Knowing that 5 years will come quickly, we know we need to seriously think about what that means for us as we launch a campus. We want to start our campus with the culture that will grow naturally into engaging with people in person (“IRL”) and online.

Over dinner the other day Willy and I were talking about how we could engage our campus online. We came up with a “strategy” that we’ll test out, knowing that it will only engage the population of campus that is active in social media – but it will mean that we can connect with people and give them a few hyperlinks of separation from a gospel presentation, a twitter/blog/email engagement, or even connect with us in person without tons of man-power.

Tools required: a P2C-UQAM Foursquare account, a twitter account, a local blog, our website. It sounds like a lot of things but you’ll see the connection in a second, I promise.

Here’s what it would look like:

1. We use Foursquare to check-in to campus buildings when we’re having events & leave good quality tips to campus venues including cafés, pubs, buildings etc. We hope this serves to advertise for us, get people familiar with our name and maybe even build some level of trust as they’re used to seeing us “around”.
2. Our 4sq account would have a link to our website and will drive traffic there when people want to know “C’est quoi Pouvoir de Changer” ?
3. We will post updates to our blog summarizing the investigative book clubs (Soul Cravings/Reason for God) or the intro to Christianity studies we’re doing or whatever else that is open for anyone to come to (ie, not discipleship appointments). This, I hope, will serve as giving a bit of humanity to an otherwise faceless or weird organization to a non-christian. If they were at all interested in showing up to something, I *think* these updates would help them feel confident they want to attend and therefore actually show up because they have an idea of what going on.
4. Our website (once finished) will have evangelistic articles, it would pull info from our Facebook group (and link to it), & hopefully pull info from our blog or at least link to it.
5. I’m not entirely sure how we’d use Facebook & Twitter yet, other than our main source of getting info out to our students.

This means that a student could go from seeing a tip on Foursquare and with a few clicks come into thought-provoking articles and information on our meetings and show up without us having to do much. They’ll also be able to ask us questions by email/twitter/facebook (which most students feel more comfortable with, especially when it’s about a topic they’re suspicious or skeptical about than IRL or phone).

Will this be effective? I don’t know. Will it be a main source of traffic to our events? Probably not. Will we see results quickly? No clue. But really, we only have to gain from trying.

We’ll update you as we get this going and think through the details more.

“There are places you do not want to go but want say you’ve been.” Holly Sheldon

Holly said this 1.5 years ago at #WCEast and it was probably the sentence that has stuck out in my mind consistently the last year and a half. It was that sentence that challenged me every time I wanted to be cowardly, it was that sentence that reminded me of my vow to go anywhere, do anything, anytime at any cost for God.

It’s the fear of the cost that always made my knees shake. The fear of rejection when I made stupid embarrassing French mistakes, it was the cost to my pride that I didn’t want to lose.

I was reflecting on this again this week on two different occasions. One, I read a blog post by my boss on how thankful he’s been challenged to do things that were so out of his reach. In his posts “In Over My Head” he basically describes the last year of my life. From the moment he challenged me to co-direct Paris project with him my life changed drastically. Before that challenge I had grown very comfortable in my faith, even if I was still sharing my faith regularly and raising support, two things a lot of people would find very intimidating to do. But saying yes to direct a project (I had never directed anything before) in a language I was rarely speaking and didn’t have much practice in was “un grand défi” – a huge challenge.

I remember walking through Charles de Gaulle airport May 2011 as we got there to lead the project and I remember feeling like I was walking to my own death. In the sense that Rick James talks about in his book A Million Ways to Die, that’s exactly what I was doing. I was walking into the death of my pride as I would be letting students correct my french grammar and knowing I’d be trying to tell a bunch of atheist students – in French – that they need God.

Fast forward a year later and we just finished launching a new campus in Montreal… in French. I’m now campus director with my married-for-6-months husband at UQAM. Aside from Paris Project, I have never worked in French before. This week I’ve been reflecting on if I had let Andy accept my initial “you must be crazy!” when he asked me to direct with him. Where would I be spiritually and organizationally? I would likely be in a rut in both senses, a stagnant under-challenged campus staff.

UQAM was a pipe dream of mine that became a reality thanks to various circumstances including my boss’s personal experience of familiarity in living “over his head”. What if he wasn’t willing to put others in that same place he was challenged to be in? What if I let my fear direct my decisions rather than trusting in the instinct of my boss? In the end, I chose to believe he was right about my leadership potential, even if I felt like it was way beyond me. I’m so glad I did.

What I needed most over the last 8 years was for God to humble me through bringing me into situations where I was regularly “in over my head,” so He did.  I am so thankful that he brought me to a place where many of my greatest assets are useless, where I’ve had to learn to depend on Him in ways that I didn’t before.

