Podcast Episode 150: Episode 123: Features, Features and More Features!

Description

  This episode of Rock Cast is jam-packed with details about all the new and upcoming capabilities of Rock. From the new media tool in v13  and the amazing analytics it can provide, the long-awaited digital signatures being worked into v14, and the new prayer and scripture  reading plan features coming in Rock Mobile 3.0, you don't want to miss out on the insider scoop on how all the various parts of Rock  come together. Listen in as the Spark team shares insights about anticipating the next platform, using the right tools to move your strategy  forward, and how important it is to remember that the work we do in technology is ultimately in service of ministry.

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 have here with me today Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo. We are going to catch you up on all things Rock today. So thanks for joining us. We always have to start out with the latest update of what's going on with our latest version releases. So Nick, can you share that with us? Yep. We have just released version 12.8 out of beta. It was, I think last week, the seventh. And that is now available for everybody. It's in the general availability. So a new patch to version 12. And we've also got a version 13.1 beta underway. So that is going well. There were a number of fixes and corrections that we've put since version 13 came And that of course will both be, are still in early access. So if your early access, when that comes out of beta, you'll have the ability to install that. And that kind of leads us to what else are we working on? We do have a 13.2, but we're just adding more fixes and model changes for the future so that our pre alpha testers, such as Spark, RockSight, can start using and exploring these new features that are coming in version 14. So if I can just touch on one version 14 feature that we finished, it was putting electronic signatures in a workflow action. So now you can have a workflow action as part of your workflow. Maybe you have a form right before that. Doesn't need to have a form before it, but you can have a form. And if you set up your attributes on this new action, you can have a person type their name for their official signature, or there's even an option to allow them to sign, with their pen or their finger or their mouse. Although we've been instructed to really not encourage using that aspect because that just puts PII data in your hands, in your database, because that signature is considered by the law community to be PII. And what is PII? It is personal identifying Everybody seems to want that, but our lawyers don't put it in there. And it's kinda , well, okay, I get it. But I think people are gonna require it. There is no better signature. Either either option, either typing your name or, , using your mouse or finger, it's the same legally. Yeah. That's why he was , you probably shouldn't do it, but I know some people are just gonna require it. So we're gonna put it in the documentation, all the caveats of don't do that. And by default, we'll check the typed version, but somebody can choose the one that we don't recommend. And then what happens behind the scenes is when somebody signs, it will create a hash of all different kinds of data, their IP address, the date and time, the content that was in the document that they're signing, their signature or their type name. It creates a hash so that we can check later on if it was tampered with. So somebody could really tamper with that content. And then a PDF is created with that hash in there as well and sent out to the email they provide. It's a pretty cool feature. Yeah, it's came together. That is pretty cool. I think I hear cheering in the background. Lot of people look excited about look this. And event registration. Yeah, yeah, that's probably true. And that is next up. I mean, it's just trying to get the ducks in the right row. Yeah, and it was, we did a lot of the hard hard stuff needed to be done to figure out that piece. Now we have the the hard part of putting it in event registration, which is its own thing. But we should also point out it's only gonna be in the new event registration block. Yeah. We'd be deprecating the current version twelve one will eventually go away. So I'm not gonna add more features to it. That makes sense. Well, is an exciting update. Yeah. It was a fun ride, especially the last week. Well, lot has gone into that over time. It was very complicated. And anytime you take your technology goals and then you apply certain legal requirements and boundaries and things to them, that just gets to be a very complicated thing to move forward. So this is a pretty exciting update that I know a lot of people will be interested in hearing. Speaking of updates, John, can you tell us a little bit about the media feature? I know we've had some information released about that, but that's a pretty cool feature we might wanna elaborate on. Yeah. So that's a new feature in version 13. We're really excited about it because if you're using a video analytics platform today, or your analytics today are probably coming from your video platform, which knows nothing about the people who are actually consuming that content. A few of them have some very loose integrations