Podcast Episode 159: Episode 132: Special Edition with Austin Spooner

Description

Special guest Austin Spooner from Veritas Church joins us on this Episode of Rock Cast. Austin shares his insights about growing into a multi-campus church, from the dream of expansion all the way through designing scalable architecture in Rock. If campus growth is on your horizon, this is an episode you won't want to miss!

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. I'm Emily Forman. I have Erin Higginbotham here with me. We love to interview members of the community about how they're using Rock in really innovative ways and ways that, other people can find value in and how they're moving themselves forward in the Rock community. Today, we have a special guest with us, Austin Spooner. Austin, thanks for joining us. Yeah. Thanks for having me. This is great to see you guys. So, Austin, you're the director of operations at Veritas Church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And, you've been a rockstar since 2020. In fact, you were involved with Spark Development Network way back in the day when it was first, starting up. I think you were volunteering, helping with some of the social media and some other aspects. So I know you've been around and seen the Rock community and product from infancy to where it is today. So you have a really cool perspective on that. Yeah. It's been a super fun journey to see kind of where the, , vision of Rock was back then and where it is today and just the whole journey from, , a couple of volunteers working at a church to, , the whole staff team you guys have now. Yeah. It's been absolutely an incredible ride. So and you've been along with us along the way. You've been to almost every Rock conference that we've had. I think you had one very valid exception. Right? Yeah. We I missed the one when our, son was born, but I felt that was worth missing for us. Yeah. I didn't think you made the right call on that one. You're a member of the Alpha Tester group. You've contributed code. You're a community developer. You've taken master class, SQL for Rock class. You just have seen many of the corners of Rock and have done some really incredible things. I know we've worked with you on a lot of really interesting projects. And we'd love to hear about kind of your Rock journey, when and how you got started with Rock, how you heard about it back in those early days. Yeah. Sure. I was on I was on staff at a previous church, and almost all church management, , system transitions, , you start looking for something different because you're frustrated with another product. And so we were at a point with a different system that it was just causing some frustrations. Maybe more on the user or more on the company end of the spectrum, and less on the user end of the spectrum, but going , hey, I think we need to do something different. And then there were other relationships we had with other churches kind of thinking the same thing. And so for us, it was more about community collaboration and being able to talk with other churches and see how they're using their product and collaborate together than it was looking for a specific feature set. And then when we heard the vision of the Spark Development Network and Rock, we knew it was something we wanted to be a part of and make sure to get off the ground, you could help other churches in the future and just accomplish the mission of just seeing more people know Jesus and how church management software can help that. And so we looked at Rock, we saw it grow from version one until it is today. But also, our first question then was, what is the base features that we have to have to move to this platform? Knowing that, hey, this is an early on system. It has a good vision. It's something we can embrace. We're probably not going to be able to do everything we can do today, so there's going to be some pain points for our staff team, but it's still probably the right thing. So I think we jumped in at version 4.5 or five back in the day, and the feature we had to have probably then was we needed family check-in because we had multiple classes. You had to check into multiple people at the same time. So that was the base thing we had to have. And then we bent a bunch of, I won't say I love this, but we bent a bunch of processes around how the system worked back then, but it has way more flexibility today. Yeah, it's pretty incredible. And , thanks to the early adopters you and the church that you were part of at that time, Rock really has become what it is today because that understanding the vision and desiring to be a part of the community and being a part of the community in the early days meant a little bit of elbow grease was pretty much required for the benefit of all. And and if it hadn't been for people you and your, church that you were part of at the time, I don't think the Rock community would be where it is today. Yeah. No. It was super cool to see just many churches, , sacrifice some features back then to just be part of something new that we knew would grow and help the kingdom. And it's pretty cool to see where it is today. So Well, you've had a big transition recently at Veritas. Right? You moved from a single campus church to a multi campus church. Can you tell us about that? Yeah. Sure. So we never really had a solid plan to go multi campus. It had always come up in meetings about how do we manage growth Or how do we handle