When we started Thrive, we developed our website to be a ‘one-stop shop’ for youth leaders. There are plenty of excellent resources and teaching materials available on the internet; the challenge is finding them. Thrive’s website was designed to act as a big signpost to the best of the net. Alongside this, we wanted to use the website to act as a shop window for all that Thrive offers the local church.
Over the five years we outgrew our first website and launched our current site in 2014. In addition to providing the aforementioned, it also has a dedicated leadership blog, updated most weeks on key leadership issues.
One of the major advantages of having the website is that when a member of the team meets with a leader, they don’t need to spend lots of time discussing resources, they can just point them to the website. This releases them to talk about deeper issues such as developing vision and strategy or how to improve the overall discipleship of their group.
The website also keeps supporters up to date with our news column. It also gives easy access to sign up to receive our regular e-bulletins, whether that’s for supporter news, prayer updates or youth work news.
Since our latest website was launched, we have seen users from all over the world access the content, with an average of one thousand different visitors accessing the site each month. In fact, for the purposes of this booklet, we have discovered that there have been a total of over 29,000 different visitors to the website.
The website is one of the few ways we have of enabling many youth leaders with the same material. We create it with a hope that it will help further build God’s kingdom amongst young people across Thrive’s local area, as well as across England and the UK, and who knows how much further afield it might help.
Most read blog posts on our website
Our current website was launched in 2014. We thought it might be interesting to see which of our leadership blog posts had been read the most times. Here is what we discovered, our top 10 most read blog posts so far:
- 10 ways you can help young people worship God
- 5 ways to attract more young people to your group without even trying
- 10 characteristics of a youth friendly church
- Dealing with difficult and disruptive behaviour
- All you need to host your own youth prayer night
- Simple ways to integrate young people into your church
- 5 reasons why a youth weekend is not an optional extra
- How to lead engaging small group discussions
- How to attract young people to your group intentionally