where you can pass it keys watcher keys and but it doesn't know who that person is and it's very hard to get that information back to a system that does know who those people are. And so I think that's what's really unique about Rock is we have all that people information and it really allows you to tailor your ministry to the preferences and and you get to see that kind of analytics right inside Rock. And so again, there's really not another way to do that. There are systems that specialize in linking people together, but where is all the information about those people? how do you actually report on it? How do you communicate differently on that? I mean, it all comes back to the central repository. And so that's what Rock is doing. And so it's very complex how it works under the covers. So you have to wire up a whole bunch of stuff and do these watch maps and and it's pretty cool in technology. Probably maybe a little bit boring for some, but what's going on that covers is very sophisticated, especially because we're doing it across today, both web and mobile, and we're gonna do other platforms in the future. That's really hard. In fact, there's no analytics platform I've seen that can do that on mobile. Wow. Some of them can do it on web, but to do it across mobile and then have web and mobile work together so that watch maps can be appended to each other or you can you can catch up where you left off across device type. I mean, that's pretty unique, especially knowing who that person is. I mean, that's there's nothing out there. There is some things you need to know though. Mean, you just don't just one doesn't just , , snap your fingers and it works you have to embed it into your content strategy. So you have to make sure that those media objects are tied to your content channel items. And then when you create your site, your website, and it kind of needs to be a Rock website, you need to use the right Lava to wire everything up. Now we've made a really cool short code, a Lava short code that's super easy and has all the little bells and whistles. You don't have to know any detailed, , JavaScript or anything that. you just use the short code and it does all the magic for you. On mobile, it's a tidge more, you have to know a little bit more. We're gonna be working on a short code for that too. But there you need more options that the short code probably can't understand. So it's gonna be a tidge more difficult. But again, compared to what's going on under the scenes, you're getting a lot of power with fairly fairly ease of of use. But you do have to wire it all up correctly. So what we've done internally is that, , we spent last week, we spent some good amount of time with our digital team training them. Hey, this is a new feature in Rock. Obviously, they knew it existed and, , they they're part of the team. So but we're going into the deep, know, details of , how do you use it? How does this work? What does this property do? How does allow the filter short code work and all that kind of stuff? So I would recommend that anybody who specializes in websites or maybe mobile, really do the research on it to make sure you understand it right. Because when you get it all wired up right, it's amazing amounts of data that you can then do some cool stuff with. And I would put a pin in the fact that the analytics is really cool. you can see some stuff today that is just blow your mind, but we're still just getting started. we're adding more and more capabilities to look across media. So you could look at maybe a folder and compare the media in a folder, which one had the highest engagement, all kinds of cool stuff and adding in an upcoming version the ability to geo locate based on IP address, which, , isn't super accurate, it's accurate enough to, , a city so that you can kinda see, , who's watching where. That'll be additional feature that that's added into Rock that we're working on right now. So all that to say is , if you look at what Rock is, it's definitely not a church management system alone. that's that's a small piece. Some day we probably should draw a chart of what Rock is because I feel the Venn diagram would be very interesting because I think, yeah, we check the box on church management system, but how much of our thought and our passion goes around servicing just that one feature? It that that's to me and I'm probably unique. That's the box. It's , yeah, we need to check that box and we need to do a good job at that. That's not where we wanna specialize. I always think of Marcus Buckingham. He's , don't play to your weaknesses, play to your strengths. And I don't think church management is our weakness by any means, but that's the box , yeah, we wanna be doing well at that. But honestly, it's a pretty low bar. , who else is doing amazing things there and not and there's not really that much innovation in the areas of group structures. , we keep adding to groups, but because of the digital strategy, not because , , small groups or neighborhood groups or, , whatever you call them, cell groups. There's not a ton of innovation there. There's a ton of innovation on the digital strategy side and the digital side, and that's where we wanna be. That's our strength. And that's what we really wanna be powerful. And, but that relies on a good church management system