Podcast Episode 213: Episode 187: Rock RMS and Hurricane Helene

Description

Listen in as Lee Boone, Data Director at Biltmore Church in North Carolina, discusses how their team prepared for Hurricane Helene and navigated the influx of needs, resources, and volunteers during their relief efforts.

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 to Rockcast. This is a special edition podcast where we go behind the scenes with a member of our community to talk about the impact that Rock is having. I'm Emily Forman, our special guest today is Lee Boone, the data director at Biltmore Church. Welcome, Lee. Hey. Thanks so much for having me. We're so excited to have you. , the topic of this particular podcast is one that I know will be of interest to many people and has actually touched the lives of many in a really impactful way. Your church is located in North Carolina, and you shared that you have seven campuses physically and one online, average attendance of about 6,100 per weekend. And important to this particular podcast, you were fairly front and center to the recent storm disaster that came through the region there. And so we're gonna talk a little bit about how you used Rock to help out in that disaster relief. So as a little bit of background first, can you tell us how long Biltmore Church has been using Rock? Sure. So we've been Rock users since August of twenty eighteen, so that puts us a little over six years. Okay. And tell us about your staff. , we receive a lot of questions from churches looking at Rock, and they are always interested in the variety of staff associated with Rock that each church has. How many staff members do you have working on Rock, and what is their, , background or what type of work do they do? Sure. So Rock falls under our technology department as a whole. We have five people altogether on our technology department. Two of them strictly stick with the IT and then two of us are strictly with our database system and then one oversees the four of us. Myself, I am the director of our database system and then I have someone that works alongside me and our data integrity, really just trying to keep our data clean with the amount of use that we get within our database system. Great. Well, thank you for that background. Let's let's talk a little bit about what has been going on this fall. You've been on Rock for quite a few years as you shared, but you really led the way with some creative approaches to serving your community in the the hurricane Helene situation that came through and just devastated the communities of Western North Carolina. In fact, we prior to this podcast recording, we were looking at the disaster mapping that has been provided, and your church seems to be very much in the middle of that. Can you just tell us a little bit about You saw the storm coming. How did you react? What did you do to prepare? Sure. So the day before the actual storm of Helene hit our area, we were already seeing excessive rainfall. So we were already experiencing a lot of flooding and we knew that this could potentially be really bad. So immediately one of our executive pastors on our team reached out to me on that Thursday and said, Hey, I think we need to start preparing for next steps in case this really does impact us the way that they could potentially do. And so right off of that, we started kind of a drawing board in my office here and started thinking about, do we need a landing page? What kind of forms and workflows are we gonna need? And then should we set up any text keywords? And that's that's what started our progression and and preparing for for what was to come. Yeah. Very interesting. So the purpose of the tools you were looking at setting up, were those for your community to reach out and request help? Were they for people who wanted to volunteer to assist? What was your original goal as you were working through that? Yeah. So it was a combination of two. We kinda landed on two specific words to start to use in an SMS pipeline for text keywords. Relief, which was specifically for those people needing assistance and response for those who were willing to help with the assistance. And so that was our avenue that we began this adventure on was using those two specific keywords to really collect people in need and people that were willing to help. And then when Helene actually hit that day, it sounds it it actually knocked out communications and was more severe than anticipated or toward the more severe end of what you might've worked for. Can you paint a picture of what that looked and how the community started taking action? Sure. So the night before we did shoot out a social post and we're able to collect 200 volunteers right off the bat that said that they were ready to help if we saw a severe impact. And so the day of, we did. We saw in those morning hours, the waters began to rise around the area. And it wasn't until about maybe a little after lunchtime around 01:00 where we saw the storm kind of start to settle down. And as you began to walk out your door, were hit with the reality of what had happened. But for us, the communication was the biggest one. You stepped out, you pulled out your cell phone you normally would to contact your family and say, I'm okay. And we were unable to make that Our phones either set SOS or just nothing. There's no service, no bars, which is a very big thing. You were without power and with having no cell service, there was no alternatives for internet. So consequently, most people just didn't have any communication with the outside world. So beyond what you saw in your backyard was all that you were aware of what was reality of what had happened. Wow. That is something I can't even personally imagine. I'm sure that was hugely impactful, but it also kind of derailed your original plans for how to connect with your community. So how did your team work through that? Sure. So initially, most people were not able to get off of their property. So you saw neighbors, many of whom you've never met before, they started coming together, pulling out chainsaws out of their storage buildings and saying, Hey, we've got to get out of this to get to reality and see what's actually going on. And so you start cutting trees and start making your way out and you really become more and more aware. And my first thought was, I need to get to the church, my church, my local church and see what the impact there was and immediately hop in and see how I can help. I may work here, but this is still my local church and my family and I wanted to see how I could help. That's the