to get this, done? In the amount of weeks we have leading up to our Christmas party, no problem. Download this and just post them on social media. And then when people show up to your Christmas party, you'd be like, hey, we're watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas because it was voted on by you.

00:10:57:29 - 00:11:15:04
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
The people on social media. Congratulations to the Grinch. And so you could do this in just four days. Round one, Elite Eight, Final Four, and then the championship. And then you have your event. So if your Christmas party is in seven days, you can theoretically crush this and get this in any time of year if you want to launch it.

00:11:15:07 - 00:11:32:02
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
You know, depending on when you're watching this, if you have enough time, you can launch it all through the month of December leading into your movie. Or like I said, you can do it all on social using either Instagram voting or the YouTube post. Now here's the good news about that is when you promote it in the room, like, hey, voting is live!

00:11:32:04 - 00:11:39:23
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
One of the things I've done, I'll show you a graphic of what we're using. It's not included in the download because it's it's custom to us. But just to give you an idea, I just

00:11:39:23 - 00:11:50:16
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
linked a QR code to our link tree, which has all of our different social handles. And so it says, hey, voting is still live and the winning movie will get, we'll get watch it.

00:11:50:16 - 00:11:55:13
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Our Christmas party on you know, December 4th or whatever. I've sent that out in our text list. We've sent it out to our parent

00:11:55:13 - 00:11:55:23
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Patreon. If you didn't know, we just launched a Patreon and it is going to be walking through my weekly lessons and it's, or a different bonus podcast every single week. It's $4 per month and you get a different bonus podcast per week. So essentially it nets out to a dollar or even slightly less than a dollar per podcast episode.

00:12:24:28 - 00:12:26:18
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Ow ow ow! Oh!

00:12:29:00 - 00:12:45:13
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
If you didn't know, we just launched a Patreon and it is going to be walking through my weekly lessons and it's, or a different bonus podcast every single week. It's $4 per month and you get a different bonus podcast per week. So essentially it nets

00:12:45:13 - 00:12:51:02
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
out to a dollar or even slightly less than a dollar per podcast episode.

00:12:51:02 - 00:13:08:17
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
I think it's a very modest amount. I would love to encourage you to go over there and check it out. I think you can probably find four bucks a month in your budget, but even if you can't, I just want to let you know that, like we're going to use it to invest deeper into the podcast gear and all sorts of things like that.

00:13:08:17 - 00:13:27:01
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And so I'd love to encourage you to go check that out. But we're going to be walking through these lessons, and this is what we're going to be talking about over on that Patreon is what what are the Christmas at the movie lessons? And then, what are the we're also doing? Like we're avoiding the big announcement time before we break into small groups.

00:13:27:01 - 00:13:46:00
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And so our students are going to go into our sort of like small group rooms directly at the end of the countdown. And each of our rooms has a TV on a cart, which is brand new. And so we're going to link that to a YouTube playlist, and there's going to be a small group activity. There's going to be an announcement corner filmed and put there on that playlist.

00:13:46:00 - 00:13:48:09
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
And then the teaching where we may teach a

00:13:48:09 - 00:14:01:27
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
little bit, pause for questions, teach a little bit, pause for questions, teach a little bit, pause for some more questions. So we're really trying to lean in sort of to that kind of hybrid thing. And I'm going to detail and explain all of that what we're doing over on that Patreon.

00:14:01:27 - 00:14:10:29
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
So I would love to have you go check that out. There's also some other kind of bonus perks and stuff like that. And as I'm describing this, you might be hearing me talk about YouTube in

00:14:10:29 - 00:14:11:11
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
all

00:14:11:11 - 00:14:13:01
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Ow ow ow! Oh!

00:14:15:20 - 00:14:16:00
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
YouTube,

00:14:16:00 - 00:14:22:24
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
because I think it's important to put spiritual and evergreen content over there on YouTube for our students.

00:14:22:26 - 00:14:43:08
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
You know, Generation Alpha is now saying that YouTube is now their preferred search engine, even over Google. And so there's value to that. And, I actually offer either some custom coaching to help you level it up or communications done for you, or I'll actually just do it for you if that's something that you're interested in, go ahead and check the show notes or the link down below in the YouTube description.

