Podcast Episode 172: Episode 145: Two Misconceptions in the Rock Community: Part 2 Digital Ministry isn't an add-on

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Join us today for part 2: As Jon, Emily and Nick discuss the exciting new features coming in the latest version of Rock, why digital ministry isn’t an add on, and Jon issues a 7-day challenge.Show Notes:Get Involved: https://community.rockrms.com/get-involvedRockRMS Classes: https://community.rockrms.com/classesRX2023: https://rx.rockrms.com/attendingDid you take the 7-day Challenge? Tell us how it went: Info@sparkdevnetwork.org

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 to this episode of Rockcast. I'm Emily Forman and have with me today Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo, and we are going to tell you all about what's happening here inside the world of ROCCRMS. Nick, let's start with an update of where we are on the latest features we've been developing. Well, we've been hard at work working on version 15 of Rock. Can't tell you exactly when it's gonna hit the streets, but there's a couple of cool new features in there that I think people are going to really enjoy using. So the two that are highlighted most in my mind are the reminders feature and what we're calling the sign up or sign ups feature. Yeah. Those are two really important features I think that we've been wanting to get to for quite a while, years. The first one is one that is hard to believe, , it's taken us this long to get there, but the roadmap is really something that's under the influence of the community. And so we're finally able to get to this one. And it's really solving an important need that we all as humans have the desire to build and and create deeper connections, but we often have a lot of things on our plate and we forget to. So this feature allows you to create reminders for people, groups, any entity, but those are probably the two that, I mean, most obvious that you want to use, that allow you to put a quick note on somebody and just say, Hey, want to follow-up at this time to do that. Now, people would think, Well, you could do that with connections. And sure, you could do that, but this is purpose built. It has a lot of features that don't take any kind of workflows or any kind of customization. It just works out of the box. A reminder can be a one time event or it can be scheduled. You can have it remind you every so often. You definitely want to read the manual because there's some terminology that you're gonna want to understand, the different states that a reminder is in. For the most part, it all makes sense. You would think a reminder would work, but until you get the terminology, it's easier to talk through that. But we're really excited about that. And I think it has a lot of obviously uses for church staff, but we have to stop thinking just about ourselves. We have to keep thinking about , how can I use this reminder to do other things? For example, you might have felt need content on your website. I hope you do. if you're how do you get out of depression or drug abuse, pornography addiction? All that content's out there. Now, when we look at that from a website perspective, it's often presented and rightfully so, it's , hey, if you if you need any of these resources, they're here. But what if we change that terminology and say, hey, who do in your life that could could could have find value from any of these resources? And then you could send that to them. At the same time, maybe that workflow that's sending it to them also creates or optionally creates a reminder for you to follow-up in two weeks because who wouldn't want to be reminded to follow-up in two weeks? The reminder feature is really amazing for that kind of of, feature set. And you can create all kinds of reminder types. You can kinda keep them all segregated. And, I just think this it's gonna unlock a whole new set of capabilities for people. But if we're not careful, it could turn into something the the the following feature. Super powerful, super community and and connection driven feature, but it's not maybe the most used feature because it takes a little bit of vision casting and understanding to get people to use it. But once you do use it, I think it's gonna really facilitate much deeper connections within churches. Yeah, and I think you said it, it might've been a gloss over for most people, but you can do that from a workflow. So there's a workflow action that can do that. So you can bake this into workflows where it makes sense. Right, and then the person can get a digest to a digest of all the reminders that are active , hey, it's now time. You won't see the ones that are still coming, but you can see all the ones that you need to follow-up on. I think that's a great feature to check all those boxes. I would recommend starting it immediately and start it slowly. You can overwhelm people if you start making all these reminders. Sometimes too many reminders, someone could just cry bankrupt and then be , can't handle it. But start slowly, but start. And I think you're gonna have to vision cast that for your staff. And then you're gonna have to vision cast it again, that it's not just for staff. It's very useful for your whole congregation. , this reminds me of a story that I heard at the Christ Fellowship Conference I was attending last week. Their connections pastor there was talking about how he'd used connections to extend a relationship with someone. So past the time that that connection opportunity was intended for, but it did