first place I went. And to our surprise, with the power being off everywhere else, half of our church buildings still had power. Wow. We didn't completely understand how that was possible, but half of the building had power. So we were able to go in and charge our devices and plug things in though we may not have initially had internet. So for us, the first place we noticed we were able to get any sort of service was the higher we went. So we went to the Second Floor of our education Building in our facility and noticed we were getting a little bit of service. And so we ended up making a command post on the roof, right outside of our Second Floor of our education Building. So very shocking for anyone coming onto the property, seeing a bunch of people sitting out on a roof, but that was where we could get service and start trying to interact with people in our community again. The only other way that people were getting any source of information was through the radio. FM radio, we had a few local stations that were staying on the air 20 fourseven. And through that, people were gaining information of what it was in other areas. The only way that people knew what was going on. So crazy, a crazy time for sure. Absolutely. So when people had requests for help at that point, they just came to the church. Is that right? Yeah. Many people were just coming on foot. I'm sure maybe in their minds, this was the only place they could think of that might be the first sense of help. So we had people coming from local neighborhoods, walking onto our campuses, either saying, hey, this is my situation or, Hey, I was able to get out now, how can I help? And so we started with next steps with that. On the first day after the storm, we had a tractor trailer of ice that was just delivered to our campus. Honestly, I'm not even aware of where it came from. Wow. But we said we need to resource this out to the community. Yep. And so that next day we started opening up that truck and allowing people to come through. We created a distribution line and allowed them to pick up ice. Our thoughts with that, preserving food for as long as they can, having some source of water if they needed it and just first steps in that process. What else did you do to help organize relief at that time? Yes. So we began to leverage our cell phones for hotspots and started sending out some social posts. We had put out the response one, which was collecting volunteers prior to the storm, but now we could start pushing the relief option, which was to collect those who needed help. And so we really started pushing that and we started to gather some very heart wrenching stories of situations that were going on and just starting to try to organize all of this incoming information. So we started utilizing the people that had come onto campus to say that they were willing to volunteer and mobilizing them with things that needed to be done that had been sent into us. And by this point, people were realizing they could go to certain areas and get cellular reception. And that's when we started to see a lot more of incoming needs and the reality of what had happened. And just by the pictures that I've seen of that area, I imagine that response was just an overwhelming responsive need. Oh, for sure. Overwhelming is an understatement. We definitely saw by the end of maybe the second week, we had seen over 500 requests for relief and it was very overwhelming. With that, we had a lot of people start donating supplies. And so we were able to start stifling through those donations, things that were very valuable and usable to these people. The main things that we noticed that people were in need of was gasoline, which we couldn't necessarily provide, food, hot meals, which we worked with a resource that had come onto our facility to assist with that. And really honestly, just community with other people. Those were three really big things that were right off the bat needed. And we were able to provide two of those. So that was encouraging. Absolutely. I just can't think of a better story of the church truly being the hands and feet of Christ in the middle of a situation where, , I'm sure there was a lot of hopelessness and and people being quite scared. So it sounds you had to make some adjustments midstream once reality started becoming apparent. What did you do? What did you do with Rock specifically to help accommodate some of these new directions and supplies? Yeah. So first and foremost, we wanted to care for our volunteers, the ones that serve with us on Sundays every week. We, which is something we hadn't talked to prior to the podcast, but we set up a text campaign, a connection request campaign, and was able to reach out to our volunteers, check-in on them. They pour out so much on Sundays, it was our chance, our turn to pour into them. So that was huge. From there, other areas that we realized we were struggling with was how we were communicating with our volunteers. Initially, we started out with just general SMS communications in Rock, sending out a text, receiving those texts and responding to those texts. That quickly became very overwhelming. So we transitioned into trying to use the RSVP feature in Rock. So we would tokenize some links, send them out RSVP for which volunteer opportunity you wanted to serve in. Well, that's a lot to go into a text message. Yes. So we quickly had to realize we needed to pivot again. And we began to use the sign ups feature in Rock. And that has been our saving grace and gathering volunteers to help serve our community. That's incredible. At this point, we're a couple months past the impact of hurricane Helene, but I know that it's not really behind us in the area where you live. There's still immediate need. What does the community disaster relief look now? Yeah. So for this winter season, most of this has already taken place, but we had the opportunity to partner with a lot of our local schools to identify the families that were in need. We saw our homelessness and the children in our area based off of the local school's information almost quadruple from the storm. And so in that, we were able to identify kids that were in need for shoes and possibly families as a whole that we could offer a gift shopping experience for their families. So what we did, we gathered volunteers through sign ups and were able to go into the local schools. We partnered with a business that's in the area and was able to gather bunches of brand new shoes, take them into the schools, fit them on the children, get them the exact size that they need and send them on