Podcast Episode 216: Episode 189: Special Edition with Alex Edmiston

Description

Data analytics is a growing focus in the Rock community! Nearly a year ago, we welcomed Alex Edmiston to the Spark team as our first Spark Analyst. Since then, he’s been exploring Rock community data and building a Topical Hub for churches to share insights. Tune in as we discuss what’s unfolding and what’s next!

Transcribed Content

This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock partner Triumph Tech, a full service specialist partner. Rock partners provide crucial support for Spark Development Network and important services for the Rock community. Connect with Triumph Tech today at rockrms.com/partners. Welcome back for a special edition of Rockcast. I'm Emily Forman, and we have a special guest with us here today. So we would to welcome Alex Edmiston. And if you're familiar with the last name, it is the same Edmiston. Alex has been interning with us for three years and is a recent grad as of last spring and has joined us for our first position ever with Spark as a a Spark data analyst. And we're so excited about the future and potential of that role and really excited to have Alex here to help talk us through that today. Welcome, Alex. Yeah. Thanks for having me here and thanks for hiring me as well. Absolutely. , you've really come in clutch. You've seen a lot of things happen around here on many sides of the roles that we have to play, and and that's really come to be very handy as you're looking at the actual data behind what we're doing. So let's talk a little bit about what you're doing and what you did when you first joined. I think that probably means we need to start at that community survey that you put out. What was the purpose of that and what kind of things did you ask the community? Yeah, that's a good question. Just any product or anything you're putting out to people, you need to have measurable objectives, which I feel for us is probably best found in a survey. So I think we had that idea just later in the year, maybe this is something we can do about year end every time. So goal was really just to get a pulse of the community, see how people are feeling about Rock. We're coming in with our own ideas of what we think we're doing well, what we think we need to be doing better. And so, of course this can be really valuable to see. Are those actually rooted in reality? Is this actually what the community is feeling as well? So we had a lot of questions on there. Definitely some higher level, just how do you feel about Rock? Down into the nitty gritty of what specific areas are you involved in? Then I even pulled in a lot of external data just how many Rxs has the respondent want to. So really just wanted to get a complete picture of the survey respondent and just their activity in the community and in Rock. Great. And I think many of our those in our listening audience probably responded to the survey. We had some good engagement by the people who are pretty engaged with many of the things we do here at Spark. So that was the reason we held that survey to get a baseline and to compare our assumptions about reality with actual hard data about it. And I would say it was successful. And there were a couple things that we did learn. Do you want to share just a couple highlights before we move on to what's next? Yeah, absolutely. I think overall, we kind of just got confirmation of what we were thinking about Rock. we know that people get a lot of value out of Rock. we're nonprofit. We're not trying to rip people off. So they're not having to pay a whole lot for a piece of technology we think is really great. And so that was confirmed in this survey. We also learned that people are pretty likely to keep on using Rock, which is great. And we also just got confirmation in some areas we think we need to improve in such as our documentation, as well as leadership buy in. we realize that leaders of churches aren't operating Rock on a day to day basis. So we know we want to get those people more involved. And that was something we saw in the survey as well. And then lastly, we saw this the regional hubs maybe aren't doing as well as we thought, which is hard for us to be directly involved in that. But that's something that we really want to empower Right. Our leaders in that area to be successful in. Exactly. And those of you who attended our Rockstar call in the fall probably saw Alex's presentation on that information. And and if you're in the Rockstar group and didn't see it, that video link should be in the channel for that. But we've made a couple of adjustments based on some of that data. Do you want to share a couple of those with us, Alex? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first of all, we changed the name from regional community and to regional hub. So I think just a little topical shift there is good. I think we'll go into this later. I think we're changing some of the ways we're branding some of our events. And leadership buy in, right? So we want to really focus on leadership engagement to help. It's gonna actually help spark and it's going to help the Rock teams inside each church as well. The more their leaders kind of understand what it is we do, how it's a little different than maybe what they anticipate, and even what's possible. And so we're taking some of those learnings even into our next Rx planning, which is one of the reasons that we're a little bit delayed in putting that event registration out. We're not just, , hitting the rubber stamp and redoing the event this year. We're really remaking this with a different vision and goal, part of which is to really provide that engagement opportunity in a super easy way for the leadership, the executive level leadership at Rock Churches. So more on that soon. And by the time this podcast is released, probably very soon. And and that's definitely