help him make sure he didn't drop a ball. This sounds it would be perfect for that. He engaged with someone who'd come in online and that person said that he was originally from the area, but lived out of state, intended to come back but didn't really have connections in the area, didn't know people. And so their pastor said, hey, let me know when you come back and I'll get a group of guys over here to help you move in. So you just come with the truck and we'll we'll get you all sorted out, moved in, connected, get to know people. And he kept following up with that guy over and over for months for probably about half a year. And finally, he did actually move in, move back to the area, and they got a group of guys, it was a a very small church, right, with that was super connected. Group of guys came over, unloaded the furniture, got them all settled in, and plugged them in immediately. And that's the kind of thing everyone intends and wants to do on the ministry side, but it can be hard to keep up on a grander scale. Yeah, and I think you might hear the ministry side, that's definitely important. But practice it in your daily life. Maybe you're not a pastor, but there's people on staff you could follow-up on. I was talking about the reminders features just yesterday with Colin who does the documentation. And I was just trying to share with him all the ideas we had going into it. But it was reminding me that now that the features on our server, Pre Alpha, I can start using it. I was just following up with someone just the other day and we were talking about a family member and their family who's not yet given their life to Christ. I'm , Oh, I'll be praying for you. And every time I say that, there's this tinge inside of my that says, I fully mean that. I sure hope I remember too. I'm in a hallway conversation. I don't have something to write down. But with this feature, could just quickly put that staff person as the reminder. Obviously their family member's not in Rock, and I don't necessarily want to add that, but I could add the reminder to the person who is in Rock and then say, Hey, follow-up on this family member. So I think we have to use it ourselves too. I think the hardest thing, it's when Google came out, the hardest thing was trying to figure out when and how to use Google. Now that's so long ago that most of us don't remember that. But I remember going around just telling people my parents or whoever, Just Google it. And it's , Oh yeah, I could just Google that. And it's all the things you could use reminders for. But again, trying to integrate it into your life is sometimes the hardest part. I think you can see that too with chat GBT. if you're not using it daily, you're forgetting that all the things you could use it for. I'm always surprised at all the creative things. I wonder if it can do this and it does. You're , woah. So trying to get that new technology integrated into your life is sometimes the hardest part. Now the other feature was signups. So that's another one that I think is gonna meet a lot of needs for churches. And that's the need for, Hey, I just have a quick temporary short term serving opportunity, whether it's Habitat for Humanity and you're gonna be building a bunch of houses or it's extra serving you need for Christmas or Easter, this tool allows you to create pretty complex scheduling system very easily. So you can create groups, you can create projects within the groups, you can have different capacities for all that, you can have people sign up for those capacities, you can have reminders set for what they signed up for. Even the sign up process is lots of options. you can sign up from a family perspective and click all the people in your family who are coming. You can sign up from a group perspective and all people who are in your, maybe your small group. An anonymous perspective, I don't even know who you are, but you wanna sign up. And there's a finder to look for projects that need people. It's pretty cool. I think it's going to solve a lot of needs. I'm sure there'll be needs that will keep adding onto it, every feature in Rocket's never done. But out of the box, really is As an MVP, it's very, very large. It's been fun to get that done. There's some, I think, some data views you can do on that to help do some reporting and lots of things. So really excited about that. I think it's going to be well used by the Rock community. Yeah. And both of those projects were kind of the monster projects for version 15. There's a bunch of other little things, but we'll leave those in the release notes. Yeah. That's really coming right after fourteen point two, which was a major, in a sense a major release, even though it's a dot release. It had lots of features in it. There's already quite a few things already done past fifteen. I was just about to say that. It's hard for me to remember what's in feed 15 because we're already looking at sixteen and hints of seventeen. Yeah. And there's a lot of things already done for that that are either hidden or not committed yet into the repos. So it's gonna be a busy year. Yeah. It's just hard to keep everything on the right track. But we do keep talking about wanting to have more frequent releases rather than larger multi dot releases. So this is a great example of that happening here. Yeah. Striking that perfect balance, but not too many. We don't want to overwhelm people, but at the same time, we want to get these good features out. Right. Yeah. And the roadmap is interrupted in a good way by other needs from churches. That's