Podcast Episode 201: Episode 174: Prioritize Ministry Thinking

Description

This episode of RockCast wraps up the second of two podcasts devoted to community Q&A. Join Emily Forman, Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo in a discussion that navigates NCOA, the move to Cloudflare for Captcha, the latest trends with Rock Mobile, the future of structured content and the ultimate goal of thinking ministry-first.

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, the podcast dedicated to the Rock community. Join us as we dive into behind the scenes happenings, offer insights into the community, and explore leadership dynamics. I'm Emily Forman, and joining me are Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo. Welcome to Rockcast. It has been busy around here, continues to be. I think that's the theme. Seems we're always saying the same thing, but for different reasons. And we've had some great requests from the community about topics they want to know more about because as we move so quickly, sometimes we have too many things to give updates on than we're able to put out. So let's dedicate some time today to answering some community questions and providing some additional insights. Yeah, , one of the first ones that I think would be kind of fun to talk about is around some changes to NOCA. So National Change of Address for those who don't speak acronyms. Yeah. And I hate acronyms other than IBM, we probably shouldn't have any acronyms is my opinion. But there I just said NOCA. So national change of address. So we're making some changes around that. Do you wanna unpack that a little bit, Nick? I can, yeah. So the way NOCA works today in Rock is the Spark server acts as sort of a middleman and deals with the external service provider. That's how it works today. So when your Rock instance wants to do some Noka, it talks to the Spark server, clears the payment and says, okay, go for it. And then your server is talking now to the service back and forth and getting data. Well, we've tripped on some problems as the service provider changes and puts in place harder, more restrictions. It's been hard for us to deal with that because now your server is sending data to them and we're kind of stuck in the middle. They end up deactivating our Spark account. It's been a bit of a nightmare. Plus they're on varying versions of Rock that we don't have control over. Right. And so, the service providers , , just send out a patch update. Well, fixed an issue in sixteen point five or sixteen point four, but somebody's on fifteen point five or fourteen point nine, whatever. Twelve. Yeah. So what we're doing is we are kind of tearing that system down and we're killing several birds with one stone, we're going to also get rid of our web forms block. So this new block will be Obsidian and it's a much simpler idea. It's basically you, and it copies the settings, the same settings that you already had for doing the Noka stuff. It's now in this new block. So you point it to a data view, you press export, it exports your data into the spreadsheet. You take that spreadsheet, which is how the Noka service provider wants to do it anyhow. You go over to their system, you import that into their tool, they process the data. When they're done, you click export on their system, you take that exported file, and then you go back to that block, step two on the Rock side, and you import that data into Rock. So all your addresses get updated with the move data, again, based on the rules that you set in that block, , well, don't mark anyone or mark someone inactive if they've moved more than 500 miles away. all those rules and all those settings still exist, but it's a much simpler approach. The plus side is the fee is cheaper too. When you move to the new system, it's half the cost to perform one of these operations. So we think it's a win win. Yeah, and there's also some forms with the post office that the service provider was needing to have for every single church. It's a very easy form. It's not a long form, but for us to collect all that and keep it up to date for every single church was just not gonna be possible for us. In addition, it's a better privacy for your church too. your data is not coming through a Spark server. It's between you and TrueNoka, the provider. And they're fantastic. I mean, they're a great company. They could be charging a lot more. Many people do, I won't name their names, but there's other service providers that charge you a hundred times what they're charging. So I think it's just a better all around approach. It's a teeny bit more work on your part to do the download upload. You have to create an account at TrueNoka, but none of this is hard. it's just, maybe an extra ten, fifteen minutes. Yeah, but cost savings and you don't do the NOCA that often. At least I have not seen many churches doing it many, many times a year. It's usually one or two. Yeah, I'd recommend two or three, but in the past it was much more important because you're trying to do mailings and you had to be cast And back in the day, was when you did mailings, it was crazy. You had to do it once a month to be cast certified, but those days are gone. It's still a great way to know that someone maybe is disconnecting. If they move a long ways away, it's a good way to know that. Keep your data clean, but it's just an update. Yep. And that form you mentioned, I forgot about that. You're right. But it's really just a