Written by

Ps Tim Garisto from Lifehouse Church, Melbourne

with Samuel Heins from Faith Christian Church, and Dan Faltas from Millpark Baptist

@timothygaristo @samuel.heins @faltas_

Last week we looked at some resources that we use for our youth designs. This week we have some design tips and some instas to follow for inspiration.

Tips:

  • Keep it simple: Don’t feel like you need the craziest designs, often times a clean and simple font with an image is all you need.
  • Find your style: Find an aesthetic that best represents your youth group. You want to find somethings that your teenagers engage with. What one style might work for one youth ministry might not work for you. Try things and see what works.
  • Experiment: Take risks when it comes to your social media. Try new things because you never know what will work.
  • Numbers: it can be so easy to get caught up on the numbers game when it comes to social media, how many followers we have, how many likes we get, that we can forget about the actual goal of why we have our social media accounts.
  • Use noise, grain, scratch textures and dust overlays: They look sick and are a great way to add just a little extra to a design.
  • Quantity over quality (in this season): memes have taught us a few things. Teenagers love memes. I feel like we are moving away from days where really aesthetic cinematic videos or elite looking promos are most effective… Posting 5 pretty average looking designs in a week is better than 1 amazing one. The more the better during this season. Get up in the teenager’s faces!
  • Empower others: take a quality hit! It’s ok! Get youth kids working on designs and ideas! We don’t use our TikTok account as much as we would like to but its currently run by a student in year 9!
  • Don’t shy away from reposting: If you want to make your feed look and feel good, don’t waste precious time creating everything from scratch if you don’t have the resources or people to do it. Re-post and give credit in the caption.
  • Social media engagement: Don’t be precious with the password! More engagement the better. Get leaders scrolling, liking and posting comments from the youth account.
  • Draw Inspiration from anywhere and everywhere: Pinterest, Pro church media, other youth ministries, Savee, Behance,, whatever inspires you! Save the ideas somewhere and create a bank to go back to for when you sit down to create.
  • Consider IG or Facebook advertising: A very effective way to target new audience when running a night or big event. Also creating printable content for a big night and giving it to kids to put up in their schools, at bus shelters etc. has also proven to be very effective. We did this for our plus+1 event last year and double our regular attendance in one night. 
  • Invest time into creating an elite Youtube channel: It’s the future!
  • Archive old posts: Having photos of your youth nights is better than having a page full of promos with old dates etc. (especially if you want new kids looking at your pages and getting a vibe of what youth is like) you can always get them back if needed.
  • Tiktok cheat: Get your promo, take it into IG stories as though you are going to upload it, add a GIFF, save it as a ‘video’ to your camera roll (Don’t upload it there), upload it to TikTok, add a sound and there you have it. Get your promos on Tiktok without having to create video content for it.
  • Use your IG bio for easy access: Change it for whatever purpose you need it to serve for that week! Whether it’s going a small group, finding a live stream, salvation next steps. Just keep uploading it weekly or whenever needed for easy access.

Lists of IG’s to follow for Inspiration:

  • @youthalivevic
  • @youthaliveaustralia
  • @youthaliveqld
  • @mosaicfuture
  • @vous_high
  • @itskarielys
  • @oneyouthvic
  • @riotyouth_
  • @forever.yth
  • @publicyouth_
  • @fusionyouth__
  • @empireyouth
  • @planetboomyouth
  • @neos.wc
  • @glowyouthgc
  • @xtra_yth
  • @prochurchmedia
  • @digitalchurchtoolkit
  • @favoryouth
  • @mediacollectivelondon
  • @dngcreative

Big shout out to everyone out there designing, editing and running socials for your youth ministries. You’re the real MVPs.

Big LOVE.

Timothy Garisto, Samuel Heins & Dan Faltas