this? Because we're located in a downtown area of the city, so we have no expansion footprint. So it was always , how do we expand? But was always really far off into the distant. But probably maybe a little over a year ago now, another group of people approached us and said, hey, we think you guys should consider starting a church in this more rural community. And we think at Veritas, that's really important, is bringing the gospel places that's missing it, but there might not be a good gospel preaching church. And so we kind of evaluated that. Our elders prayed over , hey, is that a distraction or a missed opportunity? What should we do? And after some time thinking through that, we said, Hey, yeah, we think this is a good idea. So I think from the time of inception to the time of doing it, it was maybe eight months, but we only knew maybe six weeks ahead of time where even the location was going to be. So it's , we can build up this so much and we know our strategy and we know our philosophy, but I don't know where it's going to meet. So that kind of came to fruition a little on the late side. But through different tools in Rock and geo coding, everybody's addresses, , we knew that, , hey, we have a solid group of people, , in our church who are leaders in our church that are in this community. So we know, , by, , the data we have that if we go here, , we will be able to shepherd these people well because we already have leaders and pacesetters in that congregation. Well, that is very exciting. I know I was a part of an early time at CCV here locally where we moved from two campuses to three. And what happens when you go from one or two campuses into more that I saw happen, I bet you can validate this as well, is that it's not just about adding another building or grouping your staff differently or trying to communicate differently with different people in different areas. It just opens all your processes up to scrutiny. And it's , how are we doing this? Who should do this? Where does this go? What are the direct reporting lines? They're just everything needs to be evaluated. Yeah. , nothing's very nothing's super clear. , even one weird thing we ran across was, , our new assimilation process. , the first thing people do at our Cedar Rapids campus is go to Nude Veritas brunch. Well, we don't even serve brunch anymore. So we had to work , let's rename that class because it doesn't work at the second campus. It doesn't really work at the first one anymore. And so and then it's , how do you offer those classes at a rented facility that you don't even, , have space in for later? So, yeah, I mean, literally everything doubles or triples in complexity. Absolutely. So tell us about some of the changes that that shift required. I mean, you mentioned your assimilation process. What are some other things that required rethinking, and how did you engage in that as the Rock expert at Veritas? Yeah. From, , a systems perspective, , at Veritas, , Rock really, , empowers, , everything our ministries do from, , groups to giving to our mobile app to our website. So, , I think the first thing we started really thinking through was, , how we were going to, , structure data that would be repeatable. Because, , we wanted to be able to make it if it worked for two campuses, is it gonna work for three? Is it gonna work for four? We don't wanna hash this out all over again. So we started somewhere simple where we just added a new group structure and said, hey, if we build out the groups this way, does this work well? And so, once we figured out, , we had, , a group structure that worked, we went ahead and built that same structure out in data views and in reporting and in other areas of, this is how this is kind of our model. So across the board, it'll just keep replicating. From there, we went into the website because we realized that we had to figure out how to make our website be multi campus. Were, do we build two websites, one for each campus, or do we have one single website? We landed on keeping the single website and then adding a campus picker. We built that out. My model has seemed to still work for what we're doing. That's impressive. You've exercised a lot of forethought there. Right? You're you're thinking ahead to the next group, the next change that's gonna happen. It sounds you are every time you tackle one issue, you discover a whole new issue to kinda Yeah. So for example, as we built out as we made changes on the website, we started working on how our messages and message series works. And with with our campuses specifically, we record live at each campus. It's not a video venue. So then we had to figure out how do we do content channels in a way where we can have two messages or two different series going on. People can pick, , which campus they were at and go to that. But then as soon as you make that change, it affects your mobile app. So then we had to work well, we got to work with the Triumph team and rebuild the mobile app in a way that we could have multiple messages and multiple message series, and that would work really well. Even thinking through, , right now, we do the same message at each location. So it doesn't seem we would need to have separate series of set each location, but there's always going to be that one off, so you need to build it for that. I felt we really have come up we've, over the last few months, been able to come up with strategies that worked even for some of our odd cases that, have