00:14:43:13 - 00:15:12:19
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
The link to right here on screen is my complete and full strategy of how we launched and developed a YouTube for youth ministry. It's the free version of that coaching, and then the coaching will take you sort of into that. More customization, but I hope that you grab this product if you have an amazing Christmas event, I hope you can use it to knock outreach out of the park, to have an amazing event, and also crush social media, whether you're using it for the event or just during the lull of the holiday season.

00:15:12:26 - 00:15:18:21
Nick Clason | Hybrid Ministry
Don't forget my friends and as always, to stay hybrid.

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OPUS FOR AI SHORTS & REELS
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DESCRIPTION
👋 Welcome to the Ultimate Youth Group Guide! In this exciting video, we'll dive into the power of Crush Games, Outreach initiatives, and Social Events to empower and inspire the youth.🔥

🍩 Crush Games:
Engage your youth group with thrilling Games that will ignite their enthusiasm and foster healthy competition. From exhilarating challenges to team-building activities, our guide provides all the essential tips and game ideas to keep the energy high and the fun rolling.

🌍 Outreach Initiatives:
Make a lasting impact on your community through meaningful outreach initiatives. Discover effective strategies to help your youth group connect with and support those in need. By stepping outside their comfort zones, the youth will learn valuable lessons about compassion, empathy, and making a difference in the lives of others.

👥 Social Media Events:
Creating a sense of belonging and friendship within your youth group via social media! This will help Hybridize your Ministry from your in person gathering to your student ministry social media

========================================

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🛠️TOOLS
Some of the below links are affilate links in which we do recieve a small commission based on your purchase or use of products
//YOUTUBE STARTER KIT FOR UNDER $100
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👉 STAY CONNECTED
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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hybridministry/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clasonnick

Website: https://www.hybridministry.xyz

📓SHOWNOTES
//SHOWNOTES & TRANSCRIPTS
http://www.hybridministry.xyz/069

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GUIDE: https://hybrid-ministry-40060036.hubspotpagebuilder.com/worlds-greatest-donut
DYM: https://www.downloadyouthministry.com/p/world%27s-greatest-donut/games/food-8745.html

//Full YouTube Video
https://youtu.be/5ryhkIRyDb4

//STUDENT MINISTRY BRACKET OF EPIC THINGS
https://www.downloadyouthministry.com/p/the-student-ministry-bracket-of-epic-things/games-3974.html

//GAMEDAY FOOD BRACKET
https://www.downloadyouthministry.com/p/the-big-game-food-bracket/winter/the-big-game-8544.html

//DONUT SHOWDOWN GAME
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//FULL YOUTUBE STRATEGY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDxepdu4iiM

🕰️TIMECODES
00:00-01:45 The Best Hybrid Youth Ministry Event Out There!
01:45-09:30 The History of This Hybrid Ministry Event
09:30-17:42 Pre-Event Planning and Setup

17:42-28:21 The Debrief of the Event from Start to Finish

✍️TRANSCRIPT
Try Transcribing for Yourself at Rev.Com
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Nick Clason (00:00):
Youth ministry games, social media outreach events, ah, there's just so much to do and if you're anything like me, you have layer upon layer upon layer of responsibility. You need to come up with an amazing and exciting game. You need to knock social media out of the park and you need an outreach event that is going to cater to your students friends and outsiders who are far from God and from the church. How do you prioritize? And then if you do do all those things, how do you not just give your family and your people that you love the scraps and the left over pieces of your energy? What if I told you that I had the ultimate event guide, one that's going to crush it with games, an amazing outreach experience, and it's going to lean into social media for your student ministry, all of that encapsulated in one event.

Nick Clason (00:55):
See, we actually just had an event that accomplished all those things, one with an incredible amount of games and an amazing in-room experience, one that gave students an amazing opportunity to invite their friends and it crushed on social media. Better yet, we had 23% of our attenders be first time or new students who joined us. And finally, not only do we increase engagement, but we also added new followers to our social media. It is honestly one of the best versions in my opinion, of a hybrid style event. And when I say hybrid event, it's more dynamic and it's more robust than just another Zoom Bible study. I know it sounds too good to be true, right? Well, let me show you. Welcome to the Hybrid Ministry Show in the ultimate Event guide. I came up with this idea probably in my second or third year of doing youth ministry, and now I am a 13 year youth ministry veteran.

