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Three Ways to Improve Your Youth Leadership Training

Matthew Schoenherr
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Three Ways to Improve Your Youth Leadership Training

According to Barna Research, 59 percent of 18 to 29-year olds drop out of attending church despite going regularly during their early teen years.

That’s a staggering bit of research with very telling information. An important part of our family ministry, the youth, will walk away from their church foundation. What’s the take away? We need youth leaders that understand that they may have a small window of time to impact young lives. Here’s how improving your youth leadership training could help your church achieve that goal.

Possible Goals for Youth Leadership Training

Prepare youth leaders to provide biblical solutions for the challenges presented by modern teen culture. Teens today face complex, personal issues like prescription medication addictions, cutting and alternate lifestyle choices. Does your youth leadership know how to minister to teens in these areas? Targeted training could build their confidence and provide guidance to these crucial church leaders.

Teach leaders to find new leaders. The key to reversing Barna’s recent report may be to empower teenagers to become leaders themselves. Your current leadership can’t feel threatened by the incoming surge of leadership; it needs to be a burning vision for the entire team.

Recognize individual gifts. Every teen leader should know how to lead prayer or a Bible study but not everyone is a singer. The best youth leadership training takes your group’s individual gifts and talents into consideration. If a leader isn’t sure what he has to offer, a coach or mentor could help him discern his gifts.

What Should Youth Leadership Training Include?

Thinking of promoting members of the youth group into leadership roles? This kind of growth in an organization is exciting but it is crucial that the youth leadership training that you offer meet the group’s needs. A good leadership training program teaches potential leaders how to manage their time wisely, how to work with a team and how to meet expected goals. If you have decided to offer this type of management training, consider including information on these important topics.

Understanding the Adult Perspective

Young leaders need to see the big picture if they want to lead. Teen leaders should bridge the gap between other teens and adults. They should inspire and encourage but also be the voice of reason when adults aren’t around. For example, “Yes! I’d love to toss that volleyball around but let’s take it outside.” Young leaders must have mature thinking and may need training in this area.

Youth Leaders Need to Communicate

Teach those young leaders how to listen and speak. Effective leaders must learn how to participate in active listening. That means listening, asking questions and listening again. A teen leader needs to be able to give a speech or at least address a crowd in a thoughtful way.

Enhance Conflict Resolution Skills

Charisma isn’t always enough to diffuse conflict. Teach your group how to resolve conflict by leading diverse groups and understanding different viewpoints. Leadership skills should include diffusing heated situations, navigating conflict and reconciling different parties.

Teach Young Leaders How to Self-Evaluate

The leader who knows how to administer self-evaluation honestly won’t have any growth limitations. Teach youth how to determine their leadership style, how to improve it and recognize what their weaknesses may be.

Goal Setting and Tracking

If you aren’t setting goals and reaching for them, well, you may not be a leader. Managers of all ages need to know how set a meaningful goal and develop a plan for achieving it.

To talk more about teaching youth leaders, please contact us.

Management Development: Good Conflict

Matthew Schoenherr
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0
Management Development: Good Conflict

A key aspect of management development that cannot be ignored is how to deal with conflict. We go to Alan Godwin, a psychologist, for guidance.

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Recent Article Shows Just How Important Christian Leadership Training Is

Matthew Schoenherr
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0
Recent Article Shows Just How Important Christian Leadership Training Is

Learning how to correctly manage complicated spiritual situations isn’t an inherent skill. In many cases, it takes Christian leadership training

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The Benefits of Church Leadership Training

Matthew Schoenherr
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The Benefits of Church Leadership Training

Leadership training is key no matter what type of position a person holds. We have previously written about the importance of leadership development in

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The 20-Year History of SEO

Matthew Schoenherr
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0
The 20-Year History of SEO

Full text search engines got their start with WebCrawler, created by Brian Pinkerton in 1994. It was a desktop application to start with and had 4,000 hand aggregated websites for its database. That’s a far cry from the 3.5 billion webpages that World Wide Web reports today, with fancy talk of organic search engine optimization and more apps than you can shake a stick at these days. Search engine optimization has evolved over the years alongside the influence of the search engines they utilize for traffic in a fascinating historical journey.