too. Because if you don't have that person data, you really can't do the strategy right. And I think, if you look at other people who are not using Rock for that kind of stuff, I think that's where they are gonna have a hard time is , okay, yeah, that tool's pretty good. It gives you some good video analytics on web, on a mobile, but how do you tie that to people? If you can't tie it to people, what good is it? And you can stitch up all kinds of other , assortments of tools and integrations and to kinda get it to do that. But gosh, I wanna know, this per how does person interact with my content, video content, text content, email content? Do they open do they open my emails? Or do they have a mobile app? Do they open the last push notification I gave them? That's where we're driving to and we can actually do a good part of everything I just described. And some of it, keep polishing on. And then what's the next platform, ? Mhmm. We have to the the next platform, some of them we know and we're working on. And some of them, those platforms haven't even been created yet. And we talk about that in our development meetings , okay, well, what about the platform that does not exist yet? , how are we thinking about that and how are we gonna tie into that? How do we make sure our technology stack is gonna So we have all those features that are being processed through at the same time working on our next VNext , stack, which is taking up a significant amount of time too. But we're making exciting progress. , literally, it's super exciting, the traction that we have. I was just talking to one of the developers about it, , yesterday, and it's , that's exciting. we're making good progress on that. And that patience of not just jumping has allowed the the other platforms to catch up and backfill functionality that they didn't have. So. Yeah. So we're doing it right. We're not running and gunning. We're being strategic about that. And I think being strategic about it is slow in the beginning, but it will get across the finish line even faster because we can work efficiently and productively and not have to refactor. And so I'm excited about how we're doing that too. It might seem slow to some, but it's being very productive. And if we did it perfectly, if it could be done perfectly, you wouldn't even notice, , you just get to that day, you'd hit the upgrade button, and it just still works with no change, which will be really difficult to achieve. But that's our goal. Yeah. I mean, certain point, you're gonna have to change platforms from a Linux to a Linux server at some We could. Yeah. Some of that is We're talking really cutting edge here now. Out yet. So We're way far down the line. I don't want anybody to think that that if you wanna go to the next v two version of ROT, that there's there there's probably gonna have to be some manual, , hoisting. But we will not just drop it out there without lots of time to move, lots of instruction on how to move. Yeah. We're talking about years. So Yeah. Tooling. Yeah. The way we always do things. We try to provide a lot of thought and documentation around everything that we because we were there. We know what that's to be in charge of that. Yes, so exciting things happening on the media front and in web and mobile. I know a lot of churches are now have that have moved to Rock already are thinking , how do we use this to personalize our front end experiences? And so these are some really cool ways to know to track and see how that's working. But you said it in a very small caveat that I just wanna point out. It kind of requires a Rock website. Yeah. Right. We really can't do much without that. Right. There's just so much infrastructure to know who the person is and Yep. Yeah. It's just kinda have to. Yes. So at some point, if your if your tools are not Rock based for web and mobile, you might wanna look at them and say, am I using these tools because I know them or am I using them because they move our strategy forward? Mhmm. And there's really just different strategies for how you do this. There's the all the eggs in one basket approach, which is kind of the Rock way. It's , well, we're gonna try to have all these features. We're gonna try to make them, , near best of breed. Of course, there'll always be one tool that's better or two tools that are better because that's all they do. Right. Trust me, there's so many times I'm , I wish we only did one thing. , I wish we only did giving. I wish we only did sending email. Wish, but we don't, we do all of this stuff, right? So we're not gonna be the top in every single box, but we hope to be in the top, , coverage of features of the top features, but all your eggs are on one basket, but all your data is in one basket. So it's much easier to get all that synced together because there really is no sync, right? It's all in the same database. You have access to it in the same tool sets and the same reporting engine, the same lava. The other strategy is to pick the best and integrate. In my opinion, I've, , we've wrestled with that all the way back through Honeywell. There you have much different situations and things you can't, you have to do some level integration, but you, if you pick the best tool in every single one of those product lines, you spend all your time integrating and you can never get what