About Mormon Share

You've got a computer or file cabinet full of great ideas you've collected over the years from past callings, right? So did we!

Back in 2004, our founder Jenny Smith decided to share handouts she created for her Beehive class online. Because of thousands of daily visitors' contributions, MormonShare is now the largest collection of helps anywhere online.

Goals

Our goals are

1. to create great lesson helps,
2. to provide the best information from the best sources,
3. to help others easily find materials, and
4. to provide a way that allow others to share their ideas without requiring payment or registration.

We consider it to be part of the building up of Zion on the internet -- isn't
that really what Zion is -- The Ultimate Open Source Society?

Content

MormonShare.com has thousands of user submitted documents, object lessons, primary talks, and activity ideas categorized and even cross-linked with other sections of the website to help you find the help you need.

Over 5000 LDS Clipart Files

Our collection of LDS Clipart and Handouts grows daily thanks to our thousands of daily visitors. This is the largest collection of LDS clipart and documents available anywhere -- and it's totally free!

All clipart files are categorized by auxilliary and by keywords. Some of the handouts are even cross-referenced with our LDS Young Women's lesson helps, which has helps for every lesson in the Young Women's manuals.

Browse LDS Activity Ideas by Auxilliary

We've organized hundreds of tried and true LDS activity ideas (including camp and scouts) by auxilliary to make it easy for you to get inspiration for ward, youth, Primary, or other activities.

Searchable Database of LDS Object Lessons

User submissions make up the bulk of our LDS Object Lessons collection. Seminary and Sunday School teachers love the keyword search.

One-of-a-Kind Primary Talks Database

Mormon Share has the first ever and only database of free Primary talks that you can use as a spring board to help your children prepare talks. Many Primary teachers print our talks and keep them in their bags for children who forget to prepare a talk.

History

During the summer of 2004, Jenny Smith was serving as Beehive advisor in ward and made lots of handouts for her lessons. They were just sitting in her computer -- noone but her girls even knew they had existed -- and she thought it might be of help to someone to post them online at her personal website, JennySmith.net. She did, but didn't expect anything to come of it.

To her great surprise, within 2 weeks, most hits were coming from people seeking LDS handouts! YW leaders were desperate for lesson preparation help!

So, Jenny began posting more and more helps stored in her computer already, and soon had quite a list. She began to be worried about organizing these helps, because she had visited other websites that were so jumbled up you couldn't find a specific handout.

Experienced in database-driven website design, Jenny created databases of LDS Clipart and LDS activities and LDS Object Lessons to help people find the handouts and ideas they are seeking. She also began allowing users to post their activity ideas to the database, and to be listed on the site as a reference for others.

The clipart and object lessons databases were created in October 2004. The activities database was created at the same time, but the interface didn't come along until December 2004.

Never satisfied with her pet project, Jenny came up with the idea that we could post helps for every single YW lesson. The Young Women General Board has published the Resource Guide and New Era helps to assist leaders in preparing lessons, but after leaders prepare for Mutual, plus quarterly activities, plus stake activities, plus regular leadership meetings, plus fulfill their home responsibilities, and get ready to prepare lessons on Saturday night, looking up Ensign articles just seems like too much work! So, Jenny and husband Jared created an interface putting all the resources for Young Women leaders together in one space by lesson. It integrated with the clipart database to help leaders print out relevant handouts, too. The idea was implemented in code over Christmas holidays 2004.

Also in December 2004, the Forum where you can post ideas or ask for help from other users was created.

At the suggestion from someone at the Church Office Building, I added a section of Young Men's helps similar to the Young Women helps in Fall 2005.

JennySmith.net experienced technical difficulties for several months during the summer of 2006 while Jenny moved cross-country, and the website was down intermittently for several weeks.

In December 2006, we hired a friend to write Primary Talks that went with the 2007 Primary Theme and created the very first, totally free Primary Talks database -- ever.

In 2007, embarassed by notoriety from the website ("You're THE Jenny Smith?"), Jenny changed the official URL of the website from JennySmith.net to MormonShare.com. The new website debuted in October.

Early in 2008, Jenny began evaluating content management systems to better handle the increasing amount of data and personal interaction. When Drupal 6 was released, the new system seemed almost perfectly suited for Mormon Share's unique needs. The new system added the ability for sharing comments on articles, increased taxonomic search capabilities, publishing workflow, and users can upload documents, articles, or activity ideas themselves. It also gives administrators greater control over content publishing and spam.

Today (July 2008) MormonShare.com receives well over 100,000 visitors per month from all over the world. We have recieved emails from church members in Austraila, Norway, Brazil, France, Germany, Canada, Chile, and the United States -- all of them are grateful for the resources YOU help provide by sharing your activity ideas and handouts. Thank you.

The Future of Mormon Share

Someday, I'd like to have a database of Primary talks and awesome, obscure General Authority quotes. I'd also like to add an LDS internet directory, because I think we will find an increasing need for LDS products as the church expands and as the world's standards continue to degrade. We need a way to find them. But all these things take from the time that I can spend with my family. Like most, I have more ambition than time....