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19 Dec 2023

And the Winner of the Ugly Christmas Sweater Contest Is … Chosen Using Sidekick, of Course!

By |2023-12-19T08:25:06-08:00December 19th, 2023|Mariners Youth Ministry, Sidekick, Sidekick Hero Blog, Youth Ministry Hacks|0 Comments

Our Mariners Church Student Ministry Volunteer 🎄Christmas Party🎄 was last night (’tis the season), and the Ugly Christmas Sweater Contest is always SO fun … but choosing a winner has never felt quite right. Sure, there’s the “audience applause” gauge, the crowd favorite, and then there’s me—always biased to the Star Wars-themed holiday gear, naturally.

🤔 If only there were a way to have people cast their ballots so we get an actual popular vote of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Enter: Sidekick.

(click image to enlarge)

(click image to enlarge)

AND IT WORKED LIKE A CHARM!

We picked our 6 finalists and had them hit the stage. Then everyone whipped out their phones for a serious and scientific showdown…

Some of the best parts about Sidekick Live Voting are:

  • You can only vote once (no cheating)
  • Voting is anonymous (no hating on people who voted differently than you)
  • You can choose whether or not to show voting results in real-time (you can build suspense)

For our event, here’s how we set up our Live Voting Presentation Settings:

We toggled the “Show Live Results” to OFF so we could gather all the votes in secret. And then, only after all the votes were cast did we dramatically reveal the winner.

AND IT WORKED PERFECTLY!

It was close … but we all knew the real winner that night: Sidekick.

Just kidding… well sort of. Sidekick was the tool that helped us easily solve the annual debate of who won the ugly Christmas sweater contest. So in a way, because of Sidekick, we all won. Perfection!

How will you use Sidekick +Phones this week in your ministry?

Josh

If you’re using Sidekick and you run into any issues, or if you just have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team at: [email protected]. Or you can check out other helpful articles and walkthroughs at the Sidekick Help Desk by visiting https://help.sidekick.tv.

Finally, if you choose to use the new Sidekick… let us know how you do it and what types of polls you do because we want to highlight you. Our goal is to highlight a youth worker every week with different ways they’ve used Sidekick to help their students engage. If you’re interested in being recognized as a Sidekick Hero, just click the big red button below:

If you’re using Sidekick and you run into any issues, or if you just have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team at: [email protected]. Or you can check out other helpful articles and walkthroughs at the Sidekick Help Desk by visiting https://help.sidekick.tv.

Finally, if you choose to use the new Sidekick… let us know how you do it and what types of polls you do because we want to highlight you. Our goal is to highlight a youth worker every week with different ways they’ve used Sidekick to help their students engage. If you’re interested in being recognized as a Sidekick Hero, just click the big red button below:

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11 Dec 2023

Live Voting: Would You Rather

By |2023-12-12T19:48:46-08:00December 11th, 2023|Sidekick, Sidekick Hero Blog|0 Comments

Live Voting is one of my absolute favorite new features in Sidekick. Without a doubt, it allows students to engage during a service like never before!

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be showing you some really cool ways that you can use Live Voting in your services, and I can’t think of a better way than one of my favorite ways to start a service: WOULD YOU RATHER.

If you’re curious how this might work, below are 12 different Would You Rather questions that our team came up to get you started. Just click on an image to see the two options that students would be choosing between…

On its own, Would You Rather is a fairly simple concept. Students are given two options, and they must make a choice between the two. One of the reasons Would You Rather is so much fun is that sometimes the options are related, and sometimes they aren’t even in the same ballpark. The other reason (and this is my favorite) is that often you’ll see friends who thought they agreed about something suddenly find themselves on VERY different sides of the issue.

All in all, Would You Rather is an incredible way to help students lower their guard a little bit so that they are more willing to engage with the service that’s about to happen. And in my opinion, Sidekick Live Voting takes that to a completely new level! Suddenly, students will be able to see the results of everyone in the the room’s choices in REAL TIME!

While we’d always encourage you to come up with some of your own that your students will resonate with, we also created this handy text document with all twelve of our questions so you can copy and paste them into your own Sidekick Live Polls:

👉 Download 12 Would You Rather Questions Here 👈
👉 Download 12 Would You Rather Questions Here 👈

And, if you’re interested in finding out more about how Sidekick Live Voting works we’ve created a short walkthrough video that shows you how to creat your own polls by using this this game-changing Sidekick feature.