simple, hey, acknowledge that you're not doing bad things with this data. That's really what it's about. But for us to have that in place and signed by every single church using the service. And I think you have to do it. I feel that was had to do it occasionally. So it was gonna be really difficult for us to do that. To a point where we were actually gonna probably lose money on it. Because the additional resourcing to do all that. So it just doesn't make sense. It's a cleaner technical solution too. That is coming. All right. Well, that sounds a great solution. Thanks for the update on that. Yeah. And someone else in the community asked a little bit about CAPTCHA. A couple versions ago, we released some changes to CAPTCHA. Nick, do you wanna talk through what was done and why it was done? Yes. But first I would to say that that is also an acronym, which stands for completely automated public Turing test to tell company sorry, computers and humans apart. Probably never remember that. I would consider that IBM. It's not really an acronym. I think we should stick with CAPTCHA. that. Really absurd. Yeah. But it's , what does that word mean? Anyhow, that's that's that. So, we have we were starting to go in a direction with Captcha and we said, what? Before this gets really baked into Rock in many places, we should really consider the best solution. What's not a good solution? Well, there were some concerns with Google Captcha and what they're doing with the data. So when use Captcha behind the scenes, they're using all of their knowledge to determine whether you, your computer, your IP address, your whatever tracking cookies are on your system, whether you're a human or not. And then they have that data and they know where you're logging in potentially, and they'll put you in a cohort and sell that data to advertisers. And that's really not great. And in fact, we weren't the only ones who didn't that. Cloudflare said, We don't that either. We're going to provide an alternative service. So for anybody who's concerned about privacy, we're going to be the knights in shining armor. So we chose to implement or basically integrate with Cloudflare Captcha. And somewhere in Rock settings, I forget the exact panel, you can set up your Captcha key once you've set up your account at Cloudflare. And then in fact, just by setting your settings into that panel in Rock, a bunch of places where it's already enabled, just immediately start to take effect, whether it's the payment blocks, utility payment, there's a variety of blocks that are using this now. Workflow entry, they'll just automatically make sure it's a human filling out your form. Otherwise it won't let them proceed. Yeah, know a people would probably say, Well, what's the big deal? And it can kind of get to be a big deal, with where our culture is going. Where this is spiritual content and you never know when that spiritual content will be deemed to be inappropriate by others. And we just kind of felt we don't need to be a part of that. I think it's scary too, when you think about Google's footprint in terms of having not only the Captcha data that they have, but they also have the Google Analytics data. And I think that they're not stitching that together. Mean, today, I'm sure it's happening. And I think the more we can be detached from those types of tracking, especially from a spiritual perspective, I think the better off we are. And if there is a great free other option, why wouldn't you? So that's kind of the news of how that happened. Well, makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So also community has been asking about Rock Mobile. There's a digital strategy sub team of the community that meets once a They share best practices and such. So a couple of weeks ago, there was a review of what they were doing with Rock Mobile. And it was so impressive to see the level of innovation and diversity of design, but also diversity in terms of their strategy, using one toolkit. And so it was amazing to see, one toolkit being used, but there's no way you would even know, because everything was so well designed and created. It literally is the Lego analogy fits so well. And so it's really interesting to see all the powers of Rock Mobile. It's not just for what you would expect, the default behavior of just showing messages and showing some events and some content. Yeah, it's checked that box a long time ago. It's so much more capable than that. And so, where's that going? Well, we're in this strategy right now of kind of going to the next generation of the technology platform, much we're doing with web, we call that Obsidian. That next gen version for Rock Mobile is called Maui. That's not our term, that's Microsoft's. And so we've been working really hard to port everything to this new next gen platform that Microsoft's working on. Luckily, we were was very close to where that they were going, so we didn't have to make a lot of changes. So this Maui. And so Maui is a technology platform change, but it's also we took the opportunity while we were doing all that work and having to shift things just a little bit, we thought, well, while we're in there, let's kind of clean up the design that comes out of the box, make it easier to style, make it look better just without having to do anything. So we're just putting those final touches on that and the whole thing should be ready here real soon. So that's coming. But where do we kind of see it as a