Nick Clason (01:58):
So this idea dawned on me years and years and years and years ago, and one of the things that has honestly just been super clear to me all the way back to the beginning times of my time in student ministry is the fact that hybrid matters. And when I mean hybrid, I don't mean only focusing on your in-person. I don't mean only focusing on your digital. I mean taking those two things and creating a space for there to be opportunity to reach and connect with your people beyond the hour of programming that you have for your in-person service, which is actually the reason why I just dropped this video going to be up here on the screen. You can feel free to click that where we explore and talk about the future of church ministry, especially through the eyes and through the lens of digital and hybrid.

Nick Clason (02:41):
If you're interested, hop over into that. But about 10 years ago is when I had this idea for what I call a bracket, and I'm a huge March Madness fan, college basketball. I love the selection committees. And if you're not a sports fan, essentially what they do is they create rankings or seedings, so to speak. And so there are four regions and each region has a one seed. Each region has a two seed, each region has a three seed and so on down all the way down to 16, and then the one seed plays the 16 seed. Usually a pretty easy matchup only in the history of the NCAA tournament has one 16 seed upset, a one seed. The 15 plays the two, the 14 plays the three and so on and so forth. And they're in various spots. So the one 16 are up here and the two and the 15 are down here in the bracket so that eventually they wait until the very last chance for the one and the two to eventually play.

Nick Clason (03:34):
Then once all the teams get out of those brackets, that creates your final four one winner from each region they play in Final four matchup and then the winners of each side of that end up meeting in the middle in the championship. And so I was like, this would be fun to lean in to March Madness. And so I just created a bracket out of my head. I was like, let's do little Debbie hostess cakes, and then I put one of my student ministry leaders, shout out to Aaron Koontz back in Beaver Creek, Ohio, and I did one of our favorite events, dare to Share. I put Dare to Share in there, and so students would vote on a thing versus another thing, and it was so totally random, but I offered it just as an online thing. This is before I had an Instagram.

Nick Clason (04:17):
This is before Instagram even had the poll feature, but I kept doing this. The one time I submitted an option called a Bracket of Awesome Things to Download Youth Ministry. This was probably like eight, 10 years ago at this point. My number one seed was Chip and Johanna Gaines and just leaning into the hype that they had with the Fixer Upper and H G T V movement back then. But I just kept honing in and creating this. And I remember one time I made a Christmas movie bracket. I had become in charge at my last church of social media and I just threw it together. I was running out of ideas of things to post. I was in charge of something like two or three posts per day, multiple days per week. And I was like, let's do a bracket. And I launched it and I was on a team at that time of six or seven other youth pastors, staff members, and the team went nuts.

Nick Clason (05:12):
I made Elf the number one seed and then I made white Christmas the 16th seed, and I had some diehard white Christmas fans dropping the comment below what your favorite Christmas movie is, and if it's white Christmas, I'm sorry, you're wrong. It's terrible. But that being said, they were livid and they were mad at how I sourced it and how I came up with the seeding, which by the way, side note just was in my head and they wanted a redo. And so we launched this event called something about a serial bracket. I can't remember what we can't remember the exact name of what we called it, but we had back at that last church, we had a full YouTube show. So we set up SportsCenter style desks and anchors. We all wore jerseys and we did analysis and we kicked it over to sideline reporters and we announced the seatings.

Nick Clason (06:03):
We announced the matchups, and then while when that show launched live on YouTube, people could hop over to our Instagram and they could vote. And what happened was the senior leadership must not have had anything to announce that week, and so they announced our show that week. And so we were like, man, we need to turn this into something. At that time, it was Christmas break, we weren't meeting, so it was just going to live as a thing online on our YouTube channel, but because it got announced, we're like, we need to capitalize on this just a little bit more. And so we offered, and this is

Nick Clason (06:36):
In the height of Covid, so we're not doing a lot of in-person connection with other people. If we were, it had to be masked. I mean it was awful, but it was January just after Christmas 2021 and we're like, let's do a drive-in. Kids can come watch it on their phones. Or you know what? Actually maybe we bought big old screens that they could watch, and then we did a FM tuner thing. They could listen to it in their car radio. So I don't know, we probably had 10 to 20 cars show up, not a ton. And we bought so much serial, we went to Sam's and we looted that place and then it was like negative 10 degrees. And so me and my other leaders, we have giant coats on, we're walking car to car, passing out cereal, passing out milk. But that was the inception.

