Podcast Episode 160: Episode 133: Special Edition with Brandi Myszkowski and Sena Brickwedel

Description

Brandi Myszkowski and Sena Brickwedel of Christ Fellowship Church in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida are our special guests on Rock Cast this week. They give us a behind the scenes peek into what their Rock team structure looks like and how they've put systems into place to support Christ Fellowship staff. Plus, we get a sneak preview of what Brandi and Sena will be presenting at RX2022!

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 special edition of Rockcast. We get to bring you an introduction to a lot of the community members that you've seen around in chat, at conference, and in other areas, and it's such a fun, special time. I'm Emily Forman, I have Erin Higginbotham with me today, and we have special guests, two special guests from Christ Fellowship Church, Brandi Myszkowski and Cena Brickwoodell. Thank you so much for joining us ladies. Yeah, we're excited. Yeah. So a little bit about each of you in case the community is , Oh, that name or the face, how do I know them? Brandy, you're the Director of IT Applications at Christ Fellowship, and you're in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. I know there are a couple of Christ Fellowships sometimes. You've been a strategic partner at Christ Fellowship with Rock and Spark going back many years, we've enjoyed an incredible relationship of taking ministry needs right in the trenches at Christ Fellowship and pushing those forward in ways that benefit the community. Now the community might have run into you at conference this year, I think, will be your fourth that you've attended. And you've taken the sequel class. So you have some graduate companions from that as well. And Sina, you're the application support manager at Christ Fellowship. You're a Rock star. This will be your third conference. And you've taken both Masterclass and SQL class. Does that kind of sum up where the community might have interacted with you? Job. Sure, good job. your facts. Well, you ladies have certainly done a lot of things in the community. So that's really exciting. Tell us, , we've heard titles, but tell us what your roles mean on a day to day basis at work. Sure, I'd love to. So I'm Brandi. Thanks for such an awesome introduction. I actually get to steward our applications and development team. And that means we're responsible for all things Rock, including several other applications that are used by our church staff, as well as all in house development for our website and our mobile app, including all data analytics and data visualization. So I have an awesome team. Yeah, and this is Sina. I steward the application support team which primarily looks after the UI in Rock and we also support a few other applications. Incredible. And you made those sound so succinct, but there is a lot that happens on a day to day basis to make all of those initiatives move forward. For sure, for sure. That was a lot of big projects to sum up in one or two words apiece. Yeah. They keep us busy here. Well, you guys are from a really big church. Christ Fellowship has over 17,000 attendees. Can you tell us a little bit about what your Rock team at large looks ? How do you have your team kind of structured? Sure. So our team actually consists of three main areas of expertise. So as Sina mentioned, we have our application support team that Sina manages the day to day and shout out to our team, Susan, Isaac, Rachel. And then we can't forget about Luke and Lee from Triumph Tech, of course. This team handles all of our Rock changes, configurations, workflow, new feature development with Triumph Tech and all other applications that we support for our church, such as Shopify, for our online store, we use Square in our coffee shop. We do still use Shelby Teller for check scanning and our cash envelopes. So yeah, there's that. Then we also have our development team, which I manage the day to day and a shout out to that team, Danny, Liz, George, we have our very first intern ever this summer really, and she's amazing. And then we have our QA tester, Megan. So she tests everything that our developers build out. But this team handles all development for our website and our mobile app and any API integrations both within Rock and outside of Rock. And just so everyone knows our website and our mobile app, Rock is behind it all. Rock is behind it all. So, but it is not Rock Mobile or the Rock it's not built on Rock, but Rock is behind everything. And our third team is our data analytics and visualization, which consists of Miles, Samantha, George, and myself. With the majority of reporting within Rock, we manage the analytics and visualizations in SQL and Tableau as well. Wow, that's an incredible team. And I love that you're giving a shout out to everyone on there. So much cool stuff being done. Yeah. Thank you all of Christ fellowship team for the work that you're doing internally. And then the way that that actually impacts the core team, the products that are being put out and the benefit of the whole community. That's incredible. Awesome. Yeah, and we recently had a little bit of a shift where we actually, we were part of IT and we've recently shifted our team now reports under digital transformation and IT is still IT, but it's hardware, desktop support, networking. And then our team reports under digital transformation, which is, so we have a new senior leadership and that team is marketing and communications as well as our online church CF Everywhere. That's incredible. So your tools and your strategies are becoming more tightly aligned for your digital ministry. Exactly. Exactly. That's very cool. So you have an internal development team and that's a little different for some churches. We talk a lot in the podcast about how development teams aren't