what our whole community is about. That's what our mission is about. It's not our roadmap, but the community's roadmap. So there's some things we're working on right now that weren't on our roadmap. It wasn't even close to our roadmap. Mean, we're not even close, but they're needed. And I think they're a value for everybody. And so would we have put it on this at this time? No. But again, it's not our roadmap. It's the community's roadmap. And sometimes when the funding comes to do those features, especially when it's checking boxes of some Obsidian work that we can do, there's some next generation technology that we probably would have waited in a year or two to do that specific, redo that specific block. But now someone wants some new features and they're willing to help fund the next generation. It's , well, that helps. Going to do Yep, kill two birds with one stone. Yeah, we're hoping to do a lot of the easier blocks first, but it seems it's the big, huge hard blocks that are maybe needing some new features in. It doesn't make sense to keep investing in the old technology with the new features. Again, it's not our roadmap, it's God's roadmap. And we're just trying to be responsive to that. And you're all part of that. So if you're looking for ways to get involved, because Rockstar Selection is earlier this It is, that's right. We always have Rockstar Selection around the conference timeframe. And this year, the conference is in July, don't forget. It's not in late August. So we're about six weeks earlier. So we definitely will need help if you're wanting to be involved in the alpha team or the beta team or many other ways to Answering questions, doing phone calls. There's something for everybody. You don't have to be technical to be a rockstar. In fact, we want diversity within that rockstar body. If it was all programmers, first of all, there'd be three of No, that'd be terrible. And it be the rockstar group that it is. We want people of all types of capabilities. The only thing that you have to have in common is effort. That's right. And there are a number of, I'll say non technical people on the Alpha team. They have a helper that got the environment set up for them. And then they're spot on. they're some of the best people that find bugs. So yeah, that's one important way to me being kind of the chief QA person at the moment. But if you wanna do other things, there's a get involved page or get connected on the Rock site. So lots of other ideas. Yep, that's on the community page and you can go there and see, I don't know, we have maybe eight or 10 things listed. They take a variety of diversity of skills, variety of time commitments. There's definitely something for everyone there. So if you've been thinking, one of these years, I'll work toward being a Rock star. This is the year and there's still time. Yeah. Don't think, do. Just go go to that page now. So on our last podcast, we introduced a couple of misconceptions about the Rock or within the Rock community and let that we come back with number two for this recording. So that's one thing that we wanna talk about today is the second misconception here inside the Rock community and some insights we have on that. John, do you wanna share? Sure, yeah. I think the second misconception is that what we do is just kind of an add on or just another small thing. And I think that comes from just the history of technologies. Eventually, typically things start small and they take a while to get bigger. And I think if the longer you're in it, you still kind of see it as that small thing. And digital mystery is not one of those things. This capability is Everybody's used to it in the world. Everybody's expecting it in the world. To only do church or think about church on a weekend is really not a good thing. We need to be engaging people. And people want to be engaged and they want to be learning and growing and seeing truth every day. And I think in this world, there's just so many things that you can't hold onto. If it's a rope, you can't put your weight on the rope because you don't know what is gonna happen. But God's truth is something that's trustworthy and you can put your full weight into. And I think it's very freeing because the more you get into that truth, the more the rest of the world, as crazy as it seemed, kind of makes sense. You don't it, it's not good, but it kind of makes sense. The more, I think it is almost this craving for truth and for perspective. And I think that perspective is in the church and don't lock it up and only open it on the weekends. I think there's so many things that we can be doing today that don't even take a lot of money. I was watching a video just recently about just using YouTube Shorts and overproduce them. In fact, don't produce them at all. Just take out your cell phone, get your pastors to just have a good content piece and just say it. And there's been a lot of that this video I was watching, they showed you the engagement rates of overproduced pieces versus unproduced pieces. The unproduced pieces had 7X engagement as a produced piece. So we got to get in there, but we also have to change the vision for our churches to make sure that they understand from a budgeting perspective, what does this mean? And I think in a lot of ways we're seeing it wrong, including those of us closest to it. We still see it as a small thing that it's okay not to have a lot of money. One of the things that I think is that most Rock systems are starved for resources. There's this web VM and the database are just