Podcast Episode 163: Episode 136: Special Edition w/ Melissa Drexler

Description

Special guest Melissa Drexler from ITOWN Church joins us on RockCast today to share all about how ITOWN Church uses its Rock mobile app. From gamifying weekend attendance with streaks to 21-day Bible reading challenges, ITOWN Church uses its Rock mobile app to ensure that the weekend message stays relevant all week. Melissa gives a sneak preview of her lightning round session at RX2022 by walking us through the setup of the prayer challenges in the app and the mechanics behind it. Tune in for some inspiration for using Rock Mobile to drive engagement.

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 Rockcast. We have a special edition here today where we get to interview someone from the community and learn all about what they're doing with Rock at their church and a little bit more about them. And in this case, it's someone you might run into at Rx, so this is gonna be really handy. I'm Emily Forman. I have Erin Higginbotham, and our special guest today is Melissa Drexler. Melissa is with ITOWN Church in Fishers, Indiana, a church of about 4,500, and her official title there currently is digital systems administrator. Welcome, Melissa. Thank you. Now you have a pretty impressive lineup in the community, so let me just tell everyone a little bit about, what we know about you, and then we'll dig into some other details. You've recently been named a 2022 Rock star, so you've been very present in the chat community and assisting other churches, as you've been learning as well. So thank you for your efforts on that front. Absolutely. We've been keeping you hopping this summer as well with beta testing. So that is a huge important role for people in the community to help us do the testing that goes along with making any software great and free of bugs. So thanks for helping with that. You will be at Rx twenty twenty two with a lightning round session, which is something new we're introducing this year. Several back to back 10 quick sessions so a listener can get all kinds of really intriguing information quickly. And it's your second year attending RX. Yes. Whoo. Well, you are jumped in with both feet into the community. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about your personal background? You have a degree in computer science. You worked at a development company, and now you're working at ITOWN. Tell us about the beginning of that journey. Sure. So I graduated college back in December 2017 with my computer science degree from the University of Kentucky. The degree was more focused on the science and theory parts, so not as much on the software development. So I ended up taking more of business classes towards the end. So then my first job out of college was project management at a contracting company for software development. So there, I did a lot of testing for the software, writing requirements, helping review designs, that kind of thing. But once I graduated college, moved up to Indianapolis, I started attending ITOWN and just fell in love with the community here. And then they had a leadership program called ITLA where anyone with a ministry interest or just anyone really wanting to grow their leadership could join. And so, jumped into that, began serving in all kinds of different areas, and then found a home kind of in the production world here at ITOWN. But yeah, I was hired on to staff as the pastoral care assistant. Yeah. And then quickly switched over to digital systems admin. You switched right about the same time that you guys launched Rock. Is that right? Yes. Was that ? Yeah. Honestly, looking back, I feel it was probably a great time because I really just missed the migration part from our old system and the very initial setup of Rock. So I was there to help with the rollout of, , the first version of, , check-in and just getting that flowing because that was, , the feature we launched with, was kids check-in and then quickly after that, our Go team serving check-in. So didn't feel I missed out on too much, but yeah. I'm not sure missing out on data migration is a problem, really. That's not that was very smartly timed. So what does a normal day look for you as a digital systems administrator? Yeah. So as the digital system administrator, my main focus is Rock. So that's creating and updating reports, event registrations, all kinds of workflows and the forms that come with those. I also am support, so I respond to support emails each day. So, if someone's having trouble logging in or just wanting to change their profile, whatever that looks . I try and make all of our really cool designs for my creative team come to life in our app. That's part of my role now. Also, thinking through how to enhance our processes as a staff so that we can spend less time on the admin side and more time on the people side of things. And then I also recently got to do more of the design side of things for our newest app. So kind of diving into that, which has been super fun. Beyond that, I help with other software as needed. So we use Slack as an organization for communication. Asana help a little bit with that with our task management and kind of whatever else comes up. That's digital. So That sounds quite a bit. How how big is your staff there out of curiosity? Roughly seventy, seventy five. Great. We are also part of the Asana fan club here. Yes. Well, you guys have been on Rock for eighteen months now. Is that right? Just about eighteen months? Yeah. So a couple of things. I think our biggest feature and everything that we're using is actually the mobile shell that Rock has developed because it just makes it so easy to put the app out into the world. But now that we have the Rock Mobile Shell, we're able to do so much because our previous mobile app was very content heavy and that's basically all we could do. But with Rock Mobile, we can really bring to life a ton of the features that we as staff get to use, but just giving people access to their profile, their information, but also being able to provide them tools that they can actively use in the app to grow. So our mission