you need at the end of the day, which is I need all the data in one place. And as soon as you get that, then the tool changes, you have to go write another integration and you're constantly just trying to get the data clean and accurate. And we've seen it a number of churches try that, really sophisticated churches and they they've struggled for years. And I think even one of them has abandoned it now. Yeah. So you're always just chasing, trying to get the data in one place and then being able to make it actionable in that one place. So it's , okay, well now the day is one place, but now I wanna send an email to those people. , how do I do that? Okay. So now I need to write an integration that, , syncs that data over to Mailchimp as a list. It's , well, oh, or you could just write a data view and send it out a Rock. Is the email builder slightly not as great as Mailchimp? Yeah. But not by much. And if you do good templates, , and we've seen some church do some good templates that are very usable and very safe for their people, , and I I have used Mailchimp a lot too. And I know you can, using their tools, you can still mess up the email that gets sent out. That's If you're careless you just need to not, people who send emails to thousands of people need to have a base level of training. For sure. Either that or no options, seriously just type text and provide me one image. Then you can make it safe. But if you want it to have , well, I want them to be able to be creative and have different sections and put different Well, you can do that, but you're gonna have exposure of what they type in there. Did they paste the text right out of word? Okay, well, you're probably gonna have some encoding or some corruption of the formatting or ordering. And some of that's just understanding how that works. if you ever opened up a word document behind the scenes, , go do that. Just change the docx to to dot zip and then go look inside of it. It's pretty amazing what's inside there. It's a testament to how complex those packages are. And to think that you can just copy and paste that and have it everything be perfect is not not something you can do. So those are the two strategies that we've just chosen all the eggs in one basket approach. It's not to say that that doesn't have its strengths and its weaknesses, but we feel it has the most strengths, especially for most churches. And so while on the topic, mean, we've talked a lot about media and web, but we actually do a lot with mobile. And so, we don't probably talk about it as much as we should, but Rock Mobile three point is about to ship. Now ship is weird in mobile because it's not something one just goes and updates. it's really there you update as you need features and as you want to use features. Personally, would think it'd be unwise if your app is running fine and you don't need any new features, there's no use going through the process of updating it. Just a lot of testing that needs to be done in place. And this deployment to the app stores is always a challenge and work. So if everything's running as it is and you don't need to make any changes and you don't need the new functionality, I would keep the shell that you have. You can still make changes to the app. You can make content changes all the time and you don't have to redeploy through the app store, which is something that's kind of unique. Not too many apps can do that. You can literally add pages and pages and new content on those pages without any updates. But some of the new things that we've working on is features around group finder. So you can do some group finding within the app natively. We've added a ton of prayer features and I'm so happy that prayer is getting more features. And it's one of those things that we wrote long ago in web and people used it, but not to be people who really wanted new features around it. But now we within mobile, I think prayer is taking a huge front seat. It used to be a side seat of just another thing and now it's not. And that's really cool to see. And so we've been adding a lot of new prayer features, been adding features around reading plans, some more capabilities there. And I'd say to you, that's another one of those features that's insanely hard to do behind the scenes, especially when you, when it on the feature set, a church can give us a listing of scriptures, two verses out of this book chapter, two verses out of that book chapter. And we literally behind the scenes are slicing MP3 files up and putting them back together into a unique MP3 file on the fly and serving it back. I mean, that's not something I've seen many people do. We've also starting to step into some features around how a staff person could use Rock Mobile to do some maybe more backend kind of things search for people. That's one that's we're not quite publicly ready to go out with, but we're doing some code writing on that and some prototyping on that right now. And then also notifications. So that's a feature. I think it's easy to to think about notifications and to say, check the box, we can do notifications. And the more we dig into it, that's really, that's an easy box to check for everybody. But what does it really mean under the scenes? There's so much beat to notifications that that to be really good at it, you have to go pretty deep. So for