THIS PAGE WILL SELF-DESTRUCT IN 13 SECONDS, (i.e. UNpublish it as soon as you are ready!)

Well done, you've taken a big step to try out Your Very Own Youth App! Setting it up is just the first step but you'll want to quickly move to make it your own and put it to work for you! So here are a few tips for the journey. You will have received this intro email giving you some tips on how to go about setting things up on your App. This is just a brief overview of the sorts of tasks that are lined up for you to tackle in the next few hours, days or weeks!

BRAND IT
What you've got here is your 'starter for 10' set of pages and features that are just set up to illustrate what could be done with the App and give you a few hints of how to go about customizing this for your own group. You can check the 'training' section of the website (www.madapps4youth.uk) for some design ideas from a few of the other users but at the very least you can get your own banner up there and change the icon for the 'About' section. But remember you can decide on which icons you might wish to use for any page!

INTEGRATE IT
As well as redesigning and reconfiguring some of the pages you may also wish to integrate the App with several of your current processes. That might be as simple as linking to the relevant CHURCH SUITE pages. This means that you can use the App as a portal to the aspects of Church Suite that you require -  but you can also create your own content and features that are specific for your young people, parents and leadership group.

DEVELOP IT
There are so many ways in which produce and garner content for your app - using online resoures that you have already discovered or even buying in content from other providers. Be sure to tailor it for your age demographic and group needs. Some of the pages here will require you to make use of other resources that are out there on the web and deploy them in your App (like the TeamUp calendar, or the Justcast.com podcasting feature or the www.minnit.com chat room etc.) We do have specific 'explainer videos' for most of those and you can of course choose to deploy these or delete them from the App or just 'unpublish' them so that you can return to the question in the future.

SHARE IT
Be sure to let your young people, leaders and parents know how to download and use the App! Good communication is key and the App should be one of your essential tools in your kit to ensure that everyone is up to date and on the same page!