The best place for a proud young leader is the place where they have no choice but to depend on God. (link)

As I lay there on my side in the fetal position, I recognized it. It was the feeling I had just shy of 3 years ago. In November of my fourth year at Queen’s I woke up one morning and wished I hadn’t. Ever again. I didn’t want to go to class and the prospect of facing the responsibilities of my day seemed more akin to being dragged across broken glass than the “running and not growing faint” Jesus promised. I ended up skipping all my classes that day, canceling my DGs for two weeks and saying nothing in servant team meetings. That was when I knew something was really really wrong and I went and got help, only to find out I was the so often talked about “burnt out”.

Fast-forward back to present and things are a lot different. I am healthy! I am rejoicing for that experience on so many levels and this is one of them: I know my warning signs. And friends, a month ago today I experienced one. I have to admit, it’s hard to share this with you because I know it means I’m coming clean with the fact that I have low capacity (or at least I do now). My ambition is too big for my abilities.

I know that I’m especially vulnerable to burnout because I’m a single woman with a bleeding heart and a hero complex, which I’ve been working these past few years.

The reason I’m posting this is that I want you all to be aware of your warning signs. Burnout is insanity. It’s life altering in ways you can’t imagine and probably didn’t think possible. I want you to avoid this at all costs; it’s something I seriously wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy (and not just because we’re supposed to love them!). Heck, 3 years later I’m still in recovery!

So think about it. What could your warning signs be? And how do you respond if you’re sensing the alarm bells going off?

• we’re all sick of email and often we all check Facebook more than email
• increased visibility as when friends “like” something, it shows up on newsfeeds:
  • on a commuter campus like Concordia club visibility is a challenge, even if we have an outrageously amazing poster, so do most other clubs here because we have access to dirt cheap colour printing, so this helps us be known at least to other Christians
• we could get a URL for free once we got enough likes (you only need 25). So we asked people to like our page and then secured our URL.
  • it’s viewable without having a Facebook account for those non-conformist students

Once this was done I set out to figure out how to make our page beautiful because I knew we could (see Starbucks). It didn’t take me long to realize I’d need some coding background, which I have a basic knowledge of thanks to formerly being a bored teenager with the internet & a desire for a pretty blog template. However, the easier way was just to drop an image on what they call an FBML (facebook markup language) box. So I made an image in Photoshop that featured our logo (to build branding familiarity), uploaded that image onto my webspace (it has to be hosted elsewhere) and explained what we offered as a club, keeping in mind its’ frosh week and we’re trying to connect with Christian students because we’re pretty much rebooting our whole ministry this year, starting with 5 core students.

Thanks to this Mashable article HOW TO: Build a Facebook Landing Page for your Brand, I put it together in no time. Right now the priority for us isn’t a super interactive site, but an attractive landing page that will give us a positive visual impression. This is coming from a girl who judges most things on their aesthetic including whether or not to buy an iPhone app (I know I’m not alone in this!).

This is definitely not the finished product but I feel like it’s a good place to start, especially considering I have several other things to work on. You can see the work in progress here: http://facebook.com/concordiac4c

His hope is to have people know about the McGill C4C twitter account so they could ask questions and chat with them, to be a resource to answer any question immediately. This is also my hope for Concordia as well, though we’re still very much in the building stage of our ministry. I’d love to see us succeed in a Hyatt’s social media strategy (the one we gave the workshop on at #c4cdays). We’re also hoping to use twitter as a way to connect our students and build community as we’re a commuter campus and things can feel very disconnected, especially in the soul-crushing bitter cold of Montreal winters.

So as we’re working out these strategies in the midst of our frosh week, I’d encourage you guys to think through your social media strategy BEFORE your frosh week. I’d love to hear your ideas & what you already have in place to put those ideas forward. You can leave a comment or a link to your own blog post on it.

A couple of ideas/things to keep in mind:

• What is your campus’s web presence like? Do you just have a “home base” website where people can find out info about you?
• Do you use facebook to disseminate information? Is this your main point of contact with people on the internet?
• Does your ministry have a blog & how is it used?
• Will you be using twitter & how? If not, why not?
• How do you connect all of the above?

Now you need to know this about me: I have typically tried to avoid sharing my testimony because the whole thing is pretty convoluted. When someone grows up in a Christian home and has essentially always followed Jesus, it’s pretty hard to explain the process of feeling confirmed this is the right decision as we grow in adulthood & maturity. Mine was even more complicated by significant events that, until the last 3 years, I dared not share with anyone.