platform going? I think it's interesting. We have ideas, but obviously the community has ideas too. And right now a lot the community ideas revolve around this blending of having external facing app with having an internal facing So there's a lot of interest right now in staff apps. And a lot of times you don't have to have a separate app. In fact, we would recommend in most cases, you don't have a separate app. But because of the security that you can have inside of Rock Mobile, you can make certain parts of the app only available or visible if you're a staff person or a lay leader. And so, can do a lot of things with managing connections, reminders. Reminders are a killer feature for Rock Mobile, because a lot of times you wanna set a reminder in the context of a situation or an event, or maybe you're not behind your computer, you're at the hospital, you're out in the lobby. The reminders feature is just a killer app for Rock Mobile. So you can enter those reminders in super quick. Life Church has been huge in pioneering the push for these staff apps. They've added a lot of features or funded the addition of a lot of features. So you can do mentions now on a note. So if you add a note to a person's record, you can mention a person on staff and they'll get kind of a notification of that alert or that mention. So a lot of things you can do. SMS conversations are now in there. Just really, really great toolkit. It is a toolkit though that does come unassembled. So can we create an assembled version of it? We could, and it's not to say we would never do that. But what we find is that the diversity of what people have in mind for Rock Mobile is way further than the diversity of what they do for even their websites. So I feel if we put something out of the box, and that's to say we would never do that, but if we did do that, I think there'd be almost as much effort undoing it so that they can redo it the way that they want versus starting from a clean slate. At least that's where we are today. I'm sure that will change over time as we try to make things even more simpler for churches that just don't want that complexity. But right now the toolkit is very, very powerful. And there's a lot of features that we would still to add and that we're pushing on and there'll be a lot of talk about that at the conference. So if you want to hear that, come to the conference. And we'll be announcing and talking a lot about that after the conference for those who can't come. Laroc Mobile, I think to summarize it, we're really, really happy with its capabilities today. It's a major investment for us. Have a full time person working on it, actually probably even more than that. So it's super important for us. It's a big piece of our digital strategy going forward. Another big piece of digital strategy is just having the content. You have to have the content in the right thing, in the right places. Having a great toolkit Rock Mobile is good, but there's a lot of other facets to having a good digital strategy. And another one is just content. The format of your content is really, really important. And so we continue to bring up the concept of, get your make sure that your content is in the right formats. So the biggest thing you can do is as you make content channels, make sure that you're using structured content. So the default in the past was HTML. We're all used to that back in the day, that was just it, right? But HTML is really a web only medium. And you can auto convert it a little bit, but HTML is so powerful and it's really not very structured or standardized as much as you think and look at it. there's so many different ways that a person can do it differently and still have the same results. It's a very forgiving format, almost amazingly so. And that just doesn't play well as we start to have to try to convert this for native mobile experiences, but even more so for Apple TV or TV experiences, just forget it. Structured content is quite the opposite. It's very, very, very structured. It's very limiting in what it can do. And that actually is a very good thing. You really want to be limited. You don't want your authors of this content being creative and doing all kinds of weird, crazy things. And it's , then the platform's , I don't know what to do with this. Web's , I know what to do with it. And everybody else , I don't know what to do with this. So having that central consistent structured content is really, really important. And so as you make new content channels, it's really easy to just go to HTML because that's just our default. that's where we feel good, right? That's just what we've always done. But we've actually made it the opposite. As you create a new content channel, the default now is structured content. That's good. So you actually have to go, no, I don't want that. It used to be the opposite, you had to go, Oh yeah, , probably should make this structured content. So at least you have to do a little bit of thinking, but I know even within me, I'm sometimes , I don't know, I'm just gonna change it. It's just easier today. But no, structured content, everything should be structured content. You should probably also be trying to transition your content channels to be structured content. There's no easy way to do that right now. Well, there is, get an intern. That's great intern. It's also a great volunteer. if you need to get a volunteer to do it and trust me, there are volunteers who would love to