Podcast Episode 200: Episode 173: Do the Hard Things First

Description

In the first of two podcast episodes featuring answers to community questions, join Emily Forman, Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo for insights into the progress with Obsidian, Rock Metrics and underused feature - Connection Statuses. Learn more about NextGen check-in and this year's upcoming Rock conference.

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 delve into behind the scenes happenings, offer insights into the community, and explore leadership dynamics. I'm Emily Forman, and today with me are Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo. Welcome to Rockcast. Alright. It seems so much is happening, and we're in the pre conference press, which is really honestly about a half a year long. But so many things on so many fronts. Nick, can you fill us in on where we are with the latest version updates? Yep. We just released version 16.5 for early access. So it went through beta, went through really cleanly, and that is now released. Some churches were waiting for that because of some PCI questions that they had from some, I don't know, vendors that they're in contact with. So they were anxious to get that and now they have it. And it also has 15 bug fixes. So we tend to put about that many or more in releases, and now we're working on 16.6, and that's in progress. We don't have an ETA for that one yet, but at the moment there are 16 other bug fixes in that that pretty much came in during the alpha and beta phases of 16.5. And the train keeps moving on the Rock version update, so Never ends. We are down to 30 something issues, but we're, , trying to keep up. But they , people find bugs. We we fix them. And Sure. I'm so hopeful that we're gonna hit zero. Well, there's been oh, no. Don't happen. I'm not sure about that. But stay hopeful, Nick. There's been a lot of effort that has gone into that this year. Considerable effort. Yeah. And and and we've , as the issues have gotten down to the the minimal, we've shifted efforts to to deal with things that were falling by the wayside as we were working on bug fixes. It absolutely had a priority for us this year, and we've made some incredible headway on it. So it's a great, great work by the dev team on that. All right. John, what have you got for us today? Well, kind of asked out into the community to look for topics of what people want to hear. So today we'll be kind of going over a smattering of some of the things that they wanted to hear about. So one of the things is check-in. We're in the process of doing check-in two point zero, And that's been a huge process for us. That was going to be a big part of our year this year. Our goal was to have check-in in the next gen technology by the end of the year. And we're so far, I would say pretty far ahead of schedule on that. Now the goal was only to replace the current check-in functionality, is not to add new features, but we might add a few little things here and there. But our major goal is just to simply replace the current technology, which is not compatible with where we're going and where Rock needs to go. Replace that with the next gen technology while at the same time increasing the performance. That's another stated goal was to increase the performance of check-in. So today, if you're familiar with what's under the hood of check-in, it's really just a workflow. And that workflow is kind of helping maintain the state and the filtering. And while that has benefits, it's very, very, very slow. You may not realize it because it maybe doesn't feel that slow to you, but there's a lot of stuff going on under the scenes that really probably doesn't need to happen or can be done in a much more manageable way. So we're removing that workflow. So if you have any custom workflow actions in there, those are going to go away. We've done a lot of research to try to understand what people have done so that we can get that into CORE. But it's imaginable that someone made it themselves or maybe didn't come to the community to talk about it before they did it. And so you definitely gonna wanna test. But the performance is night and day different. And we're also really polishing up the user experience a lot. And I think another thing to kind of point out is , we're just trying to get across the finish line on it, but we're also architecting it in a way that we can support new and different check-in experiences in the future. I think today we're kind of stuck in a check-in model that's probably fifteen years old. And we all now have supercomputers in our pockets and why aren't we bringing those to bear into the check-in process, which I think could really speed up that process and make it much more efficient and just smooth for our attendees. So initially there's not a ton of interest in changing a lot of that. I think churches tend to be resistant on changing check-in and we get that, but we're putting in hooks and putting in a foundation that we can do a lot of new different things in the future. So it's pretty exciting and it's good to be where we are with that, which is ahead of the game. We're also working on a lot of other blocks in terms of moving from the web forms, which is the old technology to the new technology, which we call Obsidian from a front end perspective. Another one of those blocks is the group scheduler. So that's a really difficult block. And I think our strategy