LeadSmall 4+

I am a MS SGL at LifePoint Church in Maryland, and I love using the Lead Small app in our middle school ministry that I serve in. It's got great tools to keep track of my “few,” which is great, especially given the number of students we have in our ministry. The ability to put a picture to each student’s profile is absolutely amazing, especially for those times when a student is out for a few weeks and you forget their name. The only feature I have seen missing in the app is in the “This Week” section. We don't follow the XP3 MS curriculum exactly, week-by-week, so it would be nice if I could select which part of which series we are doing that week to have the resources available on my phone rather than on papers printed out for leaders. We also sometimes use our own series, so another awesome feature would be the ability to input your own main points, discussion questions, etc. to be able to have them in the app. Other than this, the app is fantastic!

The things this app does that are absolutely AWESOME are numerous: ability to put the small group kids you lead in a group in an app, ability to get them to take selfies to add to your app (so you can remember them later), ability to see the curriculum and get discussion questions quickly, ability to capture their Insta or Twitter handle, ability to know their favorite candy, ability to have ice breakers or a spinner so they will take turns, ability to text the students, or the parents or both! AMAZING stuff!

The problem is this app lacks an important feature: the ability to move the students from one group to another. When there are more than 10, the iPhone texting capability will not work with it, so you want to keep the group(s) a manageable size. Having to do a series of screen captures of a student's data so you can move them to a new group you're creating (like, say, kids that are going to an upcoming winter camp) is CRITICAL! I'm sold out to ORANGE but I'm looking for another app solution for small group communication.

Additionally, it would be great if we would be able to "slice and dice". We could, for example, click on school and then text all the students we lead from a particular school.

I truly want to love this app because at first blush it's great. Organized info for leading group, easy to access, fun colorful design, built in tools... There's a lot to love. However, I have constant bugginess with the channel settings. Our church has multiple age groups with different lessons, and the app doesn't usually remember my choice of which I'm using even to the point that as I have it open, I choose the class and it switches for a half second and then changes to a different class randomly. It takes me at least 3 times of choosing my class out of the menu before it "takes." Another issue is when my screen turns off I lose my place in the weekly lesson. When I reopen my phone, if it doesn't push me back completely to the opening page, it at very least puts me back at the beginning of the lesson, so using the app in real time doesn't work for me... Which is super sad because it has such potential. I've reinstalled and updated immediately, and still sad faces for me. Would love to see improvements and streamlining!