The Secret to Keeping Students from Falling Through the Cracks

For most of us, the fall semester is about throwing the net broadly and following up with as many freshmen as possible: doing spiritual interest surveys and then sharing the gospel face-to-face.

There are usually two limiting factors in following up:

1. How to manage and assign thousands of contacts
2. How to mobilize students to do follow-up

MissionHub is a game changer that has helped us make sense of piles of contact cards AND given a shot in the arm to seeing students challenge other students in evangelism.

MissionHub allows us to quickly search, keep notes on, and message hundreds of students (through group texts or emails).

You can, at a glance, see the spiritual progression of a student as they connect with various students and staff.

Mikayla went from filling out a spiritual interest survey at a freshman cookout, being invited to Cru by a student, followed up by a staff and student leader where she heard the gospel, and then got plugged into Hannah and Amanda’s Bible study.

Why am I talking about the fall right now? Because now is the time for your team and student leaders to learn how to use MissionHub so that, when fall rolls around, your leaders are sharing their faith instead of reading “how-to’s” on MissionHub.

A little history: we used to just hand out the paper contact cards to students and staff to follow up (and we all know how many of those contact cards never again see the light of day).

Then we upgraded to Google Drive (essentially an online, shared Excel file). This was a huge step forward as far as accessibility but a total mess when it grew to more than a hundred contacts. There was no way to easily find, say, “all the freshmen guys in The Quad who checked ‘I want more info on a Bible Study’” and send them a text about the Freshmen Guys Bible study tonight in The Quad.

We’ve been using MissionHub for the last 2 years. The MissionHub team has made significant improvements to the app and it is now (to quote a friend ’s tweet) “a hundred times better than it was 2 years ago.”

Here’s one example of how MissionHub has made it easy for our students to encourage each other to share their faith.

This is what happens every week after our Cru meeting:

- A few student leaders type all the contacts from Cru cards into MissionHub

- That night, a student leader posts on our private Facebook Leadership page:

Within 24 hours our student leaders are doing incredibly strategic and timely follow-up (which is 100% student-led).

Key first steps to get started:

1. Get all your staff team and student leaders signed up on MissionHub. This is HUGE. Just make it a requirement  – to be a leader in Cru, you have to use MissionHub.
2. Import your student contacts into MissionHub. Our students actually manually type in thousands of paper contact cards but you can also import directly from an Excel file or gather contacts via online surveys.
3. Consult these tutorials: How can MissionHub help , How to log in , and Importing contacts .
4. As questions come up, email support@missionhub.com or feel free to email me for more info on how we use MissionHub at the University of Arkansas: tim.casteel@cru.org

Have some good ideas on contact management and follow up?  Share them in the comments!