We are making a huge step toward helping ministries with staff and volunteers.  In these larger youth groups, the youth pastor isn’t always the one that is doing the ministry.  They are a hub that connects volunteers and parents and paid staff to students, equipping and empowering them to lead more students than one person could ever effectively lead on their own.

With Dropbox syncing right around the corner, we have shifted into another gear with MinHub Youth.  The improvements in this update can multiply ministry by empowering your youth staff with essential youth ministry data.

I (Kurt) have had anywhere from 5-15 youth staff helping with ministry for the last seven years.  Using MinHub for the last year has helped me a lot, but the potential for it to help all of us has been hindered by having to iterate on a minimally viable product and the nightmare that is iCloud sync.

But the future is here, and we can’t wait to get this in your hands.

More leaders with more data means more connections to students.

Everyone in leadership needs to know who they are leading.

Here is what we have been able to accomplish with this update:

The MinHub database on the backend is now 25x smaller than it was before!  For instance, if you have 185 students with 40 groups and weekly events for the past year, your old database might be about 175mb.  That can take a long time to sync and index.  Your new database will be less than 7mb!  This speeds up the attendance screen, reduces crashing, and speeds up syncing.

Speaking of syncing, switching to Dropbox gives youth pastors brand new control over their database.  You are in control of sharing your database with the people in your ministry that will need it without having to share everything else that syncs through iCloud.

If you’d like to get a head start, we highly recommend creating a Dropbox account just for your ministry.  Check out this quick tutorial video to see a preview of the setup process.

>Dropbox also allowed us to include pull-to-refresh in your students list, smart groups, and attendance.  Just a couple of pulls and every checkmark, new students and the head count are all synced up.

This all really is just the groundwork for our monster 1.5.0 update though.  The next update (which is already in production) will bring some long awaited features:

• securely share your database amongst volunteers
• tracking adults in your ministry including parents and staff
• staff to student ratios in quick stats
• student specific events
• securing your app with a passcode or Touch I.D.

Thank you all for being amazing customers.  You guys are making all the difference in the lives of tens of thousands of teenagers.  We couldn’t be more excited or honored to be part of your ministry.

Stay tuned on Twitter for updates as the app goes through the review process.