statement here, ITOWN, is helping people move from where they are to where God wants them to be. So we really try to focus on equipping people so that they can access our daily Bible reading that our pastors are reading, or they can go in and submit prayer requests, or they can sign up to serve and jump in and get involved. And then the second feature that we use a lot is for our new homeschool partnership program. So we have used Rock to create a full application process using payments and event registration all the way to using forms for class selections and creating a new feature for just class management, stuff that. So being able to bring, homeschooling partnership into Rock has been a wonderful experience. Wow. That's really incredible. So the let me just dig into one of those for a minute. Your app experience that you're talking about, it sounds you have a lot of active development and and strategy going into that in a way that takes, , what your leadership's talking about and and uses features that are available in Rock Mobile. So what would you say have been some of the best received features that you're seeing interaction or engagement with and your leadership's loving right now? I think being able to track kinda even what pages people are visiting. So knowing, , is what we are speaking about on the weekends Mhmm. Impacting people to go and read the daily devotional or to submit prayer requests or to sign up for events and to serve and that kind of thing. So yeah, just being able to track those interactions versus, , if they just go to our website and then view it on their own, it's not as easy to see, , what are the impacts of what we're doing and then just being able to kind of bring to life what we are doing, , on a daily basis. Mhmm. So it's more for people. And how are you using group membership to to put specific information at the hands of people inside that app experience? So we haven't dug into a ton of personalization based on, , groups and whatnot. We've used them so certain groups can access certain things in the app. So, , our Go Team leads, for example, have a section in the app that only they can see that provide them resources to lead our different serving teams well. Or for IT Layer Leadership Academy, they have a secret page as well based on their group so they can access all their assignments and all that kind of stuff. That's really interesting. In in previous cases in the church world, that might have to be separate apps. Absolutely. Yes. It sounds you have different strategies, different purposes, but you can have one tool that can make all those things available depending on what it is that someone uniquely needs from you. Yes. So even as far as our staff, we were trying to make Rock very centralized. , all of our documents are stored in Rock for our staff and links and sign ups and all that kind of stuff. So it's very versatile. That's really cool. , what a thorough way to use a tool in in different varied applications and and in order to make it functional for everyone. Obviously, I haven't had enough coffee this morning. These sentences are coming out a little hard. Anyways, great job. Do you have other features you're looking at bringing into your app experience? We are always looking to bring in new features. I thought you might say that. I love seeing the updates roll out. So we're hopefully about to go into the mobile v three shell. But couple of the things I noticed for that one especially was just the different group blocks that we can access now. So we have our small groups, you can sign up for small groups in our app. And that's a current just a web page that we sign them into from the Rock site using the group finder tool. But we are looking to bring that more in mobile, so more of a native experience. We think that will really help with low times and all that kind of fun stuff. Another thing that we're looking to bring into the app is an audio Bible experience. So our daily devotional, we have audio files for the different scriptures licensed through NIV. And then we have one of our church members going to be recording the devotional, reading it out loud. So then that gives anyone who's listening on their way to work a chance to, , go through the daily devotional through the app using audio. Yeah. That's very convenient. And it sounds you've done a lot of exploring yourself, what's possible, planning, and bringing things in, and and it's really cool to hear that as a platform, Rock Mobile seems really accessible for you. Yeah. I think so. I didn't really have any specific mobile app experience before starting with the Rock Mobile Shell. So, it's been fairly simple to pick up once you recognize patterns, have a few examples, and stuff that. So That's really cool. So you mentioned before we started recording, you've been telling us a little bit about the use of streaks at iTown, which is really interesting. We did a product survey earlier this year, and the feedback we got back from churches is we're really intrigued by streaks. We really wanna use them. We don't know where to start, or we haven't quite had time to get our heads around how that applies to us. Can you share a little bit about what that has looked for you and some success that you're seeing in that? Sure. There are two ongoing streaks that we have, , happening at all times through the app, and it is the daily devotional reading. So they get a streak point every time that they open the bible app page, and then they can see their progress on their profile page. So they can see their current streak, longest streak. And then the second way is also shown in the app. It's just a weekend attendance streak. So every time that they check-in with Serve, their kids check-in, if they take notes during a service block on Sunday, we count that as attendance. We're assuming that they're there. And then there's even a button on the profile page that some people to click that just says, I'm here. And it lets us know that they're here, and we record attendance that way. Oh, that's really cool. So you've added gamification to it to help people be encouraged to tell you, hey, we're attending, which