required to use There are lots of different ways that you can use Rock, but your team does uniquely have that. What are some of the things that has impacted in the way you can use Rock? Sure. So it has significantly been impacted. So before Rock, we were on Arena and we were a team of one, who is also known as the team of no. So we were very, we could not make changes that ministries requested, but once we moved to Rock, everything changed. The team of one quickly grew to a team of three and we could start saying yes to almost everything. In fact, we had to put a process in place immediately to handle the influx of requests that were coming in because ministries started learning how flexible Rock was. And then, we had to really prioritize and manage the volume. So our small team of three, it's now actually a team of 11. And we have two open positions even. So the team has grown quite a bit and we still are getting a ton of requests. And we just love that we get to work with you guys and making sure that we're building out new features and that the whole community gets to enjoy. That's the unique thing about the Spark and RockWorld, right? It's that we're all kind of doing it together. And so the innovations, the pace, the high impact features that are not just administration focused, but ministry focused are because of the partnership that Spark has with churches Christ Fellowship, and so many others to go, oh, what is the problem you're trying to solve? How does that extrapolate across the whole? And how can we put a solution together that's extensible enough that it solves your need and can also solve the needs of other churches? Because we see all the time that a feature that rolls out in one of our major updates is being used in ways we never imagined. Sometimes it comes in as a bug report. And we're , oh, what are you doing with that feature? Oh, that's really interesting. That's cool. Yeah, we didn't make it to do that. You're right. But it's more of an enhancement. And so it's a it's a really fun way to work together. I I love seeing we're a few years further into it now. And to see the the broad range of features in the way that it's being used is really incredible. And that's definitely due to that partnership of churches who want to be working at that level of of solving solutions. Yeah. For sure. So you guys have some interesting systems in place to support your staff. You're you're talking about your different teams and kind of your overarching digital ministry. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the the systems that you've got? Know that you're gonna be talking about this at conference, don't spoil your conference sessions, but you use something called Team Pages. Can you tell us more about that? Definitely. So Team Pages started as a way to organize reports that were unique to each ministry. We wanted them to have a place to go to get the info they needed. And then over time, in an effort to create a more accessible, more user friendly Rock experience for them, we added additional items that they needed links to update content. , if they wanted to add a baptism date to the signup form, we just created a link right there on their team page to do that for the connection specific team, or we added custom analytics and metrics specific to their team, ministry specific connection requests, they could change the default connector from that team page. There's lots that they can do on that page. The great thing about team pages is it really centralized the reports, the features, the functionalities, because there was some confusion as to where to find things they always forgot, and making their life easier is what we're all about. So that by adding value to them, they could see it and they had more buy in. Then and we continue to get more requests. What kind of requests are you guys getting on a day to day basis? Oh my goodness. That was a bigger question then. Yeah. Everything that, , things we never even dreamed of thinking about, we think about Rock a lot. But, , the boots on the ground, they really in the trenches of ministry, they see things a little differently. And so things we couldn't have thought about because we don't do what they do, they come back and ask. And a lot of times we think, why does it need to do that? But when you hear the user story, you're , okay, that totally makes sense. Let's see what we can do. But we get requests for sign up forms. And a lot of them do come in last minute. That is a universal problem. on a Friday and it's going live on Sunday. Oh no. Yeah, it happens. It's generally Thursday afternoon at four Thursday afternoons at four But that's the really cool thing about Rock though, is we are able to accommodate those last minute changes most of the time and get them returned back to the ministries quickly so that our senior pastors can announce what they wanna announce on a Sunday morning that they just thought about on Thursday afternoon. So, , that's one of the reasons why we love Rock, but we get lots of requests for reporting. Reporting and changing, making small tweaks to configuration, or sometimes requires development that makes a huge difference in efficiency for them so that they can care, they have more time to care for people better. So it sounds your team pages are really quick link and reference pages, action spots that are kind of a one stop shop depending on your maybe your campus or your ministry. You're, there's a church that would come to you now and say, hey, we love that idea. How do you get started with something similar? what's the organization behind it? What would your advice be on that? In terms of organization, I mean, I think for us, we want consistency across all campuses. So organizing by ministry made sense because we wanted a consistent report for every campus, so rather than campus specific. But it really depends on