in terms of how we approach NextGen is to do the hard things first, which commonly is not the way it feels natural to do it. We always wanna do the easy things first. But I think from a project planning perspective and a project perspective, we'd much rather just tackle the hard stuff. It's just kind of a philosophy in life. Just if you're gonna have to do it, just do the hard stuff first and then you can do the easy stuff later. And so we've tackled that. And so I think if you look at some of the things that we have accomplished, event registration really hard, form builder really hard. A lot of the harder things we're trying to get done first. And group scheduler is another one of those blocks. Now that block's been done for a while, but we haven't really pushed it into where people can see it. It's kinda hidden. So Nick, can you just kinda cover the the the three major strategies on how we approach each block in Rock and how it gets shifted to next gen? Yeah. And the one you're specifically talking about there, that's a sneak. So there are three types of techniques we use, chop, swap and sneak. So sneak is where we've just put it into the release, but we didn't put it in place where it should normally go. It's just sitting out there and some churches will then go and grab that block, put it on a page, start using it, give us some feedback. So that's the sneak. If you were to go to what we call the pre alpha site, pretty much all of our Obsidian blocks that are done are in that sneak kind of phase. They're just sitting out there. Doesn't mean you'll see them in your production release because even those blocks out there are kind of specially exposed, but that's what essentially what sneak is. It just means they're not yet in use. Chop, that is where we have made the decision that the old Webforms block, the old type of block is going away and we literally get rid of it and we chop it and put in its place the new Obsidian block. And when we do that, we copy over all of the settings from the old block to the new block, and we do that for all instances of that block type. So that's a CHOP. And again, CHOP is kind of permanent, it's gone. The old block is gone, you can't fall back to that block. Okay, well, how how would you fall back? You'd have to take the next technique, is a swap. With a swap, we take the old block, put it aside, and copy all the settings, and put the new block in its place, so we swap it. But we leave the old one sitting there, just in case. Now we don't wanna do that for many blocks because, well, why? Well, we eventually have to chop it again because somebody could take that block that's sitting aside and go put it on another page. And now, , we don't wanna eventually just rip it away without replacing it. So it would have to undergo a chop eventually. So another way to say that is all swapped blocks eventually need to be chopped. And again, the reason why we do is there might be a higher risk that we've decided, let's just do a swap on that one and get some feedback. And as long as we don't have any feedback, it gets chopped in one of the upcoming releases. Yeah, it's all about risk. We don't don't even really do the swap if we felt it's a block that, man, if that doesn't go right, church can't happen. And so some of the more important blocks will get swapped even if we're pretty confident with it. And then the sneak is really , hey, we're working on this. We want people to start playing with it. Think group scheduling is a good example because we didn't just clone the current block, we redid the whole thing and works much differently and better I think. And That kind of came about because a couple of churches came to us and wanted to add features to group scheduling. And they're good features and we're , okay, yeah, that sounds good. But instead of investing that time into improving the block that eventually needs to be rewritten, We just said, well, let's just rewrite it and as a part of that, we'll take the extra funding for those little features and we'll add it on top of that work. And so we felt hesitant to necessarily just make everybody switch right now. And I think it's good because now those churches who wanted those features can kind of test out this new experience and make sure that it's performing and doing everything that they wanted. And I think that's actually been a good thing because now there are quite a few churches who are using the new group scheduler and now we're getting feature requests on top of that one. So that's the block that just keeps on giving. It just always has new features. These are good features. We're not complaining about It's just more stuff. And that's the reason why it hasn't gotten to the next level, which is probably, I'm not sure if we're gonna chop or swap that part of me once I chop it, but it's one of those things, it's moving a lot of cheese for people. And so that might be a strategy where we actually swap it. So temporarily you could put it back, even though that represents more time and effort on our part to have to come back and chop it again. I think though, and specifically to this block, the group scheduler, there are varying opinions about how it should work. And ironically, sometimes the varying opinions come from the same organization. It's just which conversation did it happen? And and that's okay too, we get that. Yeah. They they've all dealt with that too, Rock admins, right? Hearing two different