Podcast Episode 155: Episode 128: Special Edition with Danielle Vos

Description

Rock Star extraordinaire Danielle Vos joins us on this episode of Rock Cast. Danielle shares about some of the interesting projects she's been able to work on in Rock and how they supported the ministry efforts of her church, as well as how the Rock conference has been a part of her journey to Stardom. 

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, the podcast where we take you behind the scenes in all things Rock. And today we have a very special interview that we can't wait to share with you. My name is Emily Forman. And I have here with me also from Rock Erin Higginbotham. her from the community, no doubt. And our special guest today is Danielle Voss. She's a database specialist at Christ the King, a church in Bellingham, Washington. And many of you will recognize the name Danielle, if not the face, from all the areas that she intersects in the community. Welcome Danielle. Thanks for having me guys. Oh, it's so exciting that you could join us today. You have been a part of the Rock community for a long time now. Yeah, we've been running on Rock for almost six years now. Wow. So you are one of the early adopters really. Yes. Yes. That's fantastic. And let's talk about some of your community accomplishments because I think our listeners will realize that they've probably run across you in at least one of these areas. You have been a Rock star since 2018. You've been a speaker at three conferences so far, a masterclass and a sequel for Rock class graduate, a roadshow host, and then of course, you're very active in the chat and in the community. Wow, congratulations for quite a list of accomplishments and thank you for your investment in the community. Oh, thank you. It's been a great experience to be a part of the Rock community. Well, tell us a little bit about your role and your involvement at Christ the King and the Rock team there. So I've been on staff at CTK for almost fifteen years now, ten of those as the database specialists and the last six as the Rock admin. And so I am the primary Rock admin. I work closely with our digital strategy specialist on external facing pages, our finance team. We have a great group of admins. I work with our IT department and all of the hardware stuff. And yeah, we just love using Rock. That's awesome. Sounds you're a busy bee. I have a very long to do list. Yes. We're familiar. Yes. So you've been in the community a long time. What do you wish you could go back and tell your younger self? The bright eyed, brand new to Rock U. I remember going to the twenty sixteen conference in LA and we'd been live on Rock for three weeks and I was a total deer in the headlights. Because all of the speakers were talking, all of this kind of it sounded Greek to me, , sequel, lava, , just throw a little bit of this and then a little bit of that. And it was a little intimidating, but I was really excited at the possibilities that what Rock could do for our church. And in the past six years, I've learned so much, whether through the master class, the sequel class, I've kind of played around. I've locked myself out of pages, made lots of mistakes, but I've learned so much. Just being able to make some of those tweaks now that I never thought I'd be able to do. I can read SQL. I can't write it very well, but I can read it and tweak it. And that's been a fun experience to just see how far I've come. That's incredible. What are some of the Rock projects that you've been able to work on as an admin, a Rock admin, some things that you feel really proud of and excited about? When we switched to Rock, we had three different systems for events. So we had a custom built room management software, we had our database and we had our website, and we've moved two of those into Rock now. So we use Rock room management, and we have some workflows that tie to a content channel for media promotion actually. So if you want print media, if you want social media posts, and so that was a fun project to work on. We've moved prayer request into Rock, which has really helped our care team out with tying people and their requests and then follow-up with our staff. So that was a recent one we've done that we added some workflows to notify our staff, an auto response when somebody submits a prayer request. So those have been really fun projects to work on and see my team get excited about. Yeah, that's really incredible. The ministry empowerment that's made possible by just learning the skills that you've learned and to look back at where you started and where you are today and to know what you're capable of learning. So you just can imagine how far you can take it in the future. Exactly. It's really exciting. And that excitement, that's the thing. It's the driver, right? So you're passing that on to your team. You're seeing your team be excited about things. I think that's fantastic. Because that's our incentive to learn is our excitement and how fun it is to find something new. Right. I've had a few dance parties in my office when I figured something out. What do you dance to in your dance parties? This is important information. It's just a very brief, no music, little jig, and then I'm done. So I don't dance very well. We're not gonna see these on TikTok is what you're saying? No. Not at all. Shucks. Well, how have you seen what you're doing in Rock impact the ministry of your church? Do you have any examples of how ministry itself has been impacted? Probably the best example I have was the time of COVID in 2020. We're in Washington state, so we are pretty locked down very tightly with church and restrictions. And about the time my team came to me with a question, Hey, we wanna call people and have this campaign where we connect with people, is when Rock came out with the calling campaign. And so I got to set that up and train my staff on it. And I heard one story of one of our pastors had randomly been assigned a person, called them, and it was a married couple. They had just found out they were expecting their first baby, and then found out they were at a high threat of miscarriage. And so our pastor was able to just pray with them, love on them, support them, even from, , over the phone. And we found out later the baby was born happy and healthy and there were no issues. And they were so impressed with just the care that our team was able to show through this fairly simple system. It's amazing. And that'll impact not only their lives, but their baby's life. Imagine the story that they're telling later in life. And they were sporadic attenders at best, so not super involved, but they felt connected when we were able to reach out to them and support them in that way. Wow, that's a great story. We know there are just so many of those ministry stories that are happening every day with Rock tools. And thank you for sharing that one because it's hard to come by sometimes they're happening. It's hard for you to find out about them, right? Because it's your pastoral staff that's experiencing them. And so you have to pull that from your staff. And then