Podcast Episode 145: Episode 118: Intentional and Strategic Planning

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Thoughtfulness and intentionality are at the core of this episode of Rockcast as Jon, Nick and Emily discuss strategic problem solving, taking an old-fashioned approach to dashboard design, and the impact of gratitude. 

Transcribed Content

This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock partner Triumph Tech, a full service specialist partner. Rock partners provide crucial support for Spark Development Network and important services for the Rock community. Connect with Triumph Tech today at rockrms.com/partners. Welcome back to Rockcast, the podcast where we take you behind the scenes with Spark Development Network and tell you what's going on with Rock. We're so thankful for our listening audience, which seems to be a great theme during this Thanksgiving season. I'm Emily Forman, and of course, I have here with me today Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo, and we are going to get you all caught up on All Things Rock. So we have to start with our latest version update. Nick, fill us in. All right. We are testing version 12 dot seven. So at the time of this recording, we're about midway through the beta testing phase for twelve seven. And then next week, it will be general access or general release because I think all the 12s are now in general. That's true. It's just a bunch of bug fixes for the most part, and we're just gonna try and keep doing those, probably maybe one more before the end of the year, but we are really anxious to get started on v 13. So we're probably looking to start v 13 alpha within the next couple of weeks. It just depends on a couple of timing things and things that are trying to get squeezed in at the last minute. That never happens here. Never. Well, you guys are keeping a pretty good clip over there. Yeah. There's it's it's a challenge. There's so many things and so many pressures coming from different angles, but we manage. It's really hard to understand or describe accurately how many things have to line up on all the different conveyor belts just right to have the next version come out of the chute. Yeah. So sometimes it feels a little arm wrestle we gotta do, but Yeah. There's certainly a lot of things being adjusted, and I think there's this this release is a hard one because there's a lot of testing that's needed, and it's there's a lot of areas that need testing that we, as Spark, don't have the best test data for, the giving data. Our giving data does not match the typical giving data for a church. We are running it in a couple churches. So we're seeing some things, we're trying to fix them. And so but then, you said too, there are some moving some moving feature lists that we keep adding stuff to. Now I'm glad you mentioned that. We we are going to be making a concerted effort to move a bunch of people from beta to alpha. Those are people that really match our profile, approach that we want taken in alpha testing. So some of the audience listening might be tapped on the shoulder to say, Hey, we're moving you to alpha. And we're also looking for those alpha testers to volunteer to partner with us and provide us with some access to look at that data in alpha so we can make sure everything's perfectly dialed in for the stuff John was just mentioning. Yeah, and some of the bigger tools that the bigger features that are in 13, we're really kind of calling, even one that goes to full release, we're calling them in beta state. I feel some of the giving tools, we really need people trying those, testing those. And I would say too, know there's a lot of excitement for them. Jump in there, start using them, but don't add all of your executive team to these giving alerts until you've shaken them out, until you understand. Because part of it's the toolset and the technology, but part of it's your giving patterns. every church has slightly different giving patterns. I would say, do a little prototype for yourself, then roll it out. Jumping into getting your senior leadership on the first run is probably not a great idea. I mean, just go slow. You might trip and face plant if you're not careful. Yeah, I mean, we certainly have learned that ourselves over the years too. It's you get excited and I get it. I've been there, I've done that, but try before you go show the executive team. And that has to be one, I think that is the most sophisticated data modeling analysis part of Rock ever, right? Yeah. And another thing that we're doing too right now is we're spending a lot of time in the documentation. So Colin on our team who does all the documentation, we're spending a lot of time with him trying to, , not only show what buttons to push, but what's the strategy behind this. And honestly, we've been working on these tools for so long, we've kind of forgotten, or not forgotten, guess, I think it's because we know it, we forget that we need to say it because it's become part of us now, Oh, that's, yeah, of course you shouldn't say it that way. But now we're trying to get all those things. We're kind of constantly calling him down here to the other side of our little office and saying, Oh yeah, hey, we just remembered something else we need to put in the documentation. Put this little tidbit in there too. So definitely read the docs. The