been helped by the results of this survey. And as you mentioned, the regional communities, we saw that where those were performing well, there was a lot of engagement and value. Where they weren't, it was a little less engaged. And so we want to help empower that. And as we were looking at it, we realized, gosh, there are definitely regional groups of people getting together, but there are also topical groups. people are are coming together about interesting topics inside the community. So we went with the direction of hubs instead of regional communities. That way we can have regional and topical hubs. And we wanna help just make that again an easier way to connect. And, , we didn't wanna create sub communities within the community. We just wanna have gatherings and and meetups. So the the hub concept and the leadership engagement, I know both of those directly came out of the survey information. Okay. So that's going backward. And some of you might have been familiar with some of that information. But now that we have everybody all caught up, where are we now? What's our focus right now in this area and in the immediate future? Yeah, so something we're definitely interested in is what data visualization, what business intelligence tools churches are using, just because we want to make sure that we're giving them the ability to easily integrate into those. We want to make sure as well that no church is left behind in that scene. So most churches are probably not able to afford the industry leaders of that space. We want to make sure we're both empowering the big churches to be able to use their software well, as well as the small churches to make sure they're not getting totally left in the dust with data. They should be getting the same insights because they probably want the same insights as the bigger churches. That's exactly what we're finding. Everybody's kind of pursuing these same insights. So how do we facilitate that? And in a community ours, of course, there's a lot of variety and diversity in the approach. So it's important to understand where they're looking for these insights currently, right? What their tools of choice are? Yeah, absolutely. So recently we put out a survey that wasn't as well broadcast as the previous one. So there's a little fewer responses here. We did do a survey of roughly what BI tools churches are using. So I can get into the results of that. Sure. Yeah. So we found that a lot of the large churches are pretty split between the industry leaders you may know, which are Tableau and Microsoft Power BI. So both are incredible tools that can be pretty pricey. So that's typically only available to the larger churches, which is what we found in the survey. And between them, I said, it was pretty split between Tableau and Power BI. About half of the churches used Tableau, about half used Power BI, which makes sense. Think it kinda just comes down to personal preference at that point. Both are extremely powerful tools. We found that the medium sized churches, at least how we categorize them, typically use a different BI tool. They'll still use an external one just because it offers you more power and it's lot easier to use than what's built natively into Rock. So they'll typically spend a little bit of money, maybe not as much as you need for a Tableau or Power BI, but they'll definitely bring us some external source. Whereas small churches that they'll typically just rely on the native Rock features, which are very powerful, definitely. They are. There can be a time and place for the data visualization that a BI tool can bring into play. Yeah, definitely. And a lot of the smaller churches, they said in the comments of this survey, we only need one or two insights to really tracking. So, in that case, don't need to go out and spend a lot of money on an external tool. What's built into Rock is perfectly fine for that. And it probably depends a little bit on the size of your dataset as far as having your hands around the data in a way that helps you make decisions. Yeah, definitely. Well, if you've customized any of your data things in Rock, which hopefully people aren't, but if you have, that'll definitely make it harder to bring into an external source. You might want to rely on the native functions to do that. Great. And so I think this was also kind of the inspiration for creating this new community hub that's topical for data analysts. Right? So we have a data analytics community hub. And is that where you primarily put the survey out for this particular one about tools? Yes. Okay. Great. So these are a group of people that are really interested in data analysis, data analytics, data visualization, and they're gathering in Rocket Chat right now under that Community Hub name. Right? Yep. Great. So if that's of interest to you, just a little shout out to that. So Alex, as we're working together with the community on this initiative that's so important to Spark and to nearly all the churches in the community, what would you say is the goal and the purpose of the data analytics that you're digging into? Yeah. So maybe I can back up a bit a little more. It's the origin of the data analytics channel. So it kind of all started when my dad and I had visited a local church. We saw some really great things that they were doing in the data analytics sector. And we realized that, , not faulting churches, but it's not really an area where there's a lot of collaboration. Just because every church cares about different metrics. Every church tracks metrics a different So there's not a lot of collaboration there. And we realized that was kind of an issue and something we wanted to fix. So we thought, how can we get churches talking with one another about data? And I don't know, we have a great tool Rocket Chat where so many members of our community already are. So why not just create a new channel? Yeah. Where