their way with a little encouragement of something for their family. And then secondly, with the gift shopping experience, we were able to collect a bunch of gifts in our facility at our church and be able to allow parents to come in and have a part in a child's Christmas by picking out what they thought would be the best gifts for them. They came in, picked out those gifts and were able to have them wrapped on-site and take them back home. And even we were able to provide Christmas trees for the people that were able to take those. A tree, some gifts to put under that tree to give that family a little bit of sense of normality and a Christmas that they can remember for a long time. That's pretty incredible. Going into 2025, we are looking at two specific ways to continue helping our community. The biggest hurdle for us is going to be larger financial assistance. We've had the opportunity through people's generosity in our area to provide cars and possibly even homes as we're looking at each individual person's situation. Secondly is laborious repairs. There's a lot of work still to be done, you said, and possibly we're even looking at the opportunity to help with local infrastructure repairs at a large scale. So we're really excited about what 2025 has to offer and the way that we can help with that. That's incredible. If we look at this to analyze your response and what you did in Rock, as an example or an inspiration for people in the future who may find themselves in the middle of some community needs, What would you say made it possible for you to pivot your efforts so quickly to accommodate the changing needs during the disaster? I know for myself, and I would say most likely for my teammate, we have a pretty good foundational knowledge of what Rock has to offer prior to this event. So with that, knowing what resources we could use there, as you heard, I went through a couple. So we found the one that was right for our situation. And once we found that it was smooth sailing from there. So just our familiarity with the Rock interface and being able to pick what was best for us and our church was beneficial to an exponential amount to help us be able to reach our community in a way that we couldn't have imagined. Lee, is there anything you'd recommend that other churches do in advance of a disaster to help them be prepared to serve? Yeah. Mean, if I'm being honest, you can never prepare for this. The things that we experienced are not something that anybody can really prepare for. But some of the things we did see that was a hassle was three different things. One, gathering volunteers. That was finding the best way to do that, which we eventually bell into our bus on the seat and found the right way. Two was organizing the large amount of donations. Everybody wants to give in some way, especially when it's fresh on their minds and people were sending tractor trailers to us. People were literally landing helicopters in our parking lot because they wanted to help. And so they were bringing us all kinds of supplies and we just really didn't have a way of filtering the people that were coming in either by phone call or text, would say, Hey, I'm on my way. And instead we created a workflow form, which allowed us to know what they were bringing and know what we could do with those specific things. So being ready to take in large amounts of donations. And thirdly, it's not a bad idea to have a Starlink ready. That sounds very simple, but what we realized we had a partnering church that came up and let us use their Starlink during this time. And it was super helpful to make our way off of the roof and into a room to have better conversations and be more resourceful to the situation that was going on. And that was done through a Starlink. So it's not a bad idea to have one on hand. You don't have to continually keep a plan, but we we realized that it was it was a great great thing to have. Yeah. what really stands out in the middle of this entire story is just the central place that the church building represents for help for the community, for people to bring resources, for people to offer to be a part of something. And that's exactly what we're all going for. Right? And it was recognized in the center of that disaster. And that's just a very humbling and inspiring story. Thank you for sharing all these details, and I hope this has been a great encouragement to the people listening. But Lee, before we wrap up, can you share with us how our Rock community can be praying for your church and for the Western North Carolina community as this recovery continues? Yeah. So three things again, that we can really pray for. One is wisdom and discernment. In this time we have lots of people that are asking for assistance and our heart as a church is we really want to help everyone that we can. And so we're doing our best with that, but sometimes the resources fall short. So that's something that we really need prayer for. Endurance is number two. Really wanna see it through until the end, until everything that we can is back to normal. We really pray for endurance. And lastly, but not least at all, is that there are doors that are opening for us to have gospel conversations. Many of the people that we're assisting do not have a walk with Christ. And so this may be their first encounter with Jesus. And we really want to be able to have those doors open now, immediately. You've seen something so horrible, but there is something so much better that's out there for them. So we're really hoping for those doors to open up. That's incredible. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story and for joining us here on Rockcast to make sure that the community gains a sense of inspiration from what Rock is helping empower every day. And as a reminder, the technology itself is just technology. It's people, it's vision, it's a desire to serve, it's good processes and having good thought and strategy behind what's happening. When all of this comes together, this is what enables us to serve exponentially when more is required from us, when we're called to something greater than we could possibly do ourselves. So Lee, we appreciate you being with us and sharing your story. Thank you so much. And if you're part of our listening community, don't forget to subscribe wherever you get podcasts, because the Rockcast will continue to bring you stories of impact in the community, as well as insights behind the scenes with our core team as we continue building this toolset to empower your ministry. 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.