YouVersion Live has been growing like crazy since launching last week, with more than 1,200 groups and 1,000 events taking place this weekend. In the midst of all those events, we noticed a couple of groups that came up with especially creative ways to use YouVersion Live at their church. Check it out:
The first event is from Hope Fellowship in Frisco, Texas:
The second event is from the Seacoast Church in Mount Pleasant:
Did you see any great events this week?
Tony Steward and Shaun King talk about YouVersion and the happenings at The Courageous Church.
Shauns Blog: http://www.shauninthecity.com
Atlanta Flood Victims: http://www.hopeatl.com
YouVersion Live is now ready for you to use!
YouVersion Live is the latest addition to YouVersion, and it’s a brand new way to experience church services and other live events. On your mobile device or any computer with an Internet connection, you can follow along with message outlines and take notes, read related Bible verses and click through to the expanded passage, vote on a poll and see the results live, ask questions anonymously, give, request prayer, and take it all home with you on your phone.
Want to see it in action? We’ve created a demo event so you can get a feel for how it works. Just open up the Bible App on your mobile device, select the “Live” icon from the dock at the bottom, and you’ll see it as an available event.
In the future, you can search for a locality (state or city or zip) and it will return a list of nearby events. If your phone has GPS enabled, it will detect your location and return the results automatically. Tap the event that you’re participating in and enjoy.
Ready to get started? Great! Setting up an event is an easy process, and we think you’ll have lots of fun finding creative ways to use this new feature.
1. Set up a group. Churches, Bible study groups, and other organizations create a group as the first step to setting up an event. It helps users know who’s hosting an event (and we’ll be adding some cool features for groups in the future). Any YouVersion user can join a group and can belong to multiple groups at the same time. So, the first time you’re creating an event, just go to www.YouVersion.com, choose “Groups” from the “Community” tab, and you’ll be led through an easy step-by-step process to set up your group.
2. Create your event. Once you’ve created your group, you’ll be taken to an area that’s just accessible to you, the administrator of the group. Choose “Create a Live Event,” fill in the required information, and then customize the event with by dragging and dropping the event items in the order you’d like them to occur. Preview your event to make sure everything’s ship-shape, and you should be good to go at the start time you designated.
We can’t wait to see how YouVersion Live takes your communication full circle. Try it out
We love the community that’s been building in YouVersion over the past couple years. YouVersion was built so that people could experience the Bible in online communities, and YouVersion Groups is the next big step in seeing that dream come true. YouVersion Groups is, at its core, a simple way for you to find people and ideas to which you relate and begin to build the foundation for tight community interaction through an increasingly shared Bible experience.
Although “groups” is a commonplace concept in the social web, we decided to take a fresh look at how the Bible is currently shared in community, how we could build on that firm foundation, and bring that experience to the web in as natural a way as possible. Naturally, most shared Bible experiences happen in real-life groups (worship gatherings, Bible studies, support groups, etc.), so our first foray into this space is YouVersion Live, which will be connected to the Group you create.
Right now, the function of a Group is focused on the Live portion, but we have fun and useful things planned for this new piece of YouVersion.
We’re thrilled to introduce a brand new concept for YouVersion.com. It’s called YouVersion Live and it brings a new level of interaction to the communication of God’s truth and love.
YouVersion Live is a free service that will give pastors, conference speakers, teachers, and group leaders the ability to share content and real-time feedback on mobile devices during live events, services, and more. Here’s an idea of how a church leader could use YouVersion Live…
A pastor would love to be able to get his congregation more involved in his message, ask questions and get answers, survey the room with a simple poll, give them an easy and natural way to take notes on his talking points, and maybe even give them a follow-up thought with a blog post or YouTube video as they’re leaving. And, in a perfect world, they’d be able to keep all that information in a place they look every day so they can refresh themselves on what he spoke about.
YouVersion Live allows this pastor to do all this (and a little more) by simply dragging and dropping in a super-simple dashboard on YouVersion.com. During a service, his congregation will pull out their web-enabled phones, open up YouVersion (either on the mobile website or a native application), read the Bible, take notes, ask questions, submit prayer requests, answer polls, find links to external content (event details, blog posts, videos, etc), and give online. Before they leave, they can send all that great content to themselves (or a friend) via email for future reference.
With YouVersion Live, a pastor can offer his congregation a rich and engaging way to experience the Bible and his message. Plus, with millions of people already using YouVersion on their phones, he’s got a head start towards telling his congregation about this new tool.