do that. As much as it sounds a chore task, the worst thing on the world to you, there are people who just love to do that. That's actually gives them energy and joy. So just go find one of them. I would probably start by making a new content channel that matches your current one in terms of attributes and everything. And there's some probably some strategies that are a little more technical than we can get into on the podcast, but I would just transition all your content to that. And then you'd have to slowly go and start putting it into play into your mobile app and into your website. It shouldn't be a ton of work, but that might be the case that you have to dual entry into both content channels for just a little bit, but hopefully not long. But you do wanna start porting your content over. From a Rock perspective, we're not gonna force that. I don't see a day when you would have to do that. It's more for you. And you might say, well, we're not doing stuff in mobile yet, but there's always gonna be someday. So you might as well stop your bleeding. Even if you're only doing web only, I'd still recommend it. I actually even prefer it. Even if I know it's only ever gonna be HTML, I just prefer the editing experience. It's just so much easier to type it in there and not have to worry about it getting slightly messed up because it's trying to auto convert it to HTML for It's just a better experience. If you look at where content editing is going just in general, it's going that direction. Even Microsoft Word is, its days probably are somewhat numbered in terms of general content creation. It has the same problem. It's not structured as much as it has those styles that are structured. The percent of people who use those is about zero. If you're thinking I do, you're probably one of the only ones. I I do too, but I also then break that rule often. So many people just go reach and go, Oh, bold. Oh, bigger text. So unstructured. But the world is going to be multimedium and those tools just won't do that. So Microsoft's actually been experimenting with other content creation tools to replace kind of a lot of what Word does. And I think what you'll probably see is Word becomes, its default will be more of a structured approach. And then you'll have to change it to go the other way. That said, that's gonna be a long transition for them. I mean, WordPerfect is still around. We can still see blue screens occasionally. So it'll be here forever, but I think the future has to be structured content because of all the different platforms that are needed to be supported. Yeah. Because you said mobile, you might not be doing mobile now. Maybe you already have a good mobile solution. You're doing your own thing. But if you start now with structured content and a year from now, your pastor says, Hey, we need to get on Apple TV. Now all your content potentially is set up and ready to go. You have one less thing to worry about. Yeah. And I just think even if you never need it, it's a better format. It's a better editing experience. You can just do more things. So just make the change. Makes a lot of sense. And the tie to the digital strategy, think is really important, because a lot of times when we consider digital strategy, we're , how do we use certain tools to do certain things? But the content can sometimes take a backseat to that. And so, , we even see as somebody says, sometimes they'll come in and say, hey. I want a whole new, , digital project over here. And they really haven't thought through content at all. So not only do you need to think through what you want to say and where you need to think through how to say it, and that will round out and complete your digital strategies. Yeah, I think it's key for your digital strategy going forward. And we've added all kinds of new things in there. You can do some lava even inside of structured content. And we'll continue, we're really passionate about that structured content editor. And we keep a pulse on what they're changing, the component that we use, what they're changing so that we can bring it into Rock. So super love that component. And that kind of brings up maybe another strategy is , how do we get more out of Rock? And one of the things I would challenge you to consider is this thinking more about the ministry aspects of Rock. Whenever we put out a call for questions, we get a lot of great questions. And I think they're fantastic. I think when you ask for people for questions, you're also basically, in a sense, it's a way of getting what's in their mind and what are they focused And not surprisingly, a lot of the questions we get are really focused around deep technical things, administrative things, and that's natural. That's kind of the world we work in. But I think we also have to have this constant pull and push to think about the ministry aspects of what we do. The administration will always be here. It's kind of the poor. Jesus says, The poor will always be amongst you and so will the administrative features. And so we have to think hard and put energy into the thinking of it from a ministry perspective. And so, I would almost challenge you to devote a part of your week, whether it even be one afternoon or one morning or one hour even, or maybe even a couple of lunches. If , yeah, just can't , okay, well maybe work through a couple of lunches and set that side, that time aside to just think about the ministry part of what you could do with Rock and