Podcast Episode 168: Episode 141: Rock's Responsive Road Map

Description

Today, join Jon, Emily and Nick as they look at the road ahead and the exciting new things that are coming in 2023. New classes, features and versions, and a reminder to look back at an underutilized tool that should be dusted off in the new year. Show Notes:Register for RX2023: https://rx.rockrms.com/rxregister/rx2023  Sign up for a Rock Class: https://community.rockrms.com/classes

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 this episode of Rockcast. I'm Emily Forman. And, of course, today, we have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo here to talk about all things Rock. And we're closing in on the end of the year, so this is an excellent time to take a look at where we are and understand what's coming end of this year, beginning of next year. So Nick, fill us in. Where are we on our version updates? We are about to close out 14.1, and I did some research right before this meeting, and I was surprised to see we've closed 76 issues. Wow. So you might think, oh my gosh, 76 issues, but I was looking at them and they're all kind of weird edge cases. And most of them are weird edge cases, nothing really critical. We've got a number of churches running fourteen-zero. And I think we said last time, thanks to our alpha testers. But if you were holding back waiting, we've got 76 edge cases about to be fixed. And as soon as we come back, start of the new year, we're gonna go alpha on that. Okay, so Christmas is busy enough without an alpha testing timeframe in the middle, right? Yeah, we decided to not try and lean on the We still have some work to do too. Yeah. We still have some stings to get done in fourteen point one. That's sort of Sounds it will all line up perfectly then. There's a little bit of a sprint to get the final ones done. Yeah, because there's some people on vacation, injuries, all kinds of fun things happening. Real life happens here at Spark as well. Yep. That's great. Well, John, tell us a little bit about the features that we're working on right now. There's a lot going on. One thing I think from a version update too, we're trying to get version 15 out so we can get some features out immediately. So there's some really cool features reminders that we'd to get out quickly. And as always, our roadmap is very responsive to churches who need certain things. So that's another reason why we're pushing 15 a little bit faster. But it also, it hits the strategies that we've been wanting, which is, , quicker releases, smaller major releases. So reminders is gonna be a great feature. Again, it's one of those features that we're gonna continue to innovate on and innovate, and we really think it's gonna be a a great one. We're also working on a ton of new things. I'm a little overwhelmed as right before this meeting, I was trying to identify all the big things I gotta go figure out to get out. So there's a lot of features that are wanting funding, a lot of Rock Mobile things. And yeah. So just a lot is going on. It's one of those things too. Again, a roadmap is very responsive. So while we still have many of the features that we talked about at the conference that we want to work on, there's new ones coming in ahead of it, some of those, because of, , they're funded and there's some exciting, , things. So probably too early because we're not sure if that funding's gonna go through, but there's just a lot of cool stuff that's going on right now. And I feel trying to keep up is Mhmm. As difficult as always. Yep. And we are always trying to look for the the intersection of what churches are asking for and what the timing is and when our release schedule is, which has really kept us grounded to what churches need in a really responsive way. But it is a crazy sort of collection of train tracks on this side, , oh, switch the train to that track. Hurry, switch it over to that one. Yeah. And for all the new things we add, there's still a ton of features in Rock that are not well used. That's a great point. So it being the end of the year, I know you're probably thinking about goals for next year, and hopefully there's a lot of personal goals in there. But I would have feature goals too for your organization. What are the goals you wanna have done next year? And I'd probably say, which ones do you wanna have done in first quarter? Because if you don't put dates to it, it's not gonna happen. And one of the ones I'd highly recommend you put up on those, on the top of the list is following. And I would say, or ask a question. When was the last time you had a reminder of a congregants or attendees birthday? And if you've not had one of those, something's wrong. you got to go in there, start using the following features. People love to have connection. And I think birthdays, anniversaries are just a natural time to celebrate and have connection. And the features have been in there since I think one O, maybe two O- Long time. For following and then just do it. it's not hard to set up. It's very, very easy. And I think the hardest part of it is going to be setting the vision for your staff and providing some training, but get fifteen minutes in a staff meeting, prepare a few slides, maybe put out a one page little how to guide. Then you got to sell the vision, because if you don't sell the vision, it's just another thing. But I'd sell the vision by telling stories and hooking into emotions , and I know when I was at CCV, this is a slightly different feature. There is a, I think it's a plugin as a digest or a capability of sending out birthday cards. And I wrote a feature for that, way be when I first started at at CCV and I thought