come up even. So do you feel that was the most challenging part of this, or was there something else that was the most challenging? I think the most challenging part for us has really been trying to figure out who's at which location because we know people left, and we know some people came, and it's, and some people , you can still drive between both campuses. So are you here? Are you there? And which is your primary? And we're getting better at that. So we have some we've been able to write some reports that go, who, where have you what campus have you checked your kids in? And have you been there multiple times? And then from those kind of reports, we've been able to contact people and just confirm, hey. We switched campuses, which then can prompt us to even go, Hey, well, you're still giving to the general fund of this campus. Would it be okay if you're giving to this other campus now? Which is super helpful because as you plan campuses, we're trying to make sure they're also financially independent and stable in the future. So we've been working that's been our latest thing, is just running through our data and going, hey, you go here, can we do this with your giving? Or, hey, you're going to this campus, but you're still in a small group from the other campus. And so we need to get you on a campus back in your community. How are you feeling about the switch to multisite? Do you feel most of the the whitewater, the the wild part of it has settled down, or are you still kind of in the middle of it? I feel the Whitewater phase is definitely probably over, and we're just more in, , how do we continuously , I think we're in a continually improving state. Mhmm. What we're doing now is working, but there's always gonna be modifications. Or we're always gonna find the form that we haven't made multi campus yet or the connection request. Or a big thing we're working on right now is how to get people who register for serving at the wrong campus over to the right campus as serving opportunities. It's more staff training and system, but maybe we need to make it real clear, on how to do it. But I think we're at a stage where what we're doing is working, and we probably have some other priorities that affect how we engage our members and attenders more than how we improve things for our staff. So we're probably at a stage where we're trying to make the user experience better for our members and attenders and maybe less improvement on, , data views and reporting for example. What would you say is the most rewarding part of this, switch to multi campus? I think the most, I think, rewarding part from a Rock perspective is there was nothing we found that we couldn't that we wanted to accomplish that we were , this system is preventing us from doing. It was pretty simple to bend it and mold it in different ways. From a ministry perspective, I think the most rewarding thing is seeing people coming to a new church that haven't had a church that clearly preaches the gospel in their community and really engage at a really healthy level. And then getting to know them and being able to use Rock then to get them involved more and plugged into our church body. Oh, I got the chills. So you've talked a lot about making sure that each of the pieces of what you're doing are set up to be ready for the next option. You're talking a lot about the architecture of your system. Why do you think architecture is so important? Why do you think that's so key? I really felt if we build it if we built it correctly the first time, our staff wouldn't continuously come back to us with little niche improvement requests. So we spent a lot of time really making sure that this structure would be clear. It would work for kids. It would work for worship. It would work for student ministry. That just it went down to, , our email templates. , if you choose the right email template in this campus, it's just going it's gonna have the right reply to your email address. It's going to have the right address associated with it. Just so we weren't always stuck repeating what we've already done to make a little tiny improvement. Our team has other things we need to concentrate on than just little tiny things all the time. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. What what would you say is the best advice you have for other Rock churches that are single campus considering going multisite? Spend some time really coming up with the structure you want to implement before you just go build the structure in Rock. Rock's really great and will let you keep deleting things and rebuilding it, but it's way easier if you can just whiteboard it out and really come up with your structure. And if you have the skills or if you can work with a Rock partner to do it, get a test environment where you can do this as a test and not in your production system. No matter what, you're going to run into things that you've tried that don't work out. Try to keep your production data as clean as possible and really spend time on your structure. It'll help you in the long run because it affects every area. John always says, before you build anything, make sure that you can write it out on paper. Yeah. I am the weird tech guy who hates whiteboards, I don't have a whiteboard in my office. But I do have an iPad and I can draw on an F Word document. But whiteboards drive me nuts. So I whiteboard on paper. That works too. That sounds some great advice. Well, you've got a cool