starved for resources. And we're so conscientious about saving a few dollars that we still keep it locked up. It's almost we keep it in the closet and we throw a few grains of rice in there once a day and we expect it to do its job. And it will, but it's just at what expense? I recently was talking to a friend and they were using a plugin that's in the shop that scales your database up and down. Really easy, it's free. It's a great little plugin. Well, were testing it and they had it turn up the database and they forgot to turn it down. And so for the next three or four days, wow, the Rock is really fast. And then they realized, oh, it's because I forgot to scale it down. And I can't remember if they left it that way or not, but it's , yes, that's the right answer. It's , don't starve your Rock system. It's doing so much ministry. And I think when we set it up, those systems, what was it doing? What was the impact? It was probably a lot less than it is today. Now, version we try to make it more efficient and faster, but you're adding more capabilities to it. You're adding more people to it. It's powering websites, your phones, your mobile applications, your TV apps. don't forget, you're doing a lot more with it and you just need to give it some space. So for example, on that, here's what I would say. Take a seven day challenge. Increase both the size of your WebVM and your database. I'd say significantly, it's only seven days. You're not going to spend that much money. if you spend a hundred or $200, you guys spend more on floor wax than you do on that. So , just go for it. Now don't tell anybody you did it. Just see what they say. Just see if anybody notices. And if they notice it, leave it. Oh, they'll notice when you turn it down. They'll be , What happened? Why is it slow now? Just leave it. Now there are some churches who are over provisioned, but that's pretty rare. And they know it. To them it's an insurance policy. They just it to be fast. I think that's great thinking. So I'm not saying it to every church, but probably 98%. Just try the seven day challenge. It's not gonna cost you that much. No one's gonna notice the budget change. But just see if they notice the responsiveness. And that's such an important tool. Every church we talk to is , Rock, we couldn't do church without Rock anymore. It's , we'll give it some more resources. Let it do its thing. And then, that's one way to kind of start seeing it in a different way. But then you also have to start looking at how much of your church budget is being spent on digital ministry. Right. And then think about what should that number be? Now when we talk about this, at least in most of the churches I've worked with, I've not seen churches not do it this way, but we look at budgets a little bit differently. We'll have budgets for facility cost, staffing, and then missions is usually there. And then sometimes we'll talk about children and youth. But we don't count the staff part of that. The staff is usually one huge wedge in the pie chart. And then the children and youth is really events programming, supplies. I think we need to look at it a little bit differently when we're trying to prioritize what's important to a church. We should look at the total cost of each ministry, and that should come down to facility costs, staffing costs, events and programming and supplies, and just say, okay, fully, this is what we spend on children. This is what we spend on youth. This is what we spend on weekend services. This is what we spend on women's ministry, men's ministry, whatever your church has, singles ministry. And then try to figure out what is the right size wedge for digital ministry. The digital ministry that can reach everybody every day, that can magnify the voice of the pastor who can push out those messages. Now, obviously that doesn't We're not saying that needs to be 50%. That would be crazy. But if we looked at what it is today, we'd probably be really surprised. In many cases, it'd be 1%, two %, maybe even less than 1%. And I think we have to look at the staff too, it takes people. And then holistically, we need to figure out what kind of roles do we need? And some of it, I would say we have to think of it as building a building. And it's not that you do everything yourself. Now some churches do, some churches literally have architects on staff and for what they need, that's great. And they might need those digital architects on staff too. But now smaller churches, you're not gonna have an architect on staff. That would be kind of silly. And it's okay to get help from partners for that kind of architecture work. Yet at the same time, you wouldn't fully outsource all of your facilities to get all the other stuff. You have volunteers doing a lot of it. You have some maintenance people doing a lot of the daily care and feeding. Maybe you outsource cleaning. Some churches do, some churches don't. That's great. There's no right answer. But it's okay to need help with that. And we also have to see some of these projects as capital projects. I don't see too many churches who treat a new website every four years as a capital project, but why? It is a capital project. And it probably should be in those same ranges if you want to do it right. Interestingly, I was talking with a church yesterday and their marketing director was on the call and he mentioned that they're wanting to go with a Rock website. He'd been telling his leadership at the executive level that building a website on Rock is a building project. And they should look at funding