docs will be a moving target too, but we're trying to invest good time into that. Yeah. So that's the version update, but I also think that's a little bit of what we're working on, which I think John's gonna talk about. Mhmm. Yeah. So definitely working on getting 13 fully out, that, we've been saying, is a moving target, and we're trying to work on the documentation and a lot of polish and stuff that. Also working on some what's next type stuff. So doing some kind of research on that. I think there are some things that we're experimenting with that some features you can just drive from point a to point b. Some features you gotta you gotta take a journey and you gotta try something, then, oh, that doesn't work, then, , iterate and innovate from there. And I think there's a few of those things that are kind of in the crock pot right now. Just also looking at some other tools that extend our reach, our rocks reach in the area of digital strategy, other mediums that we can potentially hit. I think it's been kind of interesting just over the last few weeks, though, just working with some churches on some of what they're kind of wanting and seeing some new things , oh, wow. Yeah. , we could build that out. , one of my hobbies, personal hobbies is just going through a bunch of filters and and that's of different blogs and outlets of information. And I'm always inspired by even small things. the other night I was reading about this newsletter service. So it sends you a you subscribe to via email and it sends you a newsletter, which seems so old school, right? , oh gosh, how early two thousands was that? But it's really neat with some of the concepts and some of the personalizations and some of the drip campaigns that you can put together with this little tool. And I'm thinking, gosh, this is , it's really clever ideas, but nothing that Rock couldn't easily do. we have the content channels. So I get frustrated with stuff that. Because I'm , oh, I wanna, I just need , maybe five hours to understand this tool and then design it up, but there's really hard to find those five hours. So I constantly emailing myself these links so that I can get time in the future to go through them. But I literally have probably thirty, forty links that just waiting. And people think it's weird because I get the most email from myself. I'm constantly emailing myself links and little things. And Monday mornings are actually one my most frustrating times because that's when I have to go through the weekend load of things I've emailed myself over the weekend and have to go get them into the right buckets that I can get back to them when I have time. You have a pretty good idea organization system though that you've developed over time, don't you think? Maybe, I'm frustrated by it because I It's the fault of the toolmakers. My grandfather always said he was a construction. He ran his own construction company. He was always , never blame a good craftsman never blames his tools. Well, I'm gonna blame my tools. Right? Because I can't find a good note strategy. My favorite note tool was Evernote? Well, no, it was actually No. Google Notes. Or was it called Notes? And they and Google does, they make something that's kinda helpful, and then they get rid of it. And I had so I had to, , find a new home. But I loved it. It was so lightweight, so quick, so easy. And so then I moved to Evernote. And then of course they, I don't know, they've stopped innovating and then they changed their monetization strategy. And now if you don't pay, you're basically , it's useless. So now I'm using OneNote, which is okay, but I don't know. I feel someone could really innovate in that space and win. But anyways, yeah, so I'm kind of frustrated. The worst thing for me though is if I lose an idea, I'll spend hours trying to find it. Where'd that go? They're little nuggets of gold to me. And I if I lose them, it very much frustrates me. And if I can't find it, , know it's here. , I get really stressed out. So, I don't know if I my I'm probably it's probably better than the average bear, but I don't. You don't love it. No. I feel I could do better, but I'm gonna blend my tools again. So we're kind of in that state of trying to figure out the next steps on some other things, and, , we have some other cool projects going on. And, has been spending some time lately trying to train some of our staff on some new things. We have some new staff and it's kinda training them. I was training someone this week on how to do some workflows in Lava and they're really getting it. It kinda fun. It was they're seeing , Oh wow, you could do all this stuff. And honestly, was using tools I don't typically use because I was showing them how to use the lava tester that you wrote, Nick. I don't typically use that because I don't know. I should use it more after using it this week. I'm , gosh, I could probably save some time using this. But I was training him how to use it. Was , oh, this is kind of fun. It's very quick. I mean, I think that's the main selling point, it's And then there's a couple of edge cases that are really hard to do elsewhere. It's if it involves a workflow or a group or something. Yeah. And I was looking at stuff with workflows, and usually I resort to just the hard way, which is slower. But I usually can get it within two tries. So it's not that big of a