Nick Clason (07:28):
That was one of the inception points of this idea of a bracket. And what it does in my mind is it creates some sort of event around an in-person topic cereal. The one that I'm going to explain to you today is donuts and I like to kind of hone in. Yeah, that's what I've done over the years. I've honed in on a specific topic. We've also done this with drinks like World's greatest drink, world's greatest donut cereal madness. This coming march, we're planning on doing a potato one called Starch Madness. And so it creates that event, but the reason I like it is that it marries your social media because all the voting happens online

Nick Clason (08:04):
With an in-person event. It is the ultimate style hybrid event in my opinion. And I know that I've had people who are like, when you mean hybrid, what are you talking about? And they just think we're just talking about Zoom groups and it's more than that. And so we hosted this event at our church. Like I said in the intro, we had 23% newcomers, we had multiple new people added to following us on social media, and it's creating some sort of hype and some sort of buzz around our student ministry. There are so many benefits and values to it. And so what I want to do is honestly just walk you through the pre-planning, the actual event. I'm going to share with you the planning center document of it, and then give you just kind of a recap about why it's valuable, why we're going to keep doing it, and how you can take something like that and adapt it into your student and social ministry.

Nick Clason (08:52):
If so far you've found this episode helpful, though alike would cost you nothing and would really mean the world to us even more. A subscribe is really a next level opportunity to just engage back with us. Either one of those two things like subscribe would mean the world to us and we would love to connect with you further and deeper because more than just donuts, more than just brackets, we are talking about this world of not just physical, not just digital, but hybrid ministry. So let's move on and let's hop in to the setup and the event planning, the pre-event side of this event that I'm talking about, the world's greatest donut. So we know, we knew that we wanted to do this voting style event around donuts that would last around a month. The way I set it up is I will do round one.

Nick Clason (09:42):
We have a Wednesday night and then a Sunday morning in our environment, and so the voting is going to be live on a Wednesday. They'll vote on the topics and the rounds, and so round one we do all the voting. So that's where Instagram and the stories, that's where the most decisions need to be made. So because of that in round one, then we will announce the winners on Sunday, and then we will resume voting the following Wednesday for the Elite eight. We'll announce the following Sunday of the winners of that, and then we'll move to the final floor when there's the most activity, when there's all the contestants are still alive, no one's been eliminated yet. That's round one. And that to me is the most exciting time for the actual bracket. So because the actual bracket is exciting at that time, that's when we decided to lean into an event.

Nick Clason (10:31):
So we knew we had this bracket. In fact, I created this resource. It's a link in the description on Download youth ministry on the world's greatest donut bracket. It's on there right now. Feel free to go grab it. It's got all of the digital elements and it's got a few games in there, but not all of what I'm about to share with you. So make sure that you hang around to the rest of this video. However, we knew we wanted to do an event centered or a month centered around voting, and then we wanted the first night, the kickoff night to be a big deal. And so the question kind of always is do you focus on the kickoff of the bracket or do you focus more on the championship round of the bracket? I've found the beginning to be more exciting. Like I said, we did a cereal bracket most recently here at this church, and we have in our space, we have eight different garage door bays that lined the side left and right of our meeting space.

Nick Clason (11:26):
That's actually where our small groups meet on Sunday morning. Those doors are up, they go in there and then they close down, creates little rooms for all of them. It's really cool design. Sometimes it also makes 'em feel like caged animals, but nonetheless, we did an event back in March where we voted on serial and we had the one in 16 matchup in one bay. We had the three and 14 matchup in another bay. We had the eight and nine matchup in another bay. And so all the bay doors came up. There were tables in there with basketball themed tablecloths on and then cereal boxes with a number pasted on it, one versus 16, and then all the bowls of cereal there. And so as we're wrapping up our programming, we had adult leaders sitting in there pouring milk into each of the bowls so that students could grab that and then they could go eat and just literally had one kid eat 16 or 25 bowls of cereal that night, tried every single one of the things in the matchup.