the church and how you guys are organized. But we're gonna unpack all that in the RX twenty twenty two breakout. So don't miss it. Yeah, don't miss that. You're gonna love it. We're gonna demo the pages and show you how we build them. Very cool. All right. So that's right there. That's your little hook. Everybody needs to come and check out that conference session, because that is an invaluable way to assist team members in not wasting time and getting the things that they need and not being overwhelmed by all the things Rock can do, but the things that they need to do. Exactly. Very good. Well, we've talked a little bit about some of the features that Christ Fellowship has kind of worked to help develop in Rock. Can Can you tell us what some of those are? So currently my favorite feature right now is bookmarks. And Sina kind of referred to it earlier, sometimes we forget where things are because Rock is so big and there's so many places to go to find things. So I love this personally because I have my favorite reports saved. I have my pages I go to most often content items or connection types or group types. I have those just saved and it's just a quick click for me. I also love that I can see the last 10 person records that I was on. So I can always go back if I , oh, what was that that I was looking at? I can quickly go back to it and reference it. But coming soon, I'm so excited for this in version 14, sticky headers on dynamic data reports. We have a lot of dynamic data reports in Rock and I am constantly scrolling to find a record I'm looking at, and then I gotta scroll back up to see what the column header is on it. And so I think this is gonna be a huge feature, not only for us, but I think a lot of other churches will be able to enjoy that one. That's incredible. I have a few favorites too. My current favorite is we worked with you guys to develop being able to add a person to a family as a workflow action, and that was so huge for us because before we were doing all of our children's class sign ups through registrations, which meant our team did all of those registrations times 14 some odd campuses. So it was a lot of work every month. But by being able multiple people to a family, we were able to create a workflow and then create a group finder. And then every month the team just goes and puts their classes out there. And it was a one time we did the workflow and they do the rest. So we empowered ministry, which helps free us up to do more things. We're not stuck doing registrations every month. We can build more stuff. That's awesome. So that's my current favorite. One that's coming up that I think is going to be huge. I hope we're not stealing thunder, but I'm super excited about it was we in an upcoming version, it's not out yet, we're we're creating the bulk connection request update. So when you can you can can you can change the connector for multiple connection requests at the same time, you'll be able to change the campus or the status. And that one I think is going be a huge win for the whole community because I know how many times it's been asked of us from all of our different ministries, for that feature. And so we're excited that that is coming soon. Yeah, if someone goes on vacation or someone leaves the church and they have a ton of connection requests assigned to them, That's a lot of Yes, it is a lot of cleanup. And for us that are in Rock living and breathing it, we're , well, just don't select your specific connection requests, look at all of them. But from a ministry point of view, this is so helpful for them. And that's what, , we wanted to make that easier for them. And I think they're gonna love it. So when you look at things that you're hearing from your ministry, sometimes you're able to solve those directly on your team or working with a Rock partner to do that. And other times you say, what, this might have a better, larger benefit to the community. How are you identifying those things that might be beneficial to add to core as a feature enhancement? Right, so, , some of the ideas are born out of inspiration, wouldn't it be cool if and then some of them are born out of frustration, easier. But most of our ideas come from our brilliant ministry teams, I would say, who are using Rock really well. I would say in the beginning, work with Triumph Tech to consider how would this work on a larger scale with different sized teams and different sized churches and talk through that. But now I think we just throw out our ideas at you and your TA team or whatever, they come back with even better ideas. Sometimes they're , no, that's too custom. Or sometimes they're , yes, and this is what we were dreaming of. with the bulk connection requests, our number one goal was, hey, we wanna be able to bulk update connectors. And you guys came back and said, what if we could update everything on the edit page for connection requests? And we're , heck yeah. Go for it. That yes and is where the Rock magic happens, Right? What we love about working together with churches yours. Sina, you mentioned the workflow action that you're excited about. And one of the things I think is so cool is that adding workflow actions that have high impact is such an easy thing to do in the Rock world. That's one of the things that coming through, you mentioned the TA process, our technical architecture, the core product team. They're very open to workflow actions and not everyone that's a part of core right now is all of what we'll need, but it's really the use cases of what's happening inside specific ministry activities that has illuminated the need for additional ones that would make things more efficient. So we've seen quite a few of those types of requests come through. They're usually not huge development projects, but the impact is incredible. And they really get used across the community in cool ways. That's just something I wanted to mention because I know it's high impact, typically a smaller project size and really highly adopted. For sure. Whoever developed the conditional workflow attributes, thank you. That was amazing. We love you, whoever you were. I love how excited you guys get about that kind of thing. It's great. I think that's one of the cool cool coolest things about the Rock community is that we're all super nerds. We get really excited about stuff that. Sure. Sure. Well, speaking of the community, Rx twenty twenty two is coming up super soon, just a couple of months away, and you guys are both presenting this year. How many times have you spoken at RX? And were you nervous? How did you feel about it? Do have you gotten braver through additional speaking sessions? I don't know if 2020 counts. I was on a panel in 2020. I don't know if 2020 counts for anything. 