it appropriately that way because this is their ministry to people that may never set foot on campus or have not encountered the church there yet, as well as some of their people who are not able to make it in and that it's open seven days a week. So it was very interesting to hear that he had already kind of pre discussed that with his church leadership and said, Come into this expecting that we're building a facility, brand new building, to house our ministry in the digital spaces. But you're right, John, I really don't hear most people approaching it that way. It was a really incredible thing to hear that they had decided to do that and that's what they're interested in. Yeah, and I think if we look at all the other things that people do use, or we do have to buy in the church, that we have no problems because we're used to it, right? If that's a price, Oh yeah, of course we have to have an expensive guitar. I don't think anybody would disagree with that. But why is that normalized and some of these other projects aren't? And the impact of that is totally different. And I'm not saying again, one ministry is better than the other, but I do think that digital ministry is being held back. And I think if we let it thrive a little bit more, it's going to pay huge dividends. People are expecting that. People are using content every day. If we don't have our content out there that gives the truth, then we're kind of stifling it. Do you think our budgets are set up to be reflective of when the types of tools we have today weren't available? Absolutely, yeah. Or when they're fledgling. And a lot of times the guilty party of why that is, is the people closest to that budget. I caught myself the other day, was thinking, we were talking as a team and we were talking about some digital ministry project. And someone said, Well, that's a lot of money. And I was , in my head, went, Yeah, that is a lot of money. And then something tripped in my head, , That is not a lot of money. That used to be a lot of money. And it really wasn't a lot of money. We're talking about hundreds of dollars, literally. It's , That's not a lot of money. The return on ministry on that is off the chart. And again, we spend more on floor paste or floor wax than we do on some of these server provisionings. It's , why? But my own mindset was stuck in the old patterns of , Oh yeah, yeah, we have to save every single dollar. It's , No, that dollar, if we invest it, more people will use Rock, they'll get a better response. They'll want more things in Rock. You couldn't spend your dollar better. Or even if we think about a website. So a little thought project idea is , if someone came to me and said, well, want to do a million dollar website. today, be , oh, wait, woah, woah, woah, woah, hold on. That's way too much. You don't need to do that. And while that is probably still too much, if someone wants to invest that, if they're going to invest in a $20,000,000 building, we wouldn't blink an eye. Now the building's going to last a lot longer. So website typically is going to last four years. So you're not going be doing $20,000,000 websites, And it's not brochureware. If it's features that are going to connect people and help people connect to others, that's great. And I don't know if we've seen a good example of that yet. There's some good church websites for absolutely, but I don't think, I think if we look at holistically, the external world is so important is one of the most important things is SEO. For church, I'm not sure that's super important. Now don't not do it. But if Target had the raving lunatic fans that we do in the church, I think they would be doing things very differently. There's no force more powerful than someone who was just baptized within the last year. You can't tell them to be quiet about their faith. If you harness that and tap into that, I think Target would be , Yeah, we're still doing SEO, but we got these rabid fans. I'm not sure where they came from, but they're , getting baptized and believe in all this stuff. Let's invest in them and get them pushing out the content. And I don't know if we're tapping into that very well. And a lot of it is on the site, we have to be more adamant about saying, Hey, this content may not be for you. Because as humans, we're so selfish. I mean, we all are. When I'm looking at content, what do I want to look at? Not what Who can I share this thing to? They have no interest. I go on YouTube, I'm not learning, Oh, this YouTube video, who am I in my circle? Could I afford this YouTube video on? It's , no, do I want to watch this or not? But we have to change that on the church website because maybe I'm not depressed right now, but I bet if I put my mind to it, I could think of two, three, four people who I might want to send this to and then follow-up on them. And some of those sites are gonna be expensive. And I think the great thing about the Rock community and churches in general, the first person who does it, okay, yeah, maybe that's $100,000 because we gotta write the feature, we gotta get the pattern, we gotta document it, we gotta get the vision casted. Well, the next person who does it is probably $50,000 And then three or four more down, everybody's doing it for free. Right? Because it's in Rock, you just push the button and you're good. And so that level of investment, yeah, the first mover has to spend more. But the good news is the efficiencies of repeatability bring that cost down to near zero over time. And we know that's true because we've seen that play out in so