stories from two teams? Well, it's not it's not different on our team. even even myself, sometimes I'm , the future should work this. And then the next day later, in Figma, I'm , yeah, it should probably work this. And then it's wrestling back and forth because they're two good options. I think a lot of it is the context that you have in your head when you're looking at it. If you're looking at it from a specific mystery context, it makes sense that it should work version a and then when you have another context. And I think that's what makes Rock hard is it's nothing is ever statically built for a specific one use case. As we, it's hard not to use other products as you're doing research or helping clients move from one package to another. Sometimes in other church management system, how is it this way? How, take field types as you make an attribute in Rock, there's a bunch of field types, right? I mean, there's gobs of field types in Rock. There's another option that I think it has six. And I'm , how, how can you live this? There'd be pitchforks and fire outside the wall if we only gave six. It's a different world for sure. Not sure you need as many as we have, but holy cow. Anyways, the group scheduler block is one of those. And if that's a block that you heavily use and you use a lot of the use in a complex way, would probably recommend that you put it on a page and maybe take a couple of your key ministry heads and say, Hey, can you try this out? This is what's coming. And hopefully they'll say, Yeah, we this a lot better. Let's do it now. . And that new one is definitely more mobile friendly. If I remember right, there's button presses, doesn't rely so much on drag drop. Yeah. Doesn't have as much drag drop. I would be hesitant to say it's mobile friendly. I don't I I just don't think that experience can be mobile friendly. It's it's more mobile friendly, but That's what I mean. If someone told me I'm doing group scheduling on my phone, I'd be There's quite a lot that has to happen inside group scheduling. Yeah. That's painful. I will, but and it will work. In a pinch. Yeah. But only in a pinch. At least grab your tablet. Yeah, tablet would be fine. I think if you get your filter set down to one group and maybe one schedule at a time, maybe that it wouldn't be too bad, but I don't know. I'm a little bit more hesitant to do things that on my phone. Although some people don't, some people do everything on their phone. I just feel phones are for consuming content and not authoring content or creating content as much. I mean, it's a broad statement. But even now, yesterday, literally, I was writing up three new features for the new group scheduler, which, , That's a lot. It's a feature packed feature. Yeah, they're all fairly small. A lot of times it comes down to , well, should the filtering work around dates? You'd think that would be easy and it's really not. There's a lot of complexities to that. And then, or how do order the groups? It's just, there's a lot to it. And the problem is, no one's wrong and no one's right. And so true, but we're stuck trying to keep as many people happy as possible. Because we're always trying to figure out , okay, well, we don't mind, what's everybody else gonna think? The common thing is we'll just make a block setting so you can have it either way. Sometimes , well, sometimes you need it both ways at the same time. Yes. And sometimes, , we we've been a little bit guilty about over over block settings, certain blocks, and that makes them very complex to to for you guys to administrate and also very complex for us to keep keep working. And a lot for someone who's new to Rock to try and figure out the first time. Right. So there's a good example of a block that if you're heavy into that block, probably should play around with it. Test it out. Yeah. Think you'll actually the new one a lot better. It just feels better and it definitely maximizes your screen real estate, I think even better than the last one. So , what other kind of new things are we thinking about? One concept that we're thinking about too is around metrics. So metrics are a great feature in Rock and they haven't really gotten a ton of new features since their release in, gosh, I don't know, was in the early days of Rock. And as we start looking at newer ways of helping churches understand their data, what comes to mind now is that sometimes we need to know certain things about the church so that we can do some statistics for them inside their So for instance, everybody has ERA, whether they use it or not, it's there. So everybody has that. It'd be interesting to know how many ERAs you have per weekend attendee, right? In our limited experience with working with a handful of churches on that topic, it's interesting that it's fairly consistent. The ERA to a weekend attender is fairly consistent and that's really interesting. And so we would to start making that a metric, what is your ERA to attendee? But how do we know what your weekend attendance is? It's probably the case that almost every instance has a metric of that, but we don't know what metric it is because we didn't create it. It didn't come out of the box, right? So therefore you have one, we have no idea which one it is. That kind of stinks because now if we know that we can probably do all kinds of really cool ratios. And I think those ratios are really interesting, especially as you go to compare with other