instance, knowing if the device has notifications enabled and having that accurate at any time so that if they turn it off, do that? So we've been putting a lot of work into keeping that notifications accurate on the server side so that in Rock, all those people have a personal device, which is the phone and making sure that the notification status on that is accurate. And that's really hard And picture what happens if you delete the app? how do we know? if your communication strategy is hinging on knowing, which I would still say push notifications is probably not the go to for transactional messaging to somebody that says, if you really, if that they really need to get this message, it may not be the best way to do that. It's more for , . Campuses closed on Sunday due to inclement weather. Yeah. Or even some personalized things , , some messaging that is good to know, but you don't absolutely have to know if they got it. But we're trying to make the notifications even richer so that you could, if you wanted to, you could be fairly certain that the notifications are on. Right now I think most apps don't know that. they can ask to enable push notifications, but they're not tracking the status of that over time. And I think that's the trick. And even knowing inside the app, if as you load the app, we want you to be able to write content that dynamically knows whether that push notifications on. And if it's already been asked to get permissions, You have to know that too. Because if you've already asked once, you don't get to ask again. And so in that case, need to switch your asks to say, hey, I noticed it's not on, would you me to open your settings for you? that's the new thing is before you didn't have a choice, but now you can actually say, well, I've already asked once, so I can't just pop up the notify. I don't only get one chance of that. So now I need to tell you to open up the settings and we can actually open the settings right to the right panel for you. But all of that takes an insane amount of planning and research and code. And so I would say too, just when you realize, when you ask the question to somebody and say, hey, well does this framework do push notifications? Just realize that's probably asking, does a car have an engine? It has an engine, but does it have a functioning engine? Is it a good engine? Is that enough horsepower? Is it, , it's so much more to it. And I didn't even realize all those details until we had to get in there and try to to figure them all out. Wow. That is a lot. There I mean, just in the what we've talked about from core Rock to mobile and web, there is so much going on here right now. And even more that's further out along the lines of not quite as defined and still incoming. Incredible things happening. , we talk a lot about the technology and what that empowers, but we need to be digging down and reminding ourselves, and it's all of our responsibility, that the reason we're doing all of this is not to have the coolest thing. It's not to have the latest. It's not to stay in the top trending platforms. It's because we're trying to empower ministry and those ministry moments that make an eternal difference. And that's not necessarily readily apparent in the jobs that any of us have listening or sitting right here recording the podcast. It's something that we have to remember is our why. And we have to remind each other of that and the encouragement that goes along with it. It can be a little discouraging sometimes if your job involves a lot of troubleshooting someday and you feel banging your head against the wall or, , you're really working with something to make it work and you've got requirements and tools that don't quite line up. It can be challenging. And so we just need to make that effort. , what's the effort today that I'll make, that you'll make to encourage the people we work with about the impact and value of what they're having from an eternal perspective? Yeah. If we've People often say, internet's the Roman road system in terms of the technology to advance God's message and the gospel. And that's a good analogy, but it's actually a little bit And the Roman Rome system is incredibly high-tech. If you read about how the the way they built the roads, I mean, some of those roads are still in use today, almost three thousand years later and being into Roman history, I I've read all the diagrams of how it works. It's pretty amazing. But I think of what we're trying to do. We're trying to, it's not just the road system, but we're having to design the trucking, the trucks that go on the road systems so that the payloads can all fit in the back. And if it's, , let's think about shipping containers and the shipping system, we take shipping containers for granted, , right? We see them on trains and trucks all day, but there's a lot of high-tech that went into those shipping containers. That's a cool story. And they're actually very advanced the way that locking mechanisms work and, , to lock them together and stuff. It's it all seems easy. It's something , oh, we'll just pave another road. It's , well, no. You first have to figure out, how big is the truck? How wide should each lane be? , what what's the distance between trucks? And this notification that I'm glad no one else really has to go there, , but it's , that's the