Nick Clason (12:19):
So that was a super fun way to just kind of lean into the kickoff portion. And so we had that same question. Now we have donuts and what are we going to do? And so in our space where we have tables, and so we ended up deciding to buy a little half fishbowl things. All the supplies by the way, are going to be linked in the comments below, in the description below. Make sure you check that out. But we had little fishbowl things, half fishbowl things sort of decorative. It's not like a fishbowl where the tops right there, but it's like off to the side a little bit. And we filled each table with donut holes. We ordered several dozen donut holes, and that's what we did. We went donut holes instead of actual donuts. It's cheaper. It's also quicker. You can pop 'em into your mouth as opposed to committing to an entire donut.

Nick Clason (13:04):
And so we have 16 round tables, and so every table had a tablecloth and every table had a vase full of donuts. That was our decision to supply the donuts without breaking the bank on the budget. Don't get me wrong, it was still expensive, but it's less expensive than a dozen donuts per table or something like that. So we had donuts on every table, and then one of my favorite elements or pieces of the event is we bought a giant vase and then we filled it with donuts. We counted 233 donuts that we filled into this vase. The funny part was that we put the donuts in and then the weight of the donuts actually started to smash 'em down, and so it was full, and then the weight of the donuts started smashing 'em down. So there was a gap. So we actually had to go back and add more donuts at the end.

Nick Clason (13:48):
So I don't even want to know what the bottom donuts looked like. They probably were a little mini pancakes, but we let students vote simply, how many donuts do you think are in here? We had a Google form for that. They shot it with a QR code on their phone. We also had an iPad set up where they could just type in a Google form. All we got was their name and their number, but if you have a marketing brain or a marketing department, you can use that to capture an email and start to create a little list and start to market to those people as well. That's another kind of next level tip if you want to lean into something like that. But then it also made it easy to just have it all dumped into a Google sheet and I could command F find the closest number.

Nick Clason (14:32):
And so one person, we had 2 33 in the thing and one girl guessed 2 32, so she won it, and this little sixth grade girl carried out this giant vase of donuts and it was hers. She got to take it with her, she got to keep it. She got to bring it in her car with her. Then the actual bracket side of things, we printed, because we are doing this so much, we printed a generic bracket on a giant vinyl banner. When you walk into our space, we have a big window with an indoor half kind of sports court right there on the other side of it. And so for the cereal bracket, I took gaff tape and I taped out a bracket and then I pasted or taped the cereal to the window. But this time around we're like, what if we just print a vinyl banner and then we can swap out whatever we're voting on at that time?

Nick Clason (15:24):
So we made the investment on the front side knowing that we're going to do this. We love these style of hybrid events in our ministry, so we bought the big banner. It fit perfectly in our space. I can drop the artwork for that in the description, but it's going to vary a little bit for my ministry. Your ministry. It's also got our logo on it, but you can find any bracket online, any generic non-branded bracket online, add it, print it, make it into a banner if that's something that you want to do. What it does for us is when you walk in, it immediately draws your attention. It's not there most of the year. And so when it's there, you're like, oh, it's different. And then people know and notice that there's a bracket going on, there's a voting happening. And the other crazy thing is that people get really into it on their opinions.

Nick Clason (16:17):
What things are seeded? How such and such donut beat that donut. For example, the beignet took down, what did it take down? The chocolate cream filled donut lost to a beignet. I think beignets are good, but are they the best? I don't think so. And I think they're super kind of niche and they're really just, honestly, they're like funnel cake. And so anyway, that giant bracket in our actual space, we also allow, because we have a lot of students, a lot of kids, young kids that don't have social media yet, we allow them to vote on a paper bracket as an additional means to let their voice be heard. We got donut shirts for all of the staff and we all wore them. And so that was kind of like the event setup space. In addition to that, we had some donut balloons blown up and kind of scattered throughout the lobby.

Nick Clason (17:13):
So they walked in. On the left was the big V to vote, regular check-in, back behind check-in was the banner with the voting and the brackets printed out and people could let their voice be heard that way. So now let's dive into the rest of the event. I'm going to put the planning center event sheet right here. We're going to walk through it and I'm just going to explain to you what we did, why we did it, and just my thoughts on it, and feel free to take and adapt any of it to your ministry. So all the setups done, students are walking in. We had a countdown, which if you buy my product on Download Youth ministry, it will come with a specific donut themed and then a specific donut themed five minute countdown that I created with just random facts and stuff like that.