to myself, this is kinda cheesy. , we're just gonna send out these emails that say happy birthday. There's no I mean, personalized. It has your name and everything, but no one's really thinking about their birthdays. It's just the system is sending it out. I got the responses to all that because I had I I was, , tracking the inbox for the for the church at that time. I was shocked at how many people replied back thanks for thinking of me. And I even had people reply back with things , no one in my life recognized my birthday. Oh, But you guys did. And on one level, yes, it's just some bits flying through a computer, but there is intention behind that. There was a desire that we recognize people and it led to follow-up, really good follow-up. Slightly different feature. This one's actually much more personalized because it's you sending, you're being told, Hey, it's so and so's birthday, send them an email. It's way more genuine. Yeah. Right. And , , why wouldn't you? , that's what churches are here for is for building connection and caring for people. This feature's all about care. And we haven't gotten a feature request on that area in years. No, you're right. Which tells me no one's using it. And it's a great one. We use it internally. we use it all the time. Yeah, because it increases your ability to remember birthdays. I can't remember 200 people's birthdays in the community, but with the feature, it's easy. Of course, then you get accused of, Hey, was that just an automated thing? They'll respond back. I'm , No, I wrote that by hand. Right, yeah. We tend to send so many that sometimes you forget, , for some people you can personalize it easily, other people it's it kinda comes off as , I wonder if they think I'm really typing this. Yeah. I always try to make mine really, , unique for each person, but they're surprised that you remembered their birthday. That's why they are challenging , hey, is this really Nick? Sometimes you have three of them in one day, you're , oh. Yeah. It's a little harder to personalize it. I find that if I ask a question in an email that, then they know it's not automated. Oh, good to And so it feels a little bit more personal, which is the intention, right? we want those reminders because we want the opportunity for connection. And so it's an exciting opportunity to do that. But that's one little thing that I've picked up on. Yeah, that's good. So I would say that if you're thinking about that goals for next year in terms of features, put that one on there and don't overestimate how long that's gonna take. Can get that done in a day. And the hardest part again is the training and setting the vision. Put that on January 1, check the box and , man, you're doing well already. One day you got a huge feature out. Absolutely. Great little ministry moment for people who may be going through something in their life, and that might be just the opportunity for connection that they needed. All right. You may have seen from us some information on our Fund the Future campaign. And so we wanted to give just a little space in our podcast today to describe a little more about that and what we're doing. If you've been tracking with us at all in the past year, that we have been working on building the next gen platform for Rock technology because we're thinking ahead and working ahead. And that's a multiyear project. It's a big project. But it's important to the health of technology stack that we're using and Rock in general. So we're tracking on that very strategically and very carefully, but it does add significant workload to our product and development teams to do that, while at the same time, we really haven't slowed down our pace of developing features in general, and of course, addressing any issues that need fixes. So we're really taking on an extra kind of double layer of workload as we're building that. And all the things that we do with Spark, we are reliant on donations to provide the kind of fuel for the engine of work that we do. So as we've increased the workload this year intentionally to try and accelerate the production of this additional technology for the future, that requires additional funding. So we put together a campaign that says help us just kind of accelerate the funding a little bit to make up for some of those accelerated development hours that we were able to put in this year. In the past, you've probably heard us talking about the challenges in building a skilled dev team here on-site, which was important to us. We work really efficiently, really quickly, and doing that in a collaborative on-site environment has been really important and strategic for us. And that's been challenging over time, but God's really blessed us this year in helping develop a higher quality and quantity team than we've been able to work with in the past. It's really exciting, the developers on our team now. So we have access to additional resourcing to begin really pouring into that. But again, the fuel for the engine, the speed that we can run at is really dependent on donations. So we just to provide clarity for the community about what we're doing and how each of you may or may not be able to assist in some of those opportunities. So the Fund the Future campaign is really just to help us accelerate the development of that next gen technology. If you have more questions on that, there's some information in our last keynote that you can pay attention to. You can find that on the communities page and look up subscriptions. And that's a free video there. So there's a little more information if somehow you missed what those details look and what our progress is. That's awesome. , it is December, and