If you’re using Sidekick and you run into any issues, or if you just have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team at: [email protected]. Or you can check out other helpful articles and walkthroughs at the Sidekick Help Desk by visiting https://help.sidekick.tv.

Finally, if you choose to use the new Sidekick… let us know how you do it and what types of polls you do because we want to highlight you. Our goal is to highlight a youth worker every week with different ways they’ve used Sidekick to help their students engage. If you’re interested in being recognized as a Sidekick Hero, just click the big red button below:

If you’re using Sidekick and you run into any issues, or if you just have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team at: [email protected]. Or you can check out other helpful articles and walkthroughs at the Sidekick Help Desk by visiting https://help.sidekick.tv.

Finally, if you choose to use the new Sidekick… let us know how you do it and what types of polls you do because we want to highlight you. Our goal is to highlight a youth worker every week with different ways they’ve used Sidekick to help their students engage. If you’re interested in being recognized as a Sidekick Hero, just click the big red button below:

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28 Jan 2019

Sidekick Version 1.0.4

By |2019-02-01T06:38:24-08:00January 28th, 2019|Membership, Sidekick, Teaching/Programming, Youth Ministry Resources|0 Comments

Sidekick just keeps getting better!

The newest update to Sidekick was just pushed live and it includes a TON of things you’re gonna like!

? Drag and Drop reordering is here

You can now reorder and organize any file manually! Change up the order of your Trivia questions, adjust the layout of items in Boxes or the Wheel of Destiny, and order your teams in Leaderboard to make it easier to update the points and announce who’s in the lead!

? Hide Next Winner

We heard you! Seeing the next winner isn’t always what you want. Sometimes you just want the computer to decide and you not know the winner. So now, in all of our ‘picker’ builders (Boxes, PickMe, PhotoFury, Wheel of Destiny) you can now hide the next winner from view.

 

☕️ Improved Performance

  • fixed a bug where popups would appear too low, making scrolling difficult.
  • fixed a bug in Advanced Crop that would sometimes make it unusable.
  • fixed a bug in Trivia where it would appear dark and moody.
  • fixed a plethora of other bugs!

Updating Sidekick is easy!

Find more details about the fixes and features AND upgrade to the newest version* by clicking the Gift icon in the top right-hand menu. 

Screen Shot 2018-12-28 at 4.13.10 PM 

When you’re ready, click Update and Restart. The update will happen automatically and you’ll be ready to go in no time! *Be sure you’re connected to the internet before you begin the update! 

We hope you enjoy Sidekick as much as we do! As always, if you have any questions, reach out to other users in the DYM Facebook Community OR email us anytime at [email protected].

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30 Dec 2018

Sidekick Version 1.0.3 is here!

By |2018-12-30T11:34:20-08:00December 30th, 2018|Membership, Sidekick, Teaching/Programming, Youth Ministry Resources|1 Comment

GREAT NEWS!

We just released a Sidekick update: bug fixes, improved performance, and an ‘Add Bulk Image’ feature in PhotoFury and Pixelate.

NEW! Now, instead of adding images one-by-one, you can select a group of images to add to your Pixelate or PhotoFury files!

To do this:

1) Click [+Bulk] on the Edit Tab. 

Screen Shot 2018-12-28 at 4.16.22 PM

 

2) Drag and drop the images you’d like to add to your file and click Add. 

Screen Shot 2018-12-28 at 4.15.12 PM 

It’s that easy! Just a few clicks and you have a full set of images ready to go… imagine the possibilities: add photos of your students and leaders as they walk into the room. Forgot to shop for prizes? No problem! Load photos of whatever you have laying around and make it look that this was the plan all along!

Find more details about the fixes and features AND upgrade to the newest version* by clicking the Gift icon in the top righthand menu. 

Screen Shot 2018-12-28 at 4.13.10 PM 

Screen Shot 2018-12-28 at 4.13.25 PM

 

When you’re ready, click Update and Restart. The update will happen automatically and you’ll be ready to go in no time! *Be sure you’re connected to the internet before you begin the update! 

We hope you enjoy Sidekick as much as we do! As always, if you have any questions, reach out to other users in the DYM Facebook Community OR email us anytime at [email protected].

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