Nick Clason (18:00):
So that was what was playing on our TV and our screens all throughout our space. And when the time hit zero, myself and my boss, Darren, we were both on stage and we were hyping up the crowd, welcoming people, letting them know that voting had been live all day on Instagram. We were letting them know who was winning what matchup students could with the screen behind us. We then had a screen that said, voting is live now with a QR code. They could shoot that and take it to Instagram. I think we gained three to six or something like that. New followers on our Instagram, not a ton, but still some students who were. So we had 23% new students. So we're introducing our students to our Instagram, and if any of them are into this idea now they're following us. So now we have them on our Instagram opportunity to reach out to them, but we just did some like, Hey, here's what's going on.

Nick Clason (18:52):
Here's the bracket, explaining what a bracket is. It's going to be lasting for a month, but it's all about you and your voice and letting your voice be heard and voting is live on Instagram every single Wednesday. We also kind of teased our next series, which we're talking about big issues, elephants in the room that we often don't want to address. So we use that moment to sort of tease the topic. We didn't spend a lot of time on that. And also we had a message drop, if you've heard me before, link in the description of my full YouTube strategy, but we've our messages. And so we had a message live on YouTube, but we didn't do live teaching that night. You can do that. It's your call. It's philosophical decision for an event like this. We like to kind of pull the teaching and let this be a truly invite night, a truly bring your friends style event style night.

Nick Clason (19:41):
And then we did a bunch of door prizes and giveaways. Now, here's how I do this. I use Sidekick through Download Youth Ministry. I created a little slide, I'll drop the slide into the link down below that I've referenced before and it says World's Greatest Donut, and that says You're about to win something, dude with Little Arrow pointed up and then all their names filter through. Here's how we got the names. Every single student who checked in, we created a People search, a save search in C C B Church Community Builder. That's any student who's not a leader that has checked in within the last day. And so whenever I go into that, especially if an event has started it's live, I click refresh and it populates every single student who has checked in to our student ministry within the last 24 hours. And so since we didn't have an event on Tuesday, I know that anyone who's checked in is now here on Wednesday night.

Nick Clason (20:32):
So that list is not just going to be a random full mailing list of all of our students going to be the actual live dynamic list of the students in our event space. Figure that out in your church database system, but find some way to capture all the info of the students that are actually in your space. Now, downloaded that into a C S V, copied it, pasted it into Sidekick, and then boom, we had all the names they're filtering through and we're giving away some door prizes. So what we gave away was a donut blanket that's like the shape of a circle. We gave away a little mini donut maker. We gave away donut key chain. We gave away little rubber donuts. I almost think they were like dog toys. I think we bought them for something else and we forgot. And so we just ended up giving them away.

Nick Clason (21:14):
And what else we give away? I can't remember. But we gave away six different things, just kind of like, Hey, you won and now you won. Now you won. Kids were going nuts for it. They were excited for it. And then I had this big old pillow, this big of a donut pillow, and I was like, who wants this? And the room's going crazy. I'm like, you have a chance to win it later. And so I kind of teased that, but then we're like, Hey, we got worship. So we had two hype songs. Again, philosophically not my favorite, but our students love worship and have been clamoring for it, and we haven't had it regularly for the last year. And just our worship department, which is how our church navigates it, the worship department handles all worship for all of our different ministries. So they do it for kids and students and adults.

Nick Clason (21:58):
And so we hadn't had worship. Worship was just now able to accommodate our desire to have it more regularly. And so since we started the week before, we decided not to pull the plug on it, just let it go. So we asked them for two hype songs. They sung here in your house. They sang glorious day, and then we played a donut game. And this one, full disclosure, I didn't even make. I got it off of D Y M, the Donut Showdown, a couple different people. We have myself, my boss, we have a resident, and then two interns. So there's five of us that we can kind of cycle through on the stage. And so my boss, Darren and one of our interns, Eli, they got up and they ran the donut showdown and then the winning table, because remember I said we have 16 tables.

Nick Clason (22:38):
They got a box of donuts that are more expensive, like bougie box of donuts from one of those bougie donut shops. We bought three of those, one for the winner this game, one for the winner, the next game, and then one box for our leaders in our leader lounge. So they kept track of their answers on whiteboards, and then off they went. The winning team got that. Then we created a 15 second donut on a string bumper. My resident created it. Shout out to Caleb, ADA. And then Caleb and Kaylee came out and they ran the classic Eat a donut on a string without your hands being tied. So that's another box of donuts or maybe two that we bought. Just glazed donuts just for the donut on a string game. They had to get one holder and one eater from each table. So we had 32 people come up front to the stage.