So as Andy was sharing with our team the importance of a “myCravings” testimony this morning, he said this:

“Usually our testimonies sound something like this: ‘I used to generally sin, had general problems and I’ve found a general solution and my life is now generally better.’ Whenever we share our testimony, we’re essentially trying to fit our story into some sort of container. When I tried to fit it into this container, I realized I was sharing a story in a way that was actually the most true to my story & my life.”

I couldn’t help but nod in agreement. Going through this process of examining myself and my life and trying to understand what my own cravings were, I actually came to understand myself in a way I really hadn’t before. It occurred to me just how much my decisions are still impacted by this craving I have for safety & protection, that it impacts my life on a conscious and subconscious level even after Christ. It’s a big deal.

Why am I sharing this with you? I guess for one, both Andy and I saw this process as significant enough in our lives to share and was pretty important as well for us in finding what they refer to as a Dangerous Testimony in the Bursting Your Bubble training. As he pointed out, my testimony – when I tell it the right way – is a Dangerous Testimony. It freaks me out to be that honest with people, heck, to be that honest with myself. But realistically, how can we ask people to share their fears of taking the plunge into a life with Jesus, or share with us their very personal thoughts on God and spirituality if we’re not willing to even be honest with ourselves about what our own insecurities are, the ones that still drive us when we’re carnal. No, we don’t need to be obscene, but I think if you’re anything like me – you’re trying to fit your story into a neat category like “meaning” when it might be a related but more specifically “power” or honed in even further as “safety.” When we try to be neat with our testimony, we may just be short-changing our testimony and the person we’re sharing it with because they can sense our lack of sincerity.

So I guess my point is this: I’d strongly encourage you to spend some time investigating what your cravings testimony is and working out a few different ways to explain it. It might take some time brainstorming with your spouse, friend, or staff team to find the right way to describe it. Even today I realized that I need to find a better word for “safety” because it doesn’t really explain it right (and is pretty hard say “I found safety in Jesus” when He calls us to live such a radical life & never promises us physical safety).

All summer I’ve been hearing other staff complain about how they want to get rid of their email address or seeing productivity websites discuss how to get less email and manage your email better, and I’m hearing that Universities are no longer giving out email addresses to their students because email is seen as irrelevant or archaic. I never understood this fully.

I just sat down to write an email to my brother. It was a very weird thing for me. It felt so odd and out-of-place. For the past several months we have communicated entirely over twitter, text, Skype and maybe 2 phone calls. You might think that we don’t talk that frequently, but we do. Oh we are very well-connected. And when I emailed him to get his feedback about why I should get an iPad (because I’m really trying to convince myself this will be a useful tool cause I want one), it felt so… impersonal.***

Somehow twitter, to me, is more direct and personal than an email. So is Facebook. How did that happen, and when?? And what are the implications of this? I wonder, how much does the current university generation agree/disagree with me?

*** on the other hand, when it comes to MPD, I LOVE EMAIL because I can avoid awkward conversations.

You add your bank information, it will import all your accounts with the banks you add. You can also add other finance related accounts that you have. You can create budgets, set goals & it will help you work towards those goals. If you go over budget on an item, it will email you. If you’re using too much credit of on your credit card, it will notify you and give you links on how to manage it, if you have a low balance on your chequing account, it will notify you of that also.

I don’t know where you are on your journey to financial health. If you’re like me and just getting some of these things figured out or you’re working towards a downpayment on a home, saving for a dream vacation, or trying to pay down some debt, I really think this tool is highly useful for all of those things. And no, no one paid me to say this. I wish!

It even has an iPhone app (though at this time, it’s only available in the US iTunes store).

1. Instead of initiating a conversation using a paper + question survey, doing it with a video survey. Getting several one or two-minute clips + pictures to produce a digital Soularium.
2. We would have immediate access to a (currently non-existent) pool of useful video clips/articles that address common misconceptions or issues by scholars/authors (like these from McManus). ALTHOUGH, the iPad doesn’t do flash and so that could pose a problem, though YouTube is doing Beta testing of their HTML5 player.
3. Even as simple as having video trailers for books like Case for Christ, or the videos from Soul Cravings so that people can see a glimpse of the content and know it’s something they want to read. See here for an example.
4. Having a video version of the Knowing God Personally booklet. I love the new “God Tools” iPhone app by CCC, but I can’t help but think that if the KGP was put together like a compelling video more students would feel comfortable sharing it (because it’s a medium they’re used to).

Really, I guess it’s all about video in my opinion. Video & ease of use (less awkward than a laptop). If you handed me a Case for Christ as a student I would have been like “you have got to be kidding me. Do you know how many hundreds of pages I have to read for my classes?” I would have had to be MAJORLY interested the topic to read it. In fact, I picked up Case for Christ as a student and only got half way through it and still have never finished it (even though I know it’s a very well-written book and has really important facts that we all should know).