churches, because I think it helps you see how your ministry is unique and different and how you can improve it or help others to improve theirs. But this is a lot of cases where we just don't have that. So how do we actually bring in the concept of an objective? What's the objective of this metric? In some cases we probably need to run and make it out of the box so that it just comes and we know. In other cases, we probably just need you to label it so that we can say, Oh, this is the metric that we go to when we want this type of data. Sounds easy, kind of hard. Because if you take the one about the attendance, it's kind of , well, it probably should have certain partitions, right? Campus, schedule. So it's likely that most people did it the way we probably hope that it's done, but it's also very likely that someone didn't. And then what do we do in that case? So we have a lot of things to think about. Mhmm. But I think it'd just be really great to have more established metrics out of the box that would tell us and give us infer what is the purpose of that. Another thing that kind of along those same lines, maybe moving off features and more into strategy, Sometimes we try to talk about the underutilized features, right? ERA is one of those. I think we've talked about that. So if you're not using ERA, just please, please, please use it. But another one is connection statuses. Again, lot of the instances I go into, I feel we're under utilizing the connection status. What is it? It's simply is a defined value, or I should say a defined type that has values of different connection statuses, ways that you can label people within your database. And I think in the old days, the very old days, it was kind of standardized. Most people had membership and most people had attendees, most people had visitors and then sometimes they had participants. So back in the day, was a lot of churches talk the same talk on that. Now churches are very diversified in how they do that. And that's great. But I don't think that's really made it into connection status. Think everybody's just kind of , I don't know, they have a couple of them, but they don't really use them strategically. And I think that's a miss. I think if we start using those more strategically, man, then it becomes this kind of partitioning that we can use in all kinds of unique and different ways. Especially when you look at personalization and some of your strategies there, it really should be that as we think of these strategies, it should really kind of should start with the connection status. Now the connection status can only really describe one facet. So we have to be careful, what's the facet we want to describe? Is it newness to the church? Is it steps that they've taken? A lot of times I hear people describe a growth track or a steps process. And we put people in buckets based on where they are in that. Well, maybe those should be the connection status. Not always, but sometimes. I do think that in many of the instances I go into connection status, it's just kind of , yeah, it's a field, but we just don't, we don't really use it. In fact, I've actually heard that. Don't use connection status. It's , woah, that is the primary personalization unit in Rock. And I think sometimes we can kind of miss that. And I think if we, you gotta be strategic and make sure that what is the facet that you want to measure with that, because you only get that one. But personally, I would probably recommend going down the path of, there's a lot of people who are probably in your instance who are never going to come to your church. So I that participant option for that. Sometimes you need more than one, if you have a youth sports program. All of those parents should be in your database. Your goal of that program is to have people move from sports family to attendee, definitely want them in your database so you can measure that. But that might be a different type of participant. That might be a youth sports participant. And then having some way and it's unique to every church. It's hard to give it words of saying this person is on the fringe and this person's connected. Whatever your church vocabulary is around that, that's kind of what I would recommend so that you can kind of measure the proximity or the close tie. You can almost think of it as if you run into them on the street and say, Hey, do you go to Rock Solid Church? What's their level of response? Absolutely, yeah. , founding members, , that's the highest, right? Or Yeah, yeah, , I've been there. Or, oh yeah, my kids play sports there. Don't want to have too many, probably. I think as it measures those who go to the church, should probably be two or three. Those who don't go to the church, you might want more because you wanna know, did they come from the sports or they come from just, I don't know, they came on the website and logged in for some reason or some other kind of outreach that you have. But definitely I think connection status would be one of the things that I would really recommend people look at. And it's not one of those things you just want to quickly change them all. That's something has to be aligned with the vision and strategy of the senior leadership. But I would just listen to what they're saying and then propose a plan. Shouldn't be that hard to change them. A few data views could probably help you get them all ship shape. But then I think it's important that people understand