implement some things in some really, really small ways. I think we get a little bit wrapped around the axle thinking that everything has to be a big, harsh thing. Sometimes we can do some quick, easy things. One of the things I kind of talk about with the staff is sometimes, and I'm the same way, we'll have something that we need to do and we think of it as a project when it's really a task. The majority of things that we think of as projects are really just tasks. And if we just really say to ourselves, shut up and do it, it's amazing how fast. It's , Oh, I thought it was going take all afternoon, it only took twenty minutes. Literally, I'm not exaggerating, because realize there's a book about this, that there's this inside that we have an elephant and a rider. And the elephant is the emotive, Oh, everything's so hard, I'm so tired. And the elephant has a little rider on top of it, which is more of our analytical self saying, oh, let's go. I wanna do this. I wanna achieve that. But unfortunately, it can only move through the jungle on top of this elephant. And so the rider has to be really smart to to to kind of help the elephant, encourage the elephant to get to places. And the book I think did a really good job, it's called Switch, does a good job of explaining that. It's the writer says, I want to go to the gym so I can be healthy, so therefore I'm gonna wake up early tomorrow. Unfortunately, what wakes up tomorrow is really the elephant. And the elephant's , Yes, I said tomorrow and it will be tomorrow. I know it's tomorrow now, but it'll be tomorrow. So the writer has to be even smarter and say, Well, I'm gonna move the alarm clock into the shower and I'm gonna turn it up all the way. So you have to play these things. And I think the example is whenever you say to yourself, Oh, that's a project for another day. It's , No, that's the elephant talking. I'm the writer, I have control. I'm just gonna do this right now. This, even if I say to myself, I'm just gonna get started and see how far I can get between now and my next meeting. I'm shocked at how many times I just finished it even before the meeting and still have time to spare. And I'm , Dude, every time. It doesn't have to be a big thing. Think about ministry, what can you do? What small concept could you be working on to impact a person's life? One maybe example is, I hope your church uses ERA. If it doesn't, that's a great project. It doesn't have to have buy in by everybody on the planet. It's already running. And if you turned it off, turn it back on. And so what do you do? , okay, well now I have So ERA is running, great. What do I do? I don't know. Well, why don't you make a data view and just count how many people became an ERA that week? Once you get another data view that shows how many people lost ERA that week, and then simply just start talking about it. what if you went up to a pastor and said, Hey, do two fifty people lost their ERA status this week? And then that pastor's gonna go, What? , what are you talking about? Oh, ERA. It's this really great metric that is an estimate of how likely someone is a regular attender. Get it? ERA, it's an estimated regular attender. The joke is God knows RA, we only know ERA. And he's , Oh, that's interesting. And I just keep pushing in, you gotta get your little elevator pitch going and it's gotta be thirty seconds or less. Yeah, for instance, would it concern you if someone attended in this pattern and gave in this pattern and then all of a sudden switched and didn't do that? Shouldn't we lean into that and go get the recipe, it's in the documentation. Shouldn't we lean into that? Isn't that some kind of life event happening there? Well, yeah. I I can't imagine a pastor on the planet who say, Yeah, I don't care. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good way of saying that. Well, we don't care either. So go find another church. And you say, Hey, can I set up your email to receive this report every week that will give you people that might have fallen out of ERA so you can just look at it? Yeah. I mean, you've got to think through the psychology of that. You just basically said, Do you want a whole bunch of extra work? Because that's what you kind of just said. Wouldn't it be interesting to know who those people are? Maybe it's , Don't we have a responsibility to do something with this? Who do we need to get engaged in this? And even if that one conversation doesn't lead to transformative process improvement, you go to another one and you go to another one and you don't have to have success overnight. You just start to start planting the seeds. And if you tell 10 pastors or five, or let's go with percentages, if you tell 30% of your pastors, I would have to think something's gonna be done. Would also another quick simple thing is maybe set up a metric. What percent, what number of ERAs did we get that week and what numbers did we not get that week? Did we lose that week? That way you kind of have a historical trend. Even if I can't do something with data, I want to start gathering the data because I can't go back and get it once it's left, once it's gone. And it's a lot easier to track that is if you do it on a schedule and wow, metrics have that feature, always have. So I'd start gathering that. In our previous podcast, I talked about some of the metrics we want to collect. That's kind of another one of them. I'd love to get the ERA over time built into Rock so that it's