we're even a step removed here. So it's great to hear about that. Yeah. So Danielle, you've spoken at every Rock Conference since 2018, I believe. What have you learned from speaking and being at conferences? Or did you first attend in 2018? I actually didn't attend 2018. That's the one conference I missed. So I started in 2019 speaking. And I remember being asked to speak and I didn't know what I was gonna share because I'm not a developer and didn't have that skill set. And my session was actually called No Web Developer, No Problem, which I'm reprising for this year. Awesome. And it was just little ways you can customize your Rock database, little tweaks here and there, whether it's adding a badge or I added staff attributes for my team so that new staff could see pictures with our staff and what their job titles are, that kind of thing. And I learned, even though I'm not a developer, I can still share something with somebody that might help them. So you don't have to have the super fancy stuff that some of these churches have with probably larger budgets than we do and more staff, but even the simple things you can share. So I just shared what worked for us. I've loved hearing from churches and what they're doing, new ways they're using connection requests or workflows that I hadn't thought of. And that sparks that creative part of me to figure out how that might be implemented at our church. And had you done much speaking before you first came and spoke at a Rock Conference? No. In 2019, I was so nervous. I actually finished my session in eighteen minutes because I was talking so fast. So yeah, I'm not much for public speaking, but it's gotten a little easier over the years. That's good. Thank you for being brave. So what do you best about attending the Rock Conference? As I said earlier, it's a lot of the new ways people are using Rock. The community is so diverse in congregations and denominations, and just seeing how different churches are utilizing the different features of Rock for them. It might not work for us, but it does, again, spark that creative part of, Oh, I never thought about using it this way, so maybe we could. Maybe there's a way we could implement something this in our church. And I joke in my job that I know a lot of names and I know a lot of faces from attending my church, but I don't have them put together. And I feel the same with the Rock community, because you see a lot of names in chat on recipes and all that, and getting to actually meet people and put that name with that face and have that interaction, whether it's in a meal or after hours, or it's just been really fun getting to know people. Thank goodness for those name badges at the conference, right? Yes. You cannot tell who people are in those tiny little bubbles on Rocket very tiny pictures. Yes. And , they might be old. I know mine's old, I haven't changed it. So they don't always look the same in person, right? What are some of the best interactions that you've had or experiences in the Rock community in general? It's so great to hop into Rocket Chat and ask a question. It's very rare that I've stumped the whole community with a question. So there's usually somebody that has some advice or a way to do something. And just the willingness of people to share what they've done is so great. And I look a Rock star to my team because I can go hop in and in a couple hours have something new in Rock that they've asked for. And just the openness of them sharing, and I've gone in and been , can you explain that a little simpler to me? Because if you're giving me this high level, I might not fully understand. And they're so willing to help and they don't make they don't put you down, they don't make you feel bad. And they're just so willing to share. And it's just been so great. That's fantastic. That's, I think been a pretty universal experience. I don't know too many places that have that kind of diversity of skills and interests and backgrounds and even job titles really, where people come together and it's there's not a lot of judgment and there's I know how to do this, how to do that, a lot of sharing. Yes. And it's a lot of back and forth both ways, right? I've seen you help quite a few people, Danielle. Yes. And sometimes when I'm helping somebody, I learn something because somebody will pop in and say, Well, you can do it that way, or you can do it this way. There's so many ways to skin the cat, so to speak, and Rock that I learned something even when I'm trying to help someone. Very true. That's a great point. It's not just that you're helping people. There's the whole educational component that goes along with it. You've been very invested in helping people. So thank you for doing that. I'm glad you're getting a positive experiences for yourself out of that too. Yes, it's been great. Well, tell us a little bit about you personally. Tell us about your family. What do you to do for fun? So my husband and I have been married in August. It'll be fourteen years. We have three amazing kids. Our oldest daughter is turning 11 in just a couple of weeks. Our middle daughter is nine and our son is 10 or seven, excuse me. And we love to be outside. Summer in the Pacific Northwest is unbeatable. So we spend a lot of time hiking. We have lots of walking trails, riding bikes. I love to read. We garden, we have both a veggie garden and a flower garden in the summer. So that's one of my hobbies. We love to cook and bake, and we spend a lot of time as a family just enjoying life and experiencing new things. We actually just got back from Disneyland, so yeah. Very fun. What kind of goals do you have for yourself personally, professionally, related to Rock or not? Personally, I feel my kids are now at an age where I can have some more time to myself, which when they were little was a struggle. So finding new hobbies and taking that time for myself would be a personal goal. Professionally diving more into Lava and SQL and trying to create some new reports for my team that they've been asking for. That's a huge goal for me is to get a more firm grasp on those. You coming to the pre day, the training day before the conference this year? I'm hoping to, yes. Yeah, there should be some good content around that. Oh, that sounds fun. Yes, so make sure your flight is the day before the day before the conference. What day is that? Sunday, I think. Sunday, yeah. Because Monday morning we get to dive into some more deeply technical topics for training. If you sign up for that separate sign up but free. And then you can come to the kickoff. Yes. And we'll have fun. Oh, that's the sequel and Lava aren't fun. Definitely. Well, we look forward to seeing you there and thank you so much for spending time with us today. Well, thank you so much for inviting me. It's been great. It was a real pleasure to talk to you, Danielle. Thank you. It's great to talk to you too, Erin and Emily. Yes. All right. Well, let's wrap it up for the Rock community. Thanks so much for tuning in again. And we look forward to the next time we can catch up. 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.