them on your staff and are rooting to try to get everybody in the right connection status. The only slightly better thing than no one caring about connection status is only you caring about connection status. at the same time, it's still kind of a waste. You'll be fighting a pill battle you'll always lose. But if you can get vision around that and people start using it and people start asking for reports partitioned by that, then you're starting to to swim in the right direction. And that kind of traction, I mean, it creates easy visualization. Then you in any individual ministry conversation, you can be looking at what should this person be doing if they're moving closer to that engagement with the church. So you have individual opportunities, then you have all sorts of mass marketing and personalization. So that's a really great insight, John. It's something that's easy to overlook from a strategic perspective. I know from my previous experience, working thirteen years in a church, when you do it right, it becomes the first facet that you use to describe that person. So someone says, Hey, , look up so and so, you're , the first thing you're looking at, okay, what's their connection status? It's the biggest determiner of how the relationship to the church, I guess. And if you don't think about connection status, that's a warning sign that maybe you're not taking that tool to its fullest. Great. Super great insights. And thanks to the community for sharing some topics that they'd to hear more about and things that are close to what they're interested in. Alright. Now let's talk about how you can be more engaged with what's going on here. We have, of course, the conference that I mentioned at the very top of the podcast, and it is coming. If you still have on your to do list getting your conference ticket, I would encourage you to go ahead and do that sooner rather than later. It will help out both your team and ours. So we're doing a lot of planning right now that has to do with head counts. And the sooner we know for sure that you're coming, the easier it is on our team to get things right the first time. So, that would help us. We only know for sure once you've purchased your ticket, and then it'll help your team as well because the the ticket prices do continue to go up closer to the event simply because of the reasons I just mentioned. So go ahead and let us know you're coming if you plan to by getting your ticket. Again, hotel rooms continue to be, , first come, first serve, and and we've completely filled up the Renaissance Hotel at this point. But right across the parking lot, very close by is the True Hotel with Hilton. We have a nice room block there, and we'll be able to expand it if we hit capacity. So don't forget to get those hotel and travel tickets at the same time. Now you've probably seen the dates of the conference online, and we shifted it a little bit this year. So instead of kicking off at the beginning of the week, we're a little more centered in the middle of the week. That means our event is on Wednesday and Thursday, but we have this pre day that you don't wanna miss. So make sure that you're planning to be there for Tuesday as well. And Tuesday content is going to be unique. It's a free day, and we're offering technical training content. That's gonna be a different level and type of content. We've gotten great feedback about it in the past. It is not going to be prerecorded in our conference subscriptions, so do make sure that you're there in person. You find that pretty important. We're getting ready to give more information soon about a kickoff event that evening. So plan to be there Tuesday through Thursday to get the maximum amount out of that community experience that you can. It's gonna be a pretty incredible opportunity. We did send out mailers that you may have received with some postcards that you can hand to people that who might not otherwise come to the Rock Conference, but can really benefit from some new tracks we have this year. So pay attention to your finance and generosity folks, discipleship and engagement, communications and digital strategy. And then we are having a really nicely formed New to Rock track. So if there are churches in your area that are thinking about Rock or that you'd to make an invite to join the community, this is a good time to do that as well. And while we're talking, we still need speakers. So if you have something you've done this year that might be beneficial to the community to know about, please reach out and let us know. We'd love to have your speaking idea involved in this conference. And if you haven't spoken at RX before, you've probably noticed this is not a Toastmasters Club. Most of the people who speak don't have a heavy background in public speaking, but they're there because they have a passion to share what they're doing with Rock with the community. So step up. This might be the challenge you need, and to overcome that little bit of of nerves and just get out there and do it. We hear from first time speakers after every conference that they're so glad they did it, and that could be you this year too. So let us know if that's something that you would to tackle this year. We definitely have room for you. Okay. I think that wraps up our podcast for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you can catch the next episode of Rockcast. 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.