IDEA: Have students text in their vote.

Our student ministry is about to have a simple and very familiar thing in youth ministry: a movie night.

It's simple until you get to 1 thing, the movie to be watched.  So as a group of student leaders and I were discussing what movie to watch they came up with a great idea... let's vote on it.  Allow the students to help make the choice.  It gives buy-in and allows everyone's voice to be heard in at least a general sense.

So rather than having a stack of acceptable DVD titles ready to go we did something a little different. We voted on it.

1. I came up with an initial list and let a group of leaders send in recommendations.
2. I screened through the list and picked out a handful to go along with my list (and in some cases opted for their suggestions instead). I picked a total of 16 titles.
3. Then I created a tournament bracket, dividing genre and age of the film out, so that the bracket was evened out. The students never saw the bracket that way they truly voted on the "game before them" rather than trying to figure out how to get their movie to be the winner.
4. I used polleverywhere.com to create "games" of 2 movies against each other.  8 the first Wednesday, 4 on Sunday morning, 2 on Sunday night, and the final will be voted on the Wednesday before our movie night on Saturday evening.   The students get to then text in their vote as the "game" shows on the screen and see instant results as their votes are tallied.  No pressure on their vote because no one knows what they voted because its only in a text that no one sees.

I'm liking this because it has created some excitement.  Everyone knows they had a voice if they chose to participate, and now our group gets to watch a fun movie that for the most part they agree with.

Now the next task is finding that perfect movie popcorn that we can serve.... Ahh, the position of leadership never ends.