everyone really wants to know. Yes. And the fun part is we don't, , send out anything in particular once you hit, , streaks yet of any kind, , or accomplishments. But people are really into seeing that streak go up. , they don't wanna miss the day. , if something happens and they miss a day for some reason, especially if, , there's some kind of bug or whatever that we didn't notice, , they'll email me at support and ask me to fix it. And I will. But it's funny to see how into it people are Oh, that's great. For nothing other than to see it on their profile. Yes. So it's it just makes it a visible encouragement, which is really cool. Absolutely. Well, thanks for sharing that. That seems a great application for the feature, and I'm sure it will be encouraging for people to hear a little bit about a real life situation and kinda the results that you're seeing from it. That's that's pretty awesome. Do you have a favorite Rock feature? This might be a little generic, but I'm gonna say workflows. Just because you can do so much with workflows, it seems every couple months I'm going back to workflows I've already made to do something different to make them better. And I'm learning how to really connect workflows with other features to help facilitate more automation, and that's been really helpful. Mhmm. Workflow. Yeah. We're looking forward to the best practices day session that's coming up before conference this year on workflows because you're right. There's so much power in there, and you can do so many diverse things. It's fun to keep playing around with them. And the improvement probably never stops. I imagine we'll always continue looking backward and and thinking, oh, I I bet I could add a few tweaks to that that might make it a little better. %. Yes. Well, you've you've talked a lot about your app and about how important that is and how powerful that is at iTown. How did you go about kind of setting that up? You touched a little bit about not having had a lot of experience before that. How did you set up your app, and and how do you continue to innovate and grow in your app as well? Sure. So it's really lucky that my supervisor loves apps. He's a pretty big nerd as well. So he was really into creating some initial mock ups with our executive team. So just taking bits and pieces from other apps that we've seen, both church apps and non church apps, to kind of figure out how to engage our audience. So we had some mock ups. We tried to flush out some of the details knowing that we will always continue to add and change, , pretty much every week. But we partnered with one of the Rock partners to help get our app going, make all of the deep functionality at the beginning, and give us some examples to move forward with. And then once we had some examples in place, I was able to do a lot of copy paste, create new pages, change the content that's on the page, that kind of thing. And we still use our partner occasionally, but it's at a point where a lot of the new functionality is , I can do it based on past experience, but also the mobile documentation keeps getting better. And the mobile rocket chat channel is really great as far as asking questions or troubleshooting and stuff that. But highly recommend jumping in that channel, even if you're just considering mobile to see all the things that goes on. You are definitely very active in that channel, which is awesome. And we, have been working really hard to get those mobile docs improved. When something started totally from scratch, we get out there with what we can, and we come back and improve it over time. So appreciate that encouragement. That's been, an area of extra emphasis for us here lately as well. Now you're doing a twenty one days of prayer challenge in your app. How does that work? Yeah. So we started this back in January. So we do twenty one days of prayer and fasting in January, and then twenty one days of prayer in August. So this is our second go round, it's a lot easier this time to figure out. But basically, it's a combination of using streaks, groups, group sync from that, workflows, and then we also put in push notifications. So we start out with a workflow on a page in the app, and that workflow adds a person to a group for our challenge, so our challenge group. And then from there, they come back to that page or a specific page in the app each day. And once they hit that page of the app, we also add an attendance for them using a workflow. And so, the attendances are what fuel the streaks. And then we use group sync from that group to create a communication list so that I can set up all of the push notifications before the challenge even starts. And so that way I don't have to worry about doing it every day because I would forget. So then we send out push notifications that point them either to the specific page or a different page in the app. So that way, it also reminds them to participate in the challenge. Mhmm. And then at the end of the challenge, we use a little bit of SQL to pull in the streak information, and we either display it on their profile or we send them an email. Oh, that's really cool. What an encouraging way to approach that. What's engagement on that look at your church? It was surprisingly high in January. We were very pleasantly surprised. It was in it was near a thousand, I think. Wow. For our January line. That's fantastic. So I was getting people into reading the devotional and submitting prayer requests. So Wow. That's if you think about the it's use of tools we're talking about. Right? But these are people engaging daily in in prayer. And it's that daily encouragement that's happening, , that's that's why we're here. It's so great we can do administrative features. Right? But the the daily engagement and encouragement for people, that's that's pretty incredible. Maybe those thousand people wouldn't have necessarily been praying every day in January, or maybe you wouldn't have had the encouragement of knowing that this body of people was because it was also independent. So that's a a great a great application of that that set of tools that you're using. It's really it's