Q&A: Dare2Share

By Joan Drammeh

In 1991, the Dare2Share youth ministry was founded to teach teens across America how to share their faith with courage, clarity and compassion. Less than 10 years later, the ministry has reached more than 300,000 teens and features seven annual conference dates. With tour themes based on Bible verses, Dare2Share events are structured for students ages 12-18, bringing youth pastors and youth groups together for a combined learning and worshiping experience.

“We all want teenagers to own their faith and part of that is giving them the opportunity to share their faith,” says Ken Allen, 41, director of events for Dare2Share. “We want teens to ask themselves, ‘do I really believe what my parents have told me about church?’ Part of that growth process is finding out who God is and what place he has in their life.”

Based in Denver, Col., Dare2Share Ministries launched the Blaze 2009-2010 conference at the Denver Coliseum Nov. 6-7. Drawing from Isaiah 6:1-8, a passage in which Isaiah is called to be a prophet, this evangelism training conference aims to equip teens to encounter God in powerful ways. Although registration numbers aren’t as high as the 2008 Invincible Student Conference — where 42,954 students attended, 725 volunteers assisted and 2,557 churches were represented — the Blaze tour is relying on strong local communities to keep attendance numbers up.

“Our intention is not to go into a city and say, ‘Hey, here we are, now everyone come to our event,’” says Allen, who joined the Dare2Share team in 2003. The Kansas State University graduate first discovered Dare2Share at a DCLA Youth Specialties conference in 1997. Allen was working with Youth for Christ/USA as director of communications at the time. “We want the community to see and share the vision for Christ and be reflective of that. We believe that for us as a ministry, we are there to support what the local church is doing. That’s where our heart is. We want to empower youth pastors to be more effective in their communities and help share the gospel.”

Rejuvenate caught up with Allen and spoke with him about the rigors of a conference tour before Dare2Share’s biggest event of the year.

Describe your yearly schedule.
We try to schedule events during the school year so that we don’t have to compete against the camps and summer activities. It also works better with church schedules to have an event like ours between the spring breaks and proms. The majority of our events take place in November, February and March.

Why do you call the Blaze event a conference tour?
We call it a tour because we pull off the events the same way even when we go to different cities. This year our tour is called Blaze; last year we had the Invincible tour. Our theme changes each and every year. The Blaze tour includes seven cities. We do the same event seven times and everything on the program and everything on stage is the same.

So it becomes routine?
It does from a production side, but with that said, we do find variety in what we are doing. For example, in some of the cities we have coliseums, arenas or convention centers that we are in. Each of those venues creates a different dynamic or variety so that each setup is unique. The logistics change and every once in a while we change aspects of the program.

Can you describe your planning process?
It’s a 12-18 month process in terms of planning. I am starting on next year’s tour now. For this 2009 Blaze tour, I started locking dates in last December. It is important to have everything prepared for the marketing team as we go into the contract process with the venues and out to the hotels to get room blocks.

We negotiate hotel prices after we sign the venue contract. I don’t want to sign hotel contracts until dates are locked in. Once the schedule is set, we approach major hotel chains with our dates so that they can submit RFPs. Hotel rates are usually determined around March and April.

How big is the Dare2Share staff and planning team?
Our ministry has 30 people on staff and the events department is made up of ministry advocates who are assigned to particular cities. The ministry advocates work alongside youth pastors in the area to encourage them and support them with what they are doing. We have two assigned to each city on the tour, charged with making connections in the local community.

Our ministry advocates are constantly on the phone with youth pastors, emailing them and keeping them informed with downloadable registration forms and schedules. We have a staff member assigned to each city to encourage and pray for them. We also follow up on the experience with surveys and welcome input. We want people to take what they learned at the conference and apply it to their churches with our podcasts. They are the ones having the direct impact on kids.

Any clue what next year’s theme will be?
We are calling it the Untour. We base tour themes on different scripture or biblical verses each tour and build our programs around that. The Blaze tour is based on Isaiah 6:1-8. We based the weekend around that particular scripture and verse and bring out the truth to encourage teens to share their faith with friends.

How do you choose host cities?
Our conferences are regional conferences so we draw people from surrounding cities and states. We try to do a good job with coverage in the United States regionally speaking. We love to hear from churches inviting us to come to their communities and help them build a network of churches that want to be a part of this. We really want local communities to express interest. We choose venue space based on a number of things including cost, size and scheduling.

Dare2Share does not provide refreshments in order to avoid food and beverage costs. How do you cover these needs?
We work with venues on providing concessions and lunch options for our students. We find that most of the groups will do a combination of bringing lunches in church vans or going offsite to restaurants.

What about transportation?
[They provide] their own. For a lot of events, people use charter or church buses.

How do you organize volunteers and how many do you average for each conference?
The average number of volunteers ranges from 200 in Denver and St. Louis (our biggest events) to 50 in Seattle or Phoenix. It is really based on what we can do in terms of recruiting and attendance in determining what our needs are. We are so dependent on volunteers to provide safety, ushering and administrative help. We have a wide variety of roles for those volunteers to play and they are so critical in terms of pulling off our event.

One exciting thing that we have is a volunteer staff that truly works as an extension of our staff. These are people who have been volunteering with us for a number of years at their own expense. They travel to cities to help us pull off these events. They will pay their way to go and help train up local volunteers. We try to help with hotel rates, food and complimentary stays. If they can get there, we try to cover their costs.

How much does it cost for a student to attend a Dare2Share conference?
We encourage early sign up. Registration fees vary based on how early groups sign up. We do have early bird rates. They can be spending anywhere between $39-50 depending on when they sign up.

How has the economy affected the Dare2Share tour?
Everything from registration to rooming has been affected. We have seen a dip because of the economy. A lot of churches that brought groups with 20-25 students are now looking at 15 students, people are being more conservative. Our original goal for the Denver, Colo., event was 6,000 students in attendance. We are at 3,600 right now and expect to reach 5,000.

We have a number of churches that stay in hotels but if there is a church that can’t afford the hotel side of it, we find a local church where the group can stay. In this economy, we want to provide that service as well and give groups a number of options. We try to negotiate the best hotel prices that we can but if a group can’t afford that then we find a way.

We just want to be faithful with what He’s given us and at the same time trust and pray that God will make a way for the people that need to be there.

How often do you work with convention and visitors bureaus?
We are making more of an effort to work with the visitors’ bureaus in the cities we tour. There are some cities that we have toured for years where the CVBs don’t even know who we are. We’ve been in Columbus, Ohio, for eight years but 2009 was the first year that we actually went out and introduced ourselves.

In other cities like Seattle and St. Louis, we’ve been working hand in glove with the CVBs. They really help us in terms of getting information out to the hotels, negotiating contracts, searching out venues, and making their restaurants and partners available to us. We have a person on staff dedicated to going out and educating CVBs about who we are and what we do.

Any advice for fellow meeting planners of youth events?
I would encourage planners at local churches to continue building a community network. Inviting the community to come together to be a part of youth events is important. There are a number of local networks of churches. The National Network of Youth Ministries is a great place to start to find other churches in the area.