a lot of times we're not talking about next year's Rock experience quite yet. But we really shortened the timeline between conferences this year. And rather than having a conference in the fall, we are for a variety of reasons having RX in July next year. So that means the countdown is on. There's a lot to do. We're already hard at work on this. In fact, we probably gave ourselves what a week or two break before we started working on the next year's event. But what that means is you might feel , oh, I typically get my conference tickets in February or March, but we wanna remind you that that would actually align with December right now. And so we know there's a lot on your plate this time of year, but don't neglect getting that conference ticket purchased. Again, that has to align with a room. Right? You have to stay somewhere. And the hotel has a total of maybe 300 rooms in it, and our conference attendance is always higher than that. And I know how fun it is to stay right on-site and be able to connect with people. The lobbies, the common areas are just full of all kinds of creative energy and collaboration. So you don't wanna miss it, but those those hotel rooms are pretty limited. So make sure you get your ticket in your hotel room this month if you can, so it's not on your next year's to do list. Just check it off so you've got it in hand and you're ready to go. Some people have been asking, are we doing a pre day at the event next year? So in this last year, for the first time, we had a day before the conference that was free and available and, all about community education and connection. And as all things RX, we take all of your feedback through the surveys and and the emails that you send us, and we reenvision the best ways to, move forward into the next year, making tweaks. And so what we have determined is we definitely will have a pre day. It was something that got pretty much unanimous, interest and approval to do again. The content of that pre day may be switched up a little bit this year, so we're still looking into what the best opportunities are on that. But if you're booking travel, keep in mind that the day before the conference will have some great community connection opportunities. So make sure that you book your travel to accommodate that. That was a lot of fun too last last It was a lot of fun. So I'm looking forward to that. Yeah. I would just put out that, , the reason why it took us a little bit longer to to determine for doing that again was it was an amazing amount of work Yes. It was. Make all that content because it's technical content. And we wanted to make sure that that's content that was really well vetted and make sure that it's - High quality. These are the best practices. And it just took a ton of time. But based on input, we are gonna do it again. Yep, Definitely. So that's very exciting. We also have some new things coming in 2023 that we want to let about. In the last years, two years, I think, we've introduced two new classes for the community. We introduced the Rock one zero one and one zero two. That was kind of a high level survey of all things Rock. And then we'd introduced SQL for Rock, which was going deeper into the data structure and understanding some deeper technical levels inside Rock. Well, we are now looking at the masterclass that we have and re envisioning that just a little bit to be able to accommodate v 14. The number of features and the things that we want to cover inside masterclass has changed drastically as the, the feature set has grown in Rock. So we need to make sure that that's all up to par. So we'll be spinning off a couple of new, virtual classes that are short and specific to topics. So next year, look for classes for Rock finance and Rock check-in. And we're looking at probably timelines of two half days to accommodate multiple time zones, and, we'll have those up here pretty soon with registration options available. And masterclass will be adding new content. So we'll have all of that explained, but just wanna give you a heads up as you're looking forward to next year, who on your team might need training. And sometimes we've heard that the people who need to understand check-in and finance may not necessarily need training on all things Rock. So having very specific targeted classes for them could be really beneficial for your in house teams, and will still enable you to get training without having to them through the full masterclass. So options coming next year. Keep an eye out for those. You won't miss them. I promise we'll get all the information out just as soon as those registrations are available. Great. Alright. Well, there's a lot going on right now. There's a lot coming up next year. And the great part of it is that we get to do it with the Rock community. Every year, it's just encouraging for me anyway to look back and see what we did in collaboration with churches. And John, you mentioned we have ideas for a roadmap, but we're always working on what comes in and what's needed. And the collaboration opportunities are usually ones we wouldn't have predicted ahead of time. And in retrospect, they're just where the magic happens. And so we're really excited thinking about in 2023, all the opportunities that will come up on those fronts and just looking forward to doing it together with this community. Well, thank you for joining us today for an update on the community and the product behind Rock. We appreciate you and we look forward to connecting with you on our next podcast. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so that you can make sure you don't miss it. 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.