One of the most effective ways to communicate with teenagers is through text messages. In almost any scenario teenagers will utilize texting, regardless of if they are in school, in the middle of a conversation, or listening to your sermon. As youth workers, text messaging can be a great opportunity for us to utilize texting to meet teens where they already are.
Here's an excerpt from my guest post on dougfields.com
2. Group Text! app for iPhone: $2.99
The iPhone doesn't make it easy to send mass text messages. You can send a message to up to 20 people at the same time, which may be all you need, but as soon as you want to send a message to more than 20 people or have multiple groups to manage this becomes unrealistic. Fortunately developers have created apps that amend this problem by allowing you to utilize your address book groups to easily send a mass message. Because of iMessage and group messaging settings, you may have to adjust your iPhone settings to make the app function properly, but that is only a minor hurdle to have easy mass texting.
The difficulty however comes when it comes to making that group; you cannot simply have a group in your contacts named "Youth" and then send to all of them, you need to individually type each of their names in order to send a group message. Despite manually having to type them in, the only cost then to you is the cost of texting and the time it takes to type the names.
3. Twitter: Free
Twitter is not exactly a mass texting service. Because of the nature of the social network you can utilize it to work like one. This way of using twitter will basically be asking people who want the messages to use their cell phones to sign up for twitter and follow your account in order to receive the updates. It will be effective and cheap, but it may not have quite the flexibility of a true texting service.
To read the rest check out my post on dougfields.com. And if you're looking for how to use Google Voice for mass texting, here you go.
Photo Credit: kicki22