Who needs friends when you’ve got sidekicks, mentors, and sunshines? Tuggle is changing the way youth ministries connect online.
While Facebook and MySpace are great for connecting youth at a global level, locally Tuggle is a third social network that has them beat hands down. Being safe (even for kids under 13) and having zero potential for spam has made Tuggle a best friend to parents and youth leaders. Launched in the fall of 2007, Tuggle was designed to enhance Christian community while giving ministries the tools they need to mobilize and organize their youth. Think of it as a clean, safe MySpace built on top of a management platform.
The first thing youth notice when they login to Tuggle is there are no “friends.” Instead of grouping people you know collectively under a generic title, you get to be more specific. How about classmate, sidekick, or encourager? Tuggle says: Why tag people in your ministry as friends when you are/will be friends with all of them anyway?
Tuggle is the brainchild of Brandon Riley and Daniel Elmore. Elmore, a college student who had been developing the Tuggle concept for several years, envisioned delivering a product that youth and college ministries couldn’t find elsewhere. He made it his quest to create a localized social network connected with ministry management tools.
Tuggle allows members to check their various email accounts, but Riley says thousands of church members, mostly youth, login daily to communicate with others and sign up for events and small groups via Tuggle.
“There is something about social networking to a certain degree that can somewhat fill in those gaps of helping people connect throughout the week and strive to build that deeper kind of community that Christians ought to be striving for,” Riley said. “For us, Tuggle has been the connection Myspace, Facebook, or any church management software just couldn’t top. After a retreat we did a couple of months ago for our junior high, students went home and updated their testimony on their Tuggle profile.  Seeing that kind of life changing information was the most encouraging thing I would be hard-pressed to see on a Myspace profile.
Youth leaders can’t get over how easy it is to send a message to their Bible study or huddle group. Using Tuggle’s bulk comment feature, they quickly post profile comments or “wall” comments to any group of students or even the entire ministry. Church management software tries to communicate with youth via bulk email, but that seldom works. All youth leaders know youth rarely check email anymore! If it’s not on their “wall,” AIM, or phone, it doesn’t exist.
Tuggle currently has 4,000 members with a growth rate of 800 new members per month. Riley said he sees Tuggle “less as a third network to login to daily, but more as a tool to reach a culture that is constantly online.”