already there and we know what it is. So that's just one example. Maybe ERA isn't for you. If you're not using it, pretty sure it is. But if you already do, go find another quick, easy win. One other quick thing, maybe it's the automation of deactivating accounts. Some instances that there are a couple of churches who have a strategy is , they don't use the active and inactive, everybody's just a record. And I don't think that's a strategic rule to them. They just don't do it. And to a certain point, kind of doesn't matter, but it sure is helpful that you can rule out We talked to in the last podcast about connection status being a big personalization hinge that you can use. So is it active and inactive? That's another big personalization thing. If they're not active, isn't that a great descriptor of them? And if they come back to the website and they're inactive, maybe that's a great personalization segment that you could run and say, Hey, if someone comes to my website and they're marked inactive, you might think that's a data issue and maybe it is, but they only got inactive. Event tracked them as So someone thought they were inactive, which again, what you don't do is say, Hey bro, you're inactive. , don't out that. But you would say something , Hey, maybe it's the class that they should take or something. I think we could easily come up with some messaging that would be unique to that use case. For sure. Mean, if someone stood in front of you in your auditorium on the weekend, there were two different people and one said, I haven't been here in five years. Not really sure why I came back today. And someone else is , yeah, I'm here every weekend or every other weekend. You'd probably have different things to say to those people. Yeah. And I feel every church should have some kind of process in their organization of just a check-in. Mhmm. I'm just gonna , Hey, I just wanna talk on the phone. Can we connect? And I think if they're inactive, you'd push that button. Hey, let's connect. We have this special program where you can connect with a pastor, a pastor will connect with you. It's totally optional, I'm not gonna force you to it, but if they're labeled inactive, put the big connect button there. Same thing if they're not in ERA, if they exit an ERA, send them an email saying, Hey, we have this new program where we're just trying to connect with people. Click here to get a connection. I think having that connect process is kind of your go to thing that you have in your pocket whenever you sense that someone's disengaging, push the connecting. A lot of times we wanna personalize things, make some things hyper personalized, and then we realize we have nothing to say or nothing for them to do. And so sometimes it's creating those kind of easy things that you can recommend. And I think that one of connect with us or create a meeting with a pastor is super easy, super helpful in personalization. But going back to the whole point is , set aside sometime during your week, even if you have to give up your lunch. Think it's And do it for you. I mean, in a sense you're doing it for the people, for the people you're gonna be helping. But if you can't see that far into the future, if you can't see that vision, do it for you because it's such an encouraging thing. I know for a brief while I was taking my lunch and working on this little kind of fun technical hobby projects for twenty minutes. And I don't do it right now because I even have my lunches eaten is taken up by just other non works. I mean, things that I can't even get the hobby time in. But I just remember how how happy it made me just have a little nugget, a little new thing. So I would say even if you can't see the vision of helping the people right away, do it for yourself. Be selfish about it. I think it's a really great encouragement for growth. That's great. Another great encouragement is imagine getting together with hundreds of your closest friends around the country and finding out what they are doing to solve ministry problems that are probably not unique to just their church using a toolset that you also share. So while you may not imagine yourself with hundreds of friends, our Rock community is really just such an incredible place. And one time of year, we get together and we share those things. So while coming to Rx is a little bit of an investment, it is one that pays out exponentially. So we definitely encourage you to get your ticket to the conference and make sure you show up. Our our number of people coming this year is so far on track to be the highest yet. And what that means is there's more and more incredible content that's coming in. There are more really powerful connections for you that you can leverage throughout the year as a sounding board or as someone to collaboratively solve a ministry, , technology problem together. And this is just something that you're really not fully experiencing what Rock can do for you in your ministry without these connections. So we definitely encourage you to be at Rx. It's coming up in August, and it might seem it's a little ways away, but it's not. We know how time flies. Make sure you have that in your plans. Get your travel booked and and pick up that Rx ticket. And this time, bring with you those people on your staff or at nearby churches who could also benefit from the same kind of collaboration. We are making spaces this year for finance and generosity staff who use Rock tools and