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HAPPY NEW YEAR!

We wanted to do a live, online launch with champagne, special guests, a live concert, and a ball drop – but figured we’d spare the expense. Instead we settled for that little countdown above. Hope it was everything you hoped for.

Welcome to NewMediaMinistry.com!

On behalf of Matt Brown and Nick Heller – the co-founders of this site I want to thank you for stopping by.

NewMediaMinistry.com is a site dedicated to offering you insight and resources on how to effectively utilize new media for the new evangelization. Whether you are a youth minister, parish formation director, Priest, Pastor, Music Minister, blogger, speaker, radio personality, writer – we hope we can be of service in helping you learn how to use the numerous tools and resources now available to us through social media.

This site was born out of the many questions I received from youth ministers and other ministry leaders asking me how to build a good website, or how to build a social network for their ministry etc. Initially I thought this would be a series of blog posts that I would ask my friend and co-founder Matt Brown of 336 Creative to help me write. But Matt thought a few blog posts wasn’t nearly enough. We soon realized that the need for information and resources was great and we needed to build an entire site dedicated to these resources.

We quickly contacted my long time friend Nick Heller of Missing Link Design Services and asked him to join the team. With Matt’s web building expertise and his knack for all things new media, Nick’s passion for quality and eye catching design and production as well as his heart for ministry our team was complete and NewMediaMinistry.com was born.

I have been in pastoral ministry for twelve years with most of that being in Youth Ministry along with several years as a speaker and a year as a blogger – I have seen the landscape of ministry change immensely in these last few years. It is hard to keep up with all the changes – but I have found that if you can set your mind to this new approach to evangelization and ministry – incredible results can come.

New Media Ministry is about one primary goal - helping you be effective in your ministry using the many tools and resources offered to you by this new technology we call “new media.” You will find here many blogs about using these resources and tools to help you manage all the different options you have. If you haven’t been using the internet and need help getting started and figuring out exactly what you should do – you will find help here. If you have been doing web outreach for awhile but need help gauging your effectiveness or finding tools and resources to manage it all, or perhaps help improving what you are doing – you will find it here.

Take a look around:

• If you look to your far right you will see a little button that says, “Suggestions”. Take a minute to click on that button and offer your suggestions for blog topics you’d like to see or questions you would like answered
• Want to know more about the authors? Look up – see that “about” button at the top of the page?  You can find our info there.
• See the ads at the top and right of this page? – Those are not just ads – those are valuable resources to help you in your ministry. You will not find ads here that are not relevant to the topic at hand. Each of these is a resource that we believe can help you be effective online. In the coming weeks you will find blogs on each of those companies.
• If you look up to your righ you will see three boxes – click “t” to follow us on Twitter and get regular updates about what is happening on the site. Click “f” to follow our facebook page – become a fan and spread the word. Click the subscribe button if you would like to subscribe to our updates through email or RSS.

Thanks for joining us and please come back often.