Nick Clason (23:28):
We have 16 tables, so 16 eaters, 16 holders that went on the stage, held the donuts, and then the first person to eat the full donut without using their hands. They also win a box of boujee donuts for their table. And then at that point, I hopped back up and I gave instructions for a guided rec time. And so what we did was they could go to our cafe and decorate cake donuts. So that's another set of donuts that we bought, probably three to four, I dunno, maybe even five dozen, just like unglazed cake donuts. But then we bought frosting and sprinkles and things like that. So we allowed students to have a space to decorate donuts on their own. We also offered a game called Find the Donut. That's where I gave away my big donut thing. And what I did for that was I had seven clues of things that they could do, and so they could get any of the seven clues in whatever order they wanted, but it was a speed thing, so they'd grab a clue.

Nick Clason (24:21):
I typed it out, put it on a little piece of paper. I made it into a Word doc where it was like four on 1, 2, 3, 4 on a word doc. So I could cut the word doc up and down side to side and then have four off of one full sheet of paper. And so then I printed 10 of the first clue and then cut it. And that got me 40 clues or whatever. So it was like, Hey, some of the clues were ways to get them to go interact with our staff. So go ask Darren what his favorite donut is. Go ask Kaylee what her favorite donut is. One of the stations that we created during this guided rec time was a temporary tattoo station, so go get a tattoo from the temporary tattoo station. Another one of 'em was to encourage them to go towards our YouTube channel or answer questions from last week's message.

Nick Clason (25:06):
And if they didn't know, it was like the answer's on YouTube so it would get them onto our YouTube channel, all that type of stuff, trying to again, hybridize it, right? So they'd grab a clue, they'd read it, and then they'd go do the thing. One of the clues was prove that you voted. So if they hadn't voted yet, they had to go fill out a paper bracket or show me they casted their vote via their phone via Instagram. And then the last and final station of guided rec was the tattoo station, as I had mentioned and alluded to, by the way, the first students come back with all seven of their clues completed. They won that giant donut. And then the last thing that they could do is they could continue to make their guests for the VAs of donuts. And then just the general rec stuff that we have.

Nick Clason (25:50):
We have a game room with nine square foosball pool and just kind of like a hangout space. And some students kind of opted into that, but there were five to six options and we gave them about 30 minutes to just do whatever they wanted. They could go do one thing the whole time, they could try and do all the things. I had one student who was like, I'm going to try and do all the things. And from that event, actually, I kind of thought and decided, what if we created a passport or a frequent flyer kind of option to let students try different things when we have a guided rec type of moment? I dunno, just an idea. Then at six 50, we called everybody back into our space. We announced the winner, sixth grade girl who won the vass of Donuts. We let them know about what Sunday morning was going to be, and then that was our final word, and we were like, Hey, thanks so much for hanging out.

Nick Clason (26:39):
Thanks for playing. We will see you next time. Love you guys. Peace, love and crabs. I think that's like a Joe's Crab Shack thing. I'm not sure. Right? All in all, I think this was a great event. Frankly, it's one of my favorite hybrid style events. And again, I remember one time I was talking about hybrid on my social, all links to my socials down the description below. But my sister was like, what do you mean by hybrid? Do you just mean zoom groups? And I can mean zoom groups, right? But this is what I mean when I talk about hybrid. I mean, create an event for one thing, and that's the thing. World's greatest donut. Linking the description to my D Y N product was already created for a voting a month worth of voting on Instagram and on your socials. Then we just said, what if we take that concept and then just craft a month around it and then craft an invite outreach event around it, and then boom, we just had donuts, we leaned in, and that's all the things that we did for it.

Nick Clason (27:35):
The point of this is not just to create vanity metrics, both in our physical space and also in our digital space with followers and whatnot, but the point of it is to step in to the space where students find themselves in 2023, right? It's like a digital mall. In fact, I have a completely free resource to help you navigate that digital mall. It's my done for you Surefire Resource 40 done for You events. On this video right here, it's going to show up on the screen what every youth ministry needs to be focusing on. I also have a video talking about a digital mall and incarnation ministry. So I'd love for you to check those things out. But until next time, we're making digital discipleship easy and accessible, and as always, stay hybrid.