SEO in the Beginning

It took a few years after WebCrawler for Yahoo and Google to come onto the scene. Yahoo had its portal website set up in 1995, providing links to many categories of web pages. Google didn’t show up until 1998, along with the DMOZ. Search engine optimization didn’t get into full swing until there were more search engines and directories that used algorithm-produced results, as opposed to human-selected listings.

Marketers took advantage of Yahoo’s dependence on alphabetical sorting in 1995, and began looking at the way search engines sorted their machine-generated listings in 1996. Keyword density was a major factor then, along with website age. Marketers used a variety of techniques to put as many instances of their keywords on their page as possible, using white text on white pages, filling up meta data and taking other actions that are considered spam today. Excite’s algorithm was cracked and revealed the 35 different factors that went into ranking those pages.

SEO Over the Past Decade

Google makes hundreds of algorithm changes these days, but it was a simpler time when Google came up with the PageRank algorithm. It got updated monthly and adjusted the rankings during that time period. Most search engine optimization was still centered on spam techniques, such as buying massive amounts of in-bound links, filling up footers with links and any other technique that could be thought of to bring in more inbound links.

Google took a stand against spammy sites with November 2003’s Florida update. Many top sites vanished from the face of the search engines, and webmasters around the world panicked. Google specifically focused on websites that went too far with search engine optimization, and took them out of the index. As time went on, Google continued to adjust their search engine rankings to reward sites with good content. Content-based marketing became popular as a way to increase relevancy, although it wasn’t always useful content for readers. Instead, it stuck to strict keyword percentages to stay out of the spammy range.

The year 2005, was the first time personalized results were introduced to the search engine. It changed the results shown in the search engine rankings by whether or not the person was logged into their Google account. That made it harder for webmasters to figure out what ranking everyone saw them as.

These days, video and social media marketing work well, as Google’s unified search brings together results from all of their channels. Go forth and conquer!

Benjamin C is a technology reporter who covers Internet-related topics.

3 Nonprofit SEO Myths

Matthew Schoenherr
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3 Nonprofit SEO Myths

Nonprofit SEO has obtained a number of myths and legends over the years. As the search engines change their algorithms consistently, nonprofits who don’t keep up hold onto past truths which are no longer valid. Nonprofits need to review the myths then reposition their marketing to avoid falling into these pitfalls.

Myth #1. Domain Age is an Essential Ranking Factor

This is the first myth nonprofits should throw out the window. Often, smaller organizations are start-ups and haven’t had a chance to grow, which means the domain is still quite young. Nonprofit organizations only need to wait a couple months before the impact of the domain age no longer matters to search engines.

Some agencies swear by domain age as a ranking factor because older domains are ranking higher. Older domains have had time to build on themselves and include items which do matter to rankings. A beginning nonprofit site holds as much competitive SEO clout as an older site after only a few months on the search engines.

Myth #2. The Only Way to Grow Traffic is to Increase Ratings

Every nonprofit needs to grow their site views, and while links, relevance and content matter, they aren’t the only way to increase rankings. The top sites on the search engines will claim that traffic estimates for keywords are touch and go most of the time. Pouring effort into a single ranking is a massive waste of time; there are better ways to increase rankings and grow traffic.

The best efforts put forth by nonprofits include concentrating on promotional materials while composing content built around low-competition keywords. If promotions don’t work right away, nonprofits should focus on producing more content. Increased content will help push rankings.

Myth #3. Links Rule Above All Else

Links are great, and certainly encouraged, but they’re not the most important SEO factor. People consider links to be essential due to their elusiveness and crucial traffic driving properties. However, focusing on links will waste valuable time which could be spent on other ranking efforts.

The word is not links; it’s relevance. How relevant are the links associated with the site? Google and other search engines need to recognize the relevance of the links on the site to match with the search terms. Therefore, links are great, but make sure they hold relevance to the content on the page and the nonprofit organization’s brand before allowing them onto the site.

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