2021 was actually our first in person presentation and we did it together and we had a blast. Sina and I, we not only worked together, but we're friends. So we had a lot of fun doing it together. And there was just some comfort knowing that we were doing it together. This year we are speaking and we're doing two presentations and we're doing both of them together. We bounce off each other well, and there is comfort knowing that if I stumble or she stumbles, we've got each other's backs. And I don't know. Yeah, I don't think we were nervous to be in front of the room, especially since we were together. But I think where the nerves came in is we were just, nervous to make sure that the content we were presenting was relevant and meaningful to our audience and that they would have some real takeaways and new ideas that they could apply in their church. I think that's what I was most, we were both most nervous Yeah, and I think in 2021, we were both relieved at the end during our question and answer time when they actually had questions. So that just helped us know. Yeah, we worked hard at it. We did, and it worked. But that helped us know that it was relevant and people were excited about what we presented. So hopefully we can pull the same thing off this year. What did you present on last year and what are you presenting on this year? Yeah, so last year we did automation, level up with automation. So we were presenting different ways from the UI without being a developer, you can implement different automated things to make your ministry's lives easier, to make our lives easier, free both of you up to do more. And this year, know, Sina already talked a little bit about Team Pages. She'll be focused on Team Pages. And we're also going to be presenting Get It Done in Half the Time. We practice scrum in our teams, actually all three of our internal teams. And it's really just how we managed the influx of requests that we started receiving through our ministries when we went on Rock and people realized how flexible it was. Using scrum really just changed the way we were actually able to get things done and get them done quickly and keep people in the know on when they were gonna actually see their stuff. So we're excited about that. All right, so everybody make sure to check those out. You can go on the RX schedule page now in favorite sessions to create your own schedule. So sign in, log in and make sure you sign up for that. Both of the Christ fellowship sessions sound they're gonna be really incredible. So if someone comes up to you at the conference and they're , Hey, I heard your podcast. I came to your session last year, and they just kind of wanna break the ice. What are some topics you love talking about or some hobbies that you have that help someone get to know you? Topics. Well, topics I would say Rock, obviously. That's a good one. I'm going back to school towards working on a ministry leadership degree. I love talking about that. It consumes a lot of my brain and my time, but I'm also a sci fi fantasy fiction novel nerd. So you could always tell me about your favorite book series. Love that. Also, national parks, backpacking. Yeah, all that. All that good stuff. I am a data nerd. So, anyone who wants to talk to me about data analytics, I can't seem to pull myself out of that no matter what. But if you wanna ask me where my tan comes from, I'm always down on the boat and my husband and I fish all the time. So love to talk about fishing. I wish there was more catching than there was just fishing. Freshwater or saltwater, Brandy? Is it freshwater? Saltwater. Saltwater. There's too many out of here. Too many gators in fresh. You don't wanna catch a gator? No. No interest. But love talking about being out on the beach, fishing, being out on the ocean, any of that. All right, great. Well, I expect there'll be a lot of people very interested in the topics that you'll be presenting on. And we really appreciate your taking the time to explain a little bit about the Christ Fellowship approach to Rock and what you do on a regular basis And all of the help that you provide inside the community. We're just so thankful for that. Thanks ladies for joining us today for this podcast. Thank you. Pleasure. And we will see you soon at RX twenty twenty two. For sure, can't wait. And thanks to our audience for joining us today. Stay tuned in, we will have additional interesting interviews for you in the future. Thanks for joining us. Do a church that loves the idea of using Rock but hasn't taken that leap yet? With managed hosting, churches of any size can get access to Rock's amazing technology, hassle free. With just one click, Rock's managed hosting removes the roadblocks that might stop a church from switching to Rock by making the process simple. Churches get the ease of a SaaS church management system without losing any of Rock's powerful features. Are you ready to take the next step or share with another local church? Visit rockrms.com/hosting today.