mobile app. You talked a little bit about making that extensible for your two campuses. Can you tell us a little bit more about your mobile app that you guys designed? Yeah, sure. I've been involved in a few different mobile apps over the iteration of my previous church and the current church, and mobile apps always just frustrated me because I felt they didn't have a purpose. So you either had a mobile app, it was repeating your website functionality, and so why have one? So we've kicked around Veritas for three years. Do we have a mobile app? What do we do with it? How is that going to work? And so post COVID, we really wanted to focus on really equipping our people with good content and tools to just help farther their theological understandings and just really give them tools to share their faith better and just dive deeper into our community. We spent some time really diagramming out what a mobile app would look for us, and we decided to really take a focus on our mobile app is going to be primarily equipping tools or content for insiders and not repeat our website. There's very few things on our website that are also on our mobile app. And there's things on our mobile app that never make our website. And it's really insider content, but it's really it's been really helpful to our people. So our mobile app is going to bring articles, blogs, stories of what God's doing in the church, mostly those things. We have a I felt events was enough, outside and insider, that we duplicated events on the website, but it's not really duplicated. Rock drives it. So it shows up in both spots. So our mobile app, we don't really look at analytics and metrics much. I to measure things if I'm hearing stories about how they're working. So every week I hear stories from our people that they're engaging in articles they didn't know existed, that they're learning things, that they've changed how they parent because they've listened to our parenting podcast. So the stories we're hearing tells us our mobile app is working. But also, when I look at our mobile app and I see now how many downloads it has, it's 85% of the people who attend our services, it's , oh, well, it's actually going somewhere. But we've even been able to really engage people in content in unique ways with it. We've used push notifications recently to alert people , Hey, here's the new story of what God's doing in this student ministry group, or hey, here's a God story about this thing. Instead of just alerts for service cancellations and just the busyness of life. Just how do we keep reminding people their faith is really important and more so than what the church is doing. Churches tend to have such great content that's being produced, different kinds at different churches, it's so easy to miss that in all the busyness and all the information that's everywhere. What an incredible way to put that rate in your in your church community's hands. Yeah. And with content channels being able to drive it, I mean, from a technical standpoint, , once it's set up, our ministries our ministries really drive the content that gets on the app for the articles, stories, podcasts. Their teams are all doing that stuff. We're not really spending our time on it. And it's super cool to see them be able to handle that themselves and engage in that way. That's really incredible. So Austin, tell us a little bit about yourself, something that maybe your colleagues or people in the Rock community who know you might not know. Gosh. I think one thing that comes to mind is my wife and I love to bike. We've biked across Iowa six or seven times now in our life. No kidding. This last weekend, we biked about a hundred and four, a hundred and five miles to open some hilly area around a river. So biking is kind of something we do together. So that's something we enjoy doing. So I'd say that's unique. Oh, I would too. Yeah. That's incredible. Do you do that with a group? Do you do races? Do you do it just to We do group. We do a lot of group rides. We'll go out and do just the two of us, but we do a ton of group rides. My wife does triathlons, so she does a lot of more racing. I don't race. I wasn't built for racing. I definitely don't. So Well, this is a beautiful time of year in Iowa. Perfect for getting out and hitting that bike. Yeah, definitely probably not the time in Phoenix. Right? No, definitely not the time in Phoenix. Not so much. I think it was 115 yesterday. That's right. So we're going to get to 105 today. You're kidding. What? So Wow. That's not a plus out. No. No. That's a It's 66 right now. It's a temperature shift we're gonna get today. I I'm not sure I know how to dress. Stay indoors. That's my advice in that situation. That's wild. Well, thank you so much for joining us and sharing some of your adventures with Rock from the early stages, from the content promotion that you've created internally, going multisite. You've done a lot of really incredible things and and been an instrumental part of the Rock community for a long time. And we really appreciate your sharing some of that with us and with the Rock community here today. Thanks so much for joining us, Austin. Yeah. Thanks so much. We're super thankful for the Rock team, just how you guys have been able to be a part of our ministry here. It's wonderful to have you. Tune in next time, and we'll see who we get to talk with on the next special edition of Rock Cast. 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.