Thank you all so much for taking a couple minutes to complete the LISM reader survey three weeks ago! The data you provided is so valuable in helping me make some decisions about where I focus my time and how I move forward with LISM this year.

What is somewhat the same

• 61.9% of you are full-time youth workers. Another 17% of you are paid part-time, which means that 78.9% of you are still vocational youth workers.
• With 86.9% of you serving in the USA, this is still primarily an American youth ministry site.
• 72.8% of you still prefer to consume content via text. Video preference went up a bit since last year, but audio consumption went down. In fact, only 4.1% of you prefer to consume content via audio.
• The topics and issues you’d like to see addressed are still pretty evenly split among across the board, so we’ll try to hit as many of them as possible this year.

The changes

Your feedback was extremely helpful in helping me determine where to better invest my attention as I continue to develop LISM in 2011.

There are new youth workers reading LISM now
Last year 62% of you had been serving in youth ministry for 6 years or more. Over the course of 2010 that apparently changed a bit and now only 51% of you have been doing youth ministry for that long. I wish I had more data about this. Did my content become more rudimentary last year? Is there a surge of newer youth workers in the youth ministry world? Did a lot of the veteran guys retire or lose interest in LISM? Hmm…

Email subscribers getting a better system
The survey showed that most of the user engagement on LISM comes from people who subscribe via email. Good for you, email people! Sometime in the near future I’ll be upgrading the email subscription service to something that will hopefully serve you even better. Thanks for letting me know that a solid email service is worth investing into!

Sharing other people’s youth ministry content
The “Links ‘n Vids” series was rated surprisingly high. Since I know doing them by video is not what you all prefer, I’ll be more intentional about doing more “Links ‘n Vids” as normal blog posts this upcoming year, pointing you guys to whatever stood out to me recently in the youth ministry blogosphere.

The end of LIVE YM Talk?
Freebie Friday and the general blog posts clearly came out on top as what you guys feel has the most potential to bless you and your ministry, so I’ll focus on that this year. However, in this same category, LIVE YM Talk came in a solid last place. Couple that with the fact that only 4% of you prefer to download audio recordings of content, I’m wondering if LIVE YM Talk has run its course.

QUESTION: Is LIVE YM Talk still valuable enough to continue? Should it be just once a month? Should it be shortened? Should we eliminate LIVE YM Talk altogether and invest into something else instead?

Posted on February 2, 2011