blinker on the truck that we have to design to make sure, , they can be signaled right and it doesn't get knocked off by the wind or by hit another truck pass going either way. There's just so much more to it, but it's so important. if we don't have these things, we can't give the messaging. And if we can't give the messaging, then some hope in the world is diminished. That's very true. Not eliminated, but diminished. , a couple times we've put a call out for ministry impact stories because they encourage our team and because we can help share them. And just wanna take a moment to remind people that that is still out there and still needed, very needed. Please take a moment this week whenever you're listening to this to go to your profile on the Rock community page and just upload a story of how Rock has made an impact in the lives of someone at your church. And it might not be a staff person. It might be a how did Rock enable ministry to happen that impacted someone's life? And you might have to dig for it a little bit, but you're probably a little closer to it than we are. And that encouraging message is something we can help share with the rest of the community. So please take a moment and maybe even put a little recurring reminder on your calendar once a month to go look for those stories. Because if you look for them and you find them, that's where you see those little glimpses of hope in the world. And what a cool thing to remind yourself of and to be able to share. Yeah. I'd say if you don't know a story offhand, you need to go get one, not for us, but for yourself. Because trust me, I've worked at churches for decades. If you don't have that encouragement and that tie to mission, there's gonna be days where the devil attacks you or weeks or months, and you're gonna feel , well, I can go and make more money somewhere else because I'm sure that's the case. Or I can go do something else or I'm not getting fed the technology or the time or the management or the leadership that I need. And and you need that. You need those stories for yourself. And once you get them for yourself, pass them on. But if you don't go get it for yourself, you're letting the devil have a foothold into your encouragement. That's a great point. Well, there are still some great ways to get involved in the training that you might need for Rock this year. And we're seeing a lot of teams sending additional people for either a deeper level of training or for an elementary level of training or just additional skill sets as their teams become more involved in the Rock work that's being done. So think about what might be a good fit for your team this year. We have lots and lots of opportunities from a class perspective. We just graduated a master class grads, two classes that we had almost back to back. And I think there was a week in between them, and we had 55 master class grads in the last few weeks here. That's really incredible. So we can definitely see that there's a huge demand for this. Think about who might be a good fit for that at your organization. We have another master class coming up in July that is going to be virtual. And the reason I'm mentioning that is we have some people that have been asking for that virtual class and when it's going to come back. We're trying to have about one a year. Do you want to point out that the virtual class experience is different than the on-site experience for a couple of reasons? So make sure you're picking the one that will be the best fit for you. While there's no travel required, there are also lots of connection opportunities in person that aren't available for a virtual class. So it's a different experience. The content, however, is the same. If you have questions about what might be different between the two, , reach out to us and we can talk about it. But some people definitely have to have a virtual option for a variety of reasons and that is coming this summer. I the in person because we get to go to dinner with them and talk with them So those are always fun. And they connect one night of the week at one of the local hotels where they're staying and just kind of do some live problem solving and connection and just lots of cool stuff that happens. So we can't replicate that in a virtual experience. Class 100 and the sequel for Rock class are both coming up this spring as well. So check those out on our site. You can find them on the community page. There's a classes link in the menu on the left and find out what classes make sense for your team and make sure to get those registered. Our spots have been filling up in classes, so I wouldn't wait until the last minute. I would try and just proactively figure it out. All right. We've had some great updates to share with you today. Thank you so much for tuning in and for being a part of our audience. We enjoy sharing what's happening. There's just so much. The pace is so incredibly fast that this podcast is a great way for us to consolidate that and get it out for you to hear in one spot. That's a hopefully a very timely update. Thanks to those of you who filled out some of our surveys recently about content and the podcast in general. We enjoy connecting with you here. Thanks for being a part of the Rock community, and we'll catch you next time. 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.