they can just come together. And that's really what the goal is. We just want people discussing, maybe not the nitty gritties of data. We already have a lot of other active channels where that's going on, but kind of more just bigger picture, bigger strategy decisions, , how are you tracking engagement? what's your goal behind it? Are you trying to just increase total engagement or you're trying to increase engagement one person at a time? And so there's already a lot of great comments, questions that people have put in the channel. So I will say if you do join the channel, don't just type something at the bottom, maybe scroll up a bit because there's already a lot of great messages people have put out discussing these things. So while everyone might be tracking different metrics, do you find they're usually asking the same questions? Yeah, absolutely. I think at the end of the day, a lot of churches have the same goal of , how can we lead more people to Christ? So I hope in that pursuit, everyone would have the same goal. I think that's what I'm finding just as people talk in the channel. And most of the conversations even so far have kind of just been about engagement. how can we get the people in our church more invested in their faith? how can we track that? How can we measure success in that area? It sounds a space that's ripe for collaboration, which I know is why we stepped into it because churches are doing this and the more I mean, we've seen in other areas with Rock, the more people share what they're working on and why and how, the more exponentially beneficial it is to everyone. So it's really exciting to see this is kind of at the early stages of that collaboration that's been so empowering throughout the rest of the Rock community. Yeah, absolutely. I think you said, it's still at the early stages. So it's kind of a fun challenge at this point. I feel if you are thinking at all about data analytics, would totally just encourage you to join that channel and put whatever thoughts you have. There's no right or wrong way to think about data. We're still in the early stages. So any insights, any feedback on how we could be doing it better or just anything you can put out there to other churches would be really valuable. That's a good point. If you're curious, that's a good spot to show up, see what's going on. And I bet there will be something you can learn and something you can share that will benefit on both sides. Yeah. Absolutely. Great. Well, and speaking of just getting started, didn't you have your first meetup recently? Right? Was it the January? Yes. It was, I think, the second to last week in January. Okay. So the first meetup was a virtual event and I think you have those scheduled every other month or so going forward. What can you tell us about how did that go? Yeah, it went great. I think the first half of the meeting was kind of just introductions and getting to know people, which seemed a bit awkward to me, but I think it was actually really valuable. And just getting a pulse of where everyone in the community is at and what kind of projects we're thinking about. So I encourage people in that space to maybe try to intentionally track one or two things people were saying and follow-up with them. So hopefully that ended up happening. But I think the real meat of the meeting was in the second half where we had Matt and Andrew from Life Church present on their Attender Lifecycle, I believe it was called. So I can get into that. Oh, let's do. Let's share that. I know that's something that on the Spark team, we've been kind of simultaneously in our own lane digging into many of the same or similar things. So it seems a great place to start. Tell us about it. Yeah, absolutely. It was really neat to see what they were doing. It was, they're almost coming at it from a business angle. I feel I don't really want to boil it down to that because there's a lot more intentionality that they brought to it than a typical business would. But they're kind of just looking at, it's the life cycle of a tender at Life. Church. this is what happens when they show up the first time. this is about what percentage of people never show up again after the first time and kind of just tracking their journey to see, okay, when someone comes to Life. Church, what typically happens? And it was just really interesting to see how they broke down the different categories of attenders, as well as they had all the numbers , okay, if someone's in this category, X percentage of them will head on to the next category or Y percentage of them will regress back into not coming for a little bit. So it was just really cool to see the intentionality they put into , tracking how people come to their church. That's really cool. And it strikes me as you're talking about this, how critical it is to have well defined metrics and to know how to measure the things that you want to report on. Right? So I mean, that sounds elementary, but a lot of times we'll look at a pretty chart somewhere and say , oh, great. That's great. Let's get some insights from that. But you really have to start with the fundamental basics that require a lot of discipline and a lot of hard thinking and maybe some adjustments before you go all in on what it is you're measuring and how. And I think that's a good entry point for someone that's considering, gosh, I'm interested in measuring engagement of first time people or some other form of engagement. You really need to know, , who is it that I want to track? What behaviors do they have? And how do I track that in Rock? How do I how do I know? , for instance, how many people showed up on a weekend and who are those people? That's a difficult thing to track unless you're doing actual check-in for your service. So you have to start with something that's measurable and you have to have it really well defined. Yeah, absolutely. That's