Lead Small App [Review]

What is your go to app for youth ministry?

This past summer I stumbled across an app as I was looking for a way to help our small groups connect better.  I was struggling to find an app to really help my youth ministry.  I actually got a quote to build a youth ministry app.  The quote was too much for what I was willing to invest at this time, but I think this is still a viable option.  I don’t agree with companies making a ton of money of churches.

This is where I stumbled across Lead Small.  I have seen their book Lead Small, and always wanted to go to their conference called The Orange Conference.  At first glance the app looked pretty good, but the one thing that really enticed me was the ability to customize it.  How awesome would it be to customize my own lead small app.

So, I downloaded it and played around with it for a bit, and quickly loved all that this youth ministry app offered.  At my adult leaders meeting I unveiled it to the leaders on my projector, and gave them a simple walkthrough.  They quickly downloaded it and picked it up.

Each week since September my youth ministry has used this app and my leaders are loving it.  There are a few issues we have noticed with this app since adopting it, but we are willing to work through the glitches.  It is a fantastic app that churches need to download and start using today.

The first time my small group met we passed around my iPad and they put in information about themselves.  I love how easy my small group picked up this app, and showed me features that I didn’t really notice, or notice how great they would be.  One of the features that my small group quickly caught on to was the ability to add your picture to the student’s profile.  This has become a helpful way to memorize the students in my small group.

Each week we pass the iPad around and fill in information that the student in my small group has left out.  I am surprised at how excited the students in my small group are willing to give tons of information about themselves.  I have their cell phone numbers, the phone number for their parents and more.

The game changing feature of this app is the ability to text all the students in your small group at once.  Now, this isn’t anything special, but the gaming changing feature is the ability to text the students and their parents all at once.  I love that the parents will be contacted for events or special nights in our youth ministry.  This really changes things for my small groups, and puts a lot of responsibility on them for leading, and communicating, and I love that.

Some of the features that need changing and I know that they are working on these things is the ability to have all the apps sync to one master database.  Right now we are manually inputing information each week from the app to an attendance sheet.  I would love to be able to do this with an app right off of someones iPhone or android device.

Another feature that we noticed needs changing is the ability to text students in your small group individually.  It’s easy to send a group text, but you can’t send a single text to someone.

The  Lead Small app is a game changing app for youth ministry.  I know that for my youth ministry this app will help my leaders lead their small group.  We love this app and the vision behind it, and know that the team working on this will make this app better.