I signed my high school ministry up for the text-messaging program with Simply Youth Ministry. Most of our kids are on MySpace still, almost as many are on Facebook, but 99% of them are text-messaging maniacs!
For $40 a month we can send up to 3 messages a day to our group members, and they allow you to have 1,500 members in a group. So basically we have WAY more than we’ll ever need.
We tried to get our students fired up about Twitter, but… it just didn’t happen.
Youth pastors: how do YOU communicate with your students? Newsletters, emails, blogs, text?
ryanguard.net 
i was actually just talking with our student team yesterday, and they told me that they’ve been using mass texting for a little while, and they use a free service that’s based on the database program that they’re using. it sends it out of their email, and they receive replies back through the email also
if you want info, you could probably email rachel – roblon@parkcrest.org
We are using Simply Text and I love it!
It has a new feature also that you can have people reply back to your mass texts. This is by far the best system.
What a great idea. I would have probably purchased something like that when I was back in YM if they had it. I just read something about a texting service that a lot of Youth Pastors were using just the other day on a blog but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was or where I read it.
That’s cool that there are tools like that out there now.
Ryan – I think you might want to check out http://www.tatango.com – its a much better service at half the monthly price (and we are all looking for ways to save). It has unlimited contacts, admins, groups, 400 monthly messages and its only $20 a month (that is the basic plan).
I use Boom Text now, for free, since I work with the guy 🙂