If you are like me, there are days that you feel completely behind when it comes to staying in touch with your students.   You might get 20 text messages in the span of a single lunch meeting; have 30 posts on your My Space from one Friday night and a million invitations to be a ninja or a pirate on your Facebook account.  Keeping track of it all is time consuming and at times tough on the soul as you navigate the good and the bad within those worlds.  

As we struggled to manage communication with students and leaders our youth ministry began to search for a tool that would help us create a bridge between our worlds and discovered something new, tuggle.  Over the last few years a group of former youth pastors with a techy streak created tuggle, “a clean online community for your ministry, built on top of an elegant suite of event management and communication tools”.  Unlike the public online communities, tuggle is a private, ministry specific tool that can be tailored to your specific ministry needs.  We use it to keep in touch with students, promote ministry events, expand the sense of community within our group, share prayer requests and even manage event signups.  Tuggle is a free service which only takes minutes to sign up for and has made an enormous impact on our ability to communicate with our students.  Using tuggle, you could have 40 students sign up for your Winter retreat, place them into small groups, survey them about any issues you might need input on and even bulk text message or e-mail them with any updates with a click of a button. 

Times will continue to change and technology will always be a few steps ahead of almost any youth pastor, but for now this is the best resource we’ve found to enter into the online world in a safe and encouraging atmosphere.

Website: tuggle.it

Brian Nanninga
Youth Pastor
Community Covenant
Eagle River, Alaska