a good point. I think seeing what Life. Church did was really neat. But if you just looked at kind of the flow chart of attendance they presented, think anyone in that meeting could probably say, I could just make that in fifteen minutes on my free time. there's nothing too complicated about it. But I think just the really cool part and why they're able to speak just so well about is I'm sure the countless hours that they put in just defining what is an engaged person, sure. It's how many times do you, does someone not show up in a row to be considered , inactive or unengaged. And so, I'm , well, what they did maybe wasn't, , there wasn't dozens of lines, dozens of boxes everywhere. But it was just a really simple chart. I think that just goes to show how much work and on the back end they put in. So simple something is, the more thought has probably gone into it and pruning. Yeah. Lot of times, the shorter essay is the one that took longer than the long essay. That can certainly be true. Another thing that comes to mind is process. So you can measure things all day long, but if you don't know the actual processes that your staff, your ministry leaders, your volunteers are taking to count or measure or move someone through a process, it's possible that you have a leak somewhere. Right? And there's something you're totally missing. So here's what comes to mind for me. For instance, if you want to track baptism numbers and you have a baptism registration that people can sign up at, that feels , oh great, that's totally measurable. We can get that in Rock. We can report off of it. But did you think about that one campus where they have walk up baptisms and don't require anybody to check-in or register or leave their name or anything? If you have even something that small at one campus, one exception, that does kind of throw off your data. So there's another point where you have to just be really rigorous in chasing things down. Yeah, absolutely. I think we even saw that in the Life. Church presentation, not only did they show off their flowchart, but they also broke down how individual pastors would go about following up with people who needed to be followed up with. And they did a lot of fancy stuff, especially with AI integrations. That's Yeah. And they kind of created talking points about someone's profile in Rock based on putting all that information into an AI. Which maybe sounds a bit dangerous to people listening to this, but , go go watch the video. They explain how it safe and the steps they're using to make sure that data is not getting trained into the models. But I think that that just goes to show the time and thought, the intentionality that Life Church is putting into following up and making the conversation easier between each pastor and each individual. And it really requires you to also have the buy in of your staff, right? The pastors have to believe in it. Have to understand the vision behind it and they have to, , wanna follow it. And and those things all come together. we're talking analytics, but really it all starts with the the vision, the buy in, the details, and and then you can have some some pretty cool things that come out of it. Now you have the opportunity to find individual engagement and work on shoring that up in places where you might have some fall off. Absolutely. I think you can measure all you want with your church, but yeah, if you don't create actionable ways to increase that, what's the point of even measuring it? So I think, saying that out loud maybe makes me realize that that's something I need to push more as I'm in myself as I'm thinking about how I can grow the content, the data analytics, channel. But I think that's just something that Life Church displayed really well and definitely made an impact on me. That's cool. And that's an example of the collaboration we're looking for in this topical hub. So if that sounds interesting to you, where to find us. What's the name of the community hub there? Pretty simply just data analytics. Great. So look for that. Pop in if you're curious. Is there a link to the presentation there from the last meeting? If you go into the data analytics hub on the Rock community site, and you just scroll down past all the other smiling faces that are part of the hub, you can see the link to the Perfect. Yeah. So it sounds something people should definitely check out. And we can provide some links and show notes to the various things that we've mentioned here. But, , really encourage you to to check it out. That collaboration can help move you forward. If you're just getting started on your end, there's a lot to learn. And if you're further down the path, there's still a lot to learn. I think all of us are growing together. As you just mentioned, Alex, even talking through some things, we're all continually gaining insights and opportunities for growth. And to do that in a community the Rock community is just priceless. All right. Well, we'd to thank everyone for tuning in and listening. Alex, thanks for joining us on the podcast today. We're super excited about this topic and excited to see where it develops. And if you were just listening to Rockcast for the first time, don't forget to hit subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you can find out what we're up to the next time we release one. Thanks for joining us. Do a church that loves the idea of using Rock but hasn't taken that leap yet? With managed hosting, churches of any size can get access to Rock's amazing technology, hassle free. With just one click, Rock's managed hosting removes the roadblocks that might stop a church from switching to Rock by making the process simple. Churches get the ease of a SaaS church management system without losing any of Rock's powerful features. Are you ready to take the next step or share with another local church? Visit Rockrms.com/hosting today.