can benefit from them, but also have many other things that they're doing. And we wanna make a space for them to share some things together, best practices related to what they're doing, some inside Rock, some external to Rock, but great connections in the same type of collaboration that you can enjoy with other Rock teams currently at RX. We're gonna have that for finance folks. We're gonna have a separate track for discipleship and engagement for your pastoral staff. We will have communications and digital strategy for your communications department. And we will have a new to Rock track for the churches around you that keep hearing about Rock on the sidelines and are not sure what to do with it. They're not really gonna be under able to understand what Rock is without this conference experience. So don't come by yourself. Bring your crew and and help them experience the same things that you can as well. You really cast the vision well for that conference and why you should come. I do think though that might be one or two people who still aren't coming. Really? There's one other thing that they should probably know that I think will just seal the deal. -oh. What is this thing? You get a chipped t shirt. Oh. The conference t shirt will be chipped this year. You I think that might just be the last thing that pushes one or two people over the edge. I think now you just sealed it. That's definitely it. And you don't have to pay extra above your ticket price for that CHIP T No, this is the free T shirt for the conference this year. It's CHIP. Yeah. It's highly collectible and not gonna be available in any other form. And people are already asking, will Chip be there? So can we take a photo op with him? I was at a community event and that's what was asked. But yes, he will be there. Chip always shows up in interesting ways at Rx. Yeah, there will be many new Chip things at this conference. You don't wanna miss it. There literally are no excuses. You just have to be there. Yeah. It's kinda funny though. Chip is so popular, Does little to no work around here. That's true. He just stands there in the corner. Smile and wave, boys. Smile and wave. He's so cheerful. How can you not love Chip? Oh, and I don't think he mentioned it yet, but that the normal the the main hotel is sold out now. Right? It is. Right. The lot. For Yes. Still a great hotel. It's a great hotel, and it's very close. So there are lots of nearby hotels, but now we're onto the one that's the closest to the Renaissance. So I would jump on that particular opportunity while it's still available. It seems to us that the tick that the hotel rooms have sold out far in advance this year than what we've seen in the past. So don't wait around. Waiting around will not get you the worm. You gotta be the early bird or maybe maybe it's too late for early bird, the medium bird. Is that a thing? It's still a great hotel. It's a great hotel. It's a short walk. Yeah. And you can still be involved in the type of community that happens at the Renaissance after hours. It's cold. We have a short walk. Conditioning detox, that short walk. Is that the one that you walk right through the main where all the shopping areas are and the or is that the other one across the street? It's just across the street. I mean, it's very, very close. So that's all good. If you are listening and you have spoken at a conference before, we need you to speak again this year. And if you just heard that and said, whew, I'm off the hook. I've never spoken before. Nope. This is your year. This is the year for you. So we need you too. And guess what? You need this too. For sure. This is the kind of thing that you can invest in yourself to challenge yourself and realize you can do more than you thought you could. And when you share something that helps someone else, there's a different level to that. One, it drives your personal growth because of the investment you make in it. But two, it's just so encouraging, and you'll make some great connections that way. So if you're listening to this, we are talking to you. If we did not exclude you from the fact that we need more speakers for the event, and we need to know how you're using Rock in a way that's helping your ministry. So reach out. Let us know, and we can get you set up. Additionally, we always offer a master class the week before conference. And so we are hoping to fill a class before the conference. You can come and stay for a a couple weeks duration instead of having two different travel periods. So the in person experience and the back to back master class training plus conference is a a huge exponential force for good that we hear about all the time in reviews from people who've done it. So if you're gonna invest in your Rock experience this year, the best way to do that is that one two punch masterclass conference. So sign up for both of those and see what that does for your fourth quarter and for next year when it comes to your ability to to dive into what you can do in Rock. You'll leave a different person. You absolutely will in a lot of very good ways. Well, thanks for joining us again, and we look forward to seeing you and hearing from you in a speaking spot at RX this year. No excuses. Make sure you subscribe to your podcast delivery system so you can get, our podcast every time it comes out. We'll see you at RX. 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. 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