I recently went on a missions trip to Washington D.C. with my youth group. It was a blast! Everyone came back changed, such a growth experience. You can check out our trip at www.fuse-missions.org. Please check it out! You will see at this website, we have a message board and photos.
Leading up to the trip, the site is more or less unused. We have the team members post their profile information and maybe a blog post (under used, I know). No major traffic on the site, just our team.
While we’re on the trip, the site is used a lot: we have photos from our trip, uploaded daily; team members can post blog-like entries about their trip (yeah, no one wanted to!); and most importantly the message board. This message board was used for family and friends of the team to post “hellos” and other notes of love. Some parents posted scriptures and encouragement for our entire team. Our team members posted back keeping in touch with their loved ones back in Massachusetts. Some of our team members also shared some video messages during the trip!
This little site helped keep our team connected with their family and kept the people who helped us get to D.C. see what we were doing daily. I suggest any group going on a missions trip to do something similar. It proves to be a very fun thing to do during the slow times on a trip and it keeps parents plugged in and happy 
.
So how do you do it?
I developed this site 2 years ago for our missions trip to Romania, see www.impact-romania.org. You’ll see the same structure on the Romania site, just a different look and feel. This year I took the Romania website and skinned (new theme) it for D.C. For our next missions trip, I’ll take the same site and put a different skin on it again. For me, it’s a real simple thing to do, takes me about 4 hours to complete. For the average person, this may be a huge task. I’ll cover the major aspects of the site and how you can do it in a few easy steps:
FaceBook.com
You can do all of this quite easily by creating a group in Facebook. This will allow you to have a message board, news, photos and videos. The only issue with this, and why we didn’t use it, all visitors to the site require a Facebook account. A lot of our parents don’t have Facebook accounts. Also, it’s easier to share with others outside of Facebook. If this isn’t a problem for you, then read no more, and go to Facebook!
If you want something available for the general public to read easily and post comments on, read on…
Message Board
The most commonly used feature of the site. There are many free services out there for message board/news groups. Most services will require anyone posting to verify who they are by use of a login. Our site doesn’t prompt for a login since it’s a very small and controlled group of users (team members, family and friends). I will eventually disable the anonymous posting so spammers cannot post.
Google Groups. A free and very easy option to setup. I just setup a sample group in less than 2 minutes. Using the file upload and pages, you can feasibly post photos, videos and whatever else you may need. Also, the url is pretty simple, i.e. http://groups.google.com/group/fusemissions-2009.
There are many options on the web, bing free message board and you’ll find a lot!
Videos
We took our videos using a digital camera, a still camera. You don’t need a video camera to take videos for the web. As you can see on the few we have on there, they are good enough quality to get the point across. We took the video, downloaded it from the camera and uploaded to YouTube.com. Once uploaded, copied the Embed code and posted it into a message board post. Blamo, we have video.
Photos
Similar to videos, using a digital camera. Google groups will let you upload photos to the group, and that my suffice. If you wanted to, you could use something like DotPhoto.com to upload your images to, and link to it from your message board. All free!
I hope this helps, if you’re interested and would like some more information, please contact me and I’d love to guide you through it!
