Core Docs - Engagement - Intro to Connections

Rock Version: v19.0
Last Modified: 2026-04-07 3:53 PM

Many of your organization's strategies are about helping people move from one state to another. Often this movement isn't a straight line, but more of a meandering path. When the path takes an extended period of time it's possible for people to fall through the cracks.

This is where the Connections tool comes to our rescue. While workflows can be a great help by connecting people through automated processes, they can quickly become complicated and unwieldy in complex situations. The Connections tools provide a backbone that allows you to build advanced processes. As you'll soon see, workflows still play an important role in Connections but more so as an extension of the foundation instead of the foundation itself. But enough talk... let's see for ourselves what the Connections feature can do.

10,000 Foot View of Connections

When we started to work on the Connections features, we were trying to solve a specific problem: connecting people who want to serve. As we progressed through the ideation process, we started to see that this specific problem was really a reoccurring pattern inside of an organization. What we mean is, these features could be used in lots of different ways. With that realization we made the tool to be configurable for many different types of connection processes. Out of the box it's configured for a single Involvement (fancy term for serving) process, but we encourage you to build your own connection processes. You're not on your own, though; we'll show you how later.

In most connection processes the goal will be to take a person who wishes to be connected to a high-level Opportunity and walk them through a series of steps or activities until they can be connected to a specific group. This will make more sense if we look at an example. Let's consider the Involvement connection type.

Okay, now that we've seen all the components of a connection process, let's learn a bit more about the lifecycle of a request. Requests have a couple of different properties that allow us to describe their current state and see a history of previous activities. Each of these properties is discussed below.

State

The state of a request describes the standing of the request. There are only four options for state:

Status

You can define as many different statuses as you'd like for a request. These statuses are defined for each connection type. The statuses that have been configured for the Involvement connection type include:

Remember you can customize these statuses and add your own. For instance, you could have a status for In Training or Complete.

You can automate the process of moving individuals from one status to another. See Automating Status Changes for details.

Activities

Activities are a listing of events that have occurred during the process of connecting the requestor. You can customize what these activities are. The involvement connection type is pre-configured with the following activities:

While each request will only have one value for state and status, they can have as many activities as needed.

Now that we understand the properties of requests, let's see them in action.

The Role of Campus

Campus plays an important role in the connection process, particularly for multi-campus sites. As requests come in, they will be attached to a campus. Also, the connectors and assigned connection groups can be partitioned by campus. We'll see how to set this up later. For now, just know that the connection opportunities can be shared for all campuses while still providing support for campus-specific requests.

Spotting Connections a Mile Away

Connection requests are shown prominently on the person profile page to help give you an overview of a person's connection at a glance. Each connection request listed on the profile page lists the connection type, opportunity, campus and status.

You can edit the settings on this block to choose which connection requests to show based on their State.