many different feature sets and approaches. Yeah, and every time we do a new feature Reminders, for me, it's , I'm all excited about it, but I'm also tampering, okay, just don't forget, you have to get the vision out. You gotta get someone to go do it first. You gotta get someone else to see that, share it at the conference. And then in two or three years, everybody can go , they can't imagine a day when they didn't have reminders. Right. Rock Mobile is much the same. in the beginning, we needed someone to go first, right? Yes. And when the first person went, were they nervous? Absolutely. And they should have been, right? Anybody should be nervous when you're the first person using a new technology. But when that first person went, then other people saw it. The next person's a little bit less afraid. And then by the fourth person, it's , Okay, yeah, we got this. And now it's another Rock mobile app. Cool, that's normal. So it's just the life cycle of technology and features. But we often, as technologists, are a little bit behind in some ways. Yeah, we might be thinking about AI and ChatGPT, but at the same time we're , Oh, we can't pay more for this. And I think that lack of vision in some areas hinders the adoption of newer technologies. Well, that is a great summary of some of the ways that we are having a misconception about Rock and our roles as being just add on. So we have to definitely step back and re envision what it is that we're doing and don't let it just be a migratory process of what was to get us to where we are because that'll hold us back from exponential growth. Yeah. So those are some great insights into some of those areas, and I know it's probably a pretty broad one. Yeah. And seven day challenge, do it. Seven day challenge. You gotta do seven days because you have to have at least one Sunday. See what your check-in does on the weekend. See if anybody notices. But you can't tell anybody, just let it be a little surprise for them. And if no one notices, well, guess go back. Unless you noticed it and it was a lot better too. But I think in most cases, people are gonna be , Wow, what happened to the Rock server? It's so much faster now. And I know our internal Rock server is pretty fast, but we have it really resourced well and we don't have as much traffic as some. So we have two internal Rock servers that we use that are production for us. And one of them flies because it doesn't have a lot of traffic, but we keep it pretty resourced just because it's not that much money and we want it to be fast. And those are not to be confused with the two external demo servers that aren't really super powered. Yeah, those cost a lot of money, they they only have a couple people, and it's not production. And people are often doing silly things on them, which is what they're supposed to be for. But Yep. Alright. Before we wrap up, let's do a quick update on some of the events that we have going on just to keep everybody in the loop. As you remember, we rolled out two new Rock classes at the beginning of this year, and we just finished up our first finance class with about 16 people. That went really well. And next week, if you're listening to this podcast when it comes out first, is going to be our first check-in class. So very excited about those two specific classes because a lot of times the staff that are involved in those two areas need something specific to that without diving into everything available in Rock. So excited about those classes. Definitely check them out. We continue to offer sequel, a Rock one hundred series, and master class in a lot of different formats throughout the year. But if you have some goals about moving forward in your Rock knowledge, there are lots of opportunities for that this year, including the Rock conference. And we continue to say if you're doing Rock without the community or without the conference, you're not really doing it right, because the real secret sauce here is the engagement connection opportunities with the community and the empowerment of sharing ideas and moving forward at a lightning speed compared to doing it in your own lane by yourself. So RX twenty twenty three is coming up early this year, Nick. We hinted at that earlier, but it's July. And that is not just intended for one Rock person from your church. It is definitely intended for a variety of people in a variety of roles. Also, again, back by popular demand, we are doing a free pre day. So we'll have some great community content there, some great opportunities to connect with each other. And again, it's free. Don't miss it. It's all day. So come in on Sunday, So you'll have the opportunity to take advantage of that time as well as the pre day event, which is just a lot of fun. So take a look at that. Sign up soon. The hotel that's attached to our conference is one that sells out. So you don't want to miss out on those, opportunities to stay right where the conference happens. So this is the time to get started on that. Maybe it's early for you this year, but, again, so is the event. So jump right in there and make sure you have everything set up and ready to go. All right. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Rockcast and the opportunity to share some of our insights and the things that we're hearing as we work with multiple churches throughout the community and push forward inside the product for new innovative features that can help your ministry. Thanks for joining us, and we'll talk with you next time. 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.