something that you make attainable, a challenge, a challenge app, a challenge scenario that. Those are easier to come up with than to create, And you've done a really good job of putting things together in a way that makes it something that could be repeatable for you. So fun to see how the August 1 turns out. How far in are you? Is it the whole month? Oh gosh. We started Sunday. Okay. So it's twenty one days and starting Sunday. So we're just really getting into it. We're doing a pray it forward text challenge this time. So that's been fun to me. It's really cool to think about the ripple effects of that. Right? You start with a workflow, and then thousands of people are affected because those people who are praying are praying for their people. Right? So that that one small droplet becomes this huge wave of of prayer, of change. Yep. Yeah. So you were given a 2022 Rock star status because you earned it. Was that a surprise to you when you were notified? Did you expect it? Had you been working toward it? It was a surprise. I wasn't specifically working towards it. It was one of those things that were introduced at the conference last year when I heard it. Was , that'd be really cool to do. It wasn't something I was necessarily trying for. So, I'm very surprised. Was the conference last year where you first heard of it? I think so. I mean, I think I'd seen it in, , rocket chat and stuff, but I never really knew what it meant until hearing more about it at the conference. Oh, that's very cool. We're excited to provide some more encouragement from the stage this year at the conference. So it's really interesting to know that that was something that was beneficial to you last year. Yeah. Absolutely. What would you say to someone who might be sitting there this year in the Rx audience and hearing that and thinking, I don't know. Should I do it? Should I not? Do I have what it takes? I would just say jump in. , I would not have expected to be a Rock star at this point. , I'm just I feel a lot of times I'm just here on my little island team of one at Brock at ITown, and then just trying to figure out everything, but then being able to ask questions in the community. Then while I'm going there to ask questions, I'm browsing through the other channels and , Oh, I did that once. I can give something to this conversation. So just being available to try and give some insight or have you thought about it this? Even if you don't have a full answer, but knowing that everyone is continuing to grow, , on their Rock journey, regardless of how long they've been there because you guys keep releasing amazing new features and ways to use Rock. So there's always something new. Well, I'm sure there will be lots of new things to talk about at Rx. So for those who are listening and haven't yet signed up, don't miss it. It's coming soon. It's only once a year. You can't miss this. Alright. And you'll be there too. You have a lightning round session. What's your topic that you'll be sharing? How do you connect different elements of Rock to create some automation? Alright. That will be exciting. Don't miss it. So come and learn more about what she said about this cool process in the app. Right? Mhmm. About how to go from one piece to a big big piece. Well, I would say if someone's thinking about how they might use Rock Mobile in a way that drives engagement, not just as, , a a bunch of web links, right, but if they wanna really drive engagement through native features. And you mentioned workflows. Workflow forms are one of the easiest things to put into an app, and they're so powerful. So lots of cool options. But how would you feel about people reaching out to you and saying, Melissa, tell me more about how you did this? Yeah. Absolutely. Happy to give ideas, kinda give what we've done, and just say, hey. It's probably it's probably a better way, but this is what's working for us. This is what's working. That's right. So Melissa's on Rocket Chat. If you have questions about some of that, they're using streaks in really cool ways, putting challenges together, and really making the most of the Rock Mobile platform. She's also doing a Rockstar consult at the conference. So if you have specific questions you wanna ask, you can sign up at the conference and get some dedicated time to to connect with the Rockstars and talk through specific questions. Yeah. That's a unique opportunity at the conference that was really appreciated last year, so we definitely brought that back this year. Yeah. Well, we are so happy to have had you. You're you're recently married. Right? What do you to do for fun with your husband? What do you guys do in free time? Oh gosh. A lot of times, it's going on what we call adventures. So we go and go Rock climbing, kayaking, hiking. We just to do different things around our town, and then we also just love playing ping pong. So How did you get started playing ping pong? How do we start playing ping pong? Yeah. We have ping pong tables actually at our church for youth, but we were able to use those for small groups one semester last year, and we realized that we were both very competitive and we both love ping pong and we're pretty evenly matched on it. So we ended up really connecting over that, and then, yeah, start dating from there. So love bloomed over the ping pong table. There's the spark. Yep. Well, Melissa, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing some of the things that you've been finding success with in using Rock to reach people in new ways. We appreciate all your efforts into the community and really look forward to seeing you here soon again at Rx. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a blast on this Rock journey. Well, thank you, and thank you to our listening audience for joining us for another incredible Rock Community interview. We appreciate your listening. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you can continue to be notified about our upcoming episodes. Thank you so much 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. Are you ready to take the next step or share with another local church? Visit rockrms.com/hosting today.