deal. Man, if you can't, man, that's a lifesaver. But also I'm putting out some content writing and doing some videos. I would say there's one on problem solving that you should really check out. It's helped me a ton. It's changed. Sometimes, when the problem comes to Nick and I, it's usually the hardest ones. And if you use that strategy, that mental strategy, you can get through it. Otherwise you get so, or I get so frustrated or stressed because it's , how are ever gonna find this needle in a haystack? But if you take a methodical approach, which this outlines, it really helps you out. And so I'd highly recommend that one. I've been wanting to make that video literally for probably three or four years. And it's probably a work in process. I'll probably redo it. That's already the second. Out there is the second try. So So I better watch it. Finish watching it. I'm halfway through. Otherwise it's gonna change. Maybe, but you already do a lot of that stuff. So you kind of know it already. The good news is if you can implement that across a team, typically the really hard problems escalate, right? So one person or one team tries it, then it moves to the next. If you can implement that process across your team, then you're not just redoing each other's work all the time. It can really help expedite things too for escalation. Yeah. And I would say too, we all think that the people who solve the hard problems solve them because they're smarter or have more experience. And while having more knowledge and more experience does help, the way you approach the problem is probably way more important than the knowledge and experience. And to think that the people with more knowledge and experience have less fear of those problems is not true. Oh, that's an interesting statement. When it comes down the hall, trust me, I don't care if it goes to Nick or me, we're , Oh no. In our heads, we're not necessarily going, Oh, no problem. We get stressed out. We're afraid of how are we ever going to solve this? And I just go to my thing, okay, well just follow the process, don't stress out. I think there is a big assumption that someone who has more experience or seems to have accomplished harder things in a particular area where the problem's located just kind of maybe has that encyclopedia in their head and doesn't get stressed out and is pretty confident. I think that probably is an assumption that people carry. Yeah. In fact, was listening to a podcast this week and it was about a doctor and he said, he's more of a, he comes off a clinical doctor. So he would walk into an ICU room and have to deduce what the problems might be. And he said in the beginning, yeah, he would use the method, he was trusting his method to get there. And now he says, , I can walk into a room and I can know a lot of things just write off just because I experience, but not that then he just throws away his method. Maybe some things come easier or what I would almost think it is, because I see this in myself as , the method becomes almost hardwired in your mind that your brain is actually just following the method without actually thinking it is. So the synapses are already firing in that way. And so the answers come quicker because it's going down pre wired patterns. But you don't get those patterns in your head until you follow that methodical approach. And I just find in my experience, most people don't follow that methodical approach. They take a berserker approach and it's , and they're just changing everything. And they're actually making the problem worse and harder to solve. And then you just slow down, follow the methodical approach. And then the methodical approach becomes the approach that just becomes hardwired in your head. And therefore that's why it comes faster and seems easier, but didn't mean to get on that tangent, but. Well, it's a good one. There's no one out there that doesn't run into issues they don't know how to solve. I mean, that's life, right? You're going to run into things you don't know how to solve. So having a proven methodology is beneficial, whether your problem is technology related or something else. Yeah. And this isn't innovated here. This is stuff that I was taught at Allied Signal Honeywell and there they were trying to solve critical problems in jet engines. You think Yes, very critical. You think what we have is stressful. I mean, if you don't know why jet engines stop running while flying, that's pretty stressful. Luckily that was not my problem. I was just helping support the people whose problem that was. But I learned by going through their training process, I learned a lot and really respected that a lot. I think one of the things that come to my mind was I was in this engineer, he's a very old school engineer. I was at the time, starting at the time when computers are definitely everywhere, but some of the old school guys didn't often use them. I remember going to this guy's office, it was probably about 11AM I had my meeting with him, I was in his office, and I said, Hey, I don't know if you saw the email sent over, which is some of the stuff we were Maybe agenda for this meeting. He's , Oh, you haven't turned my computer on yet. Yeah. , it's 11:00. Oh my gosh. But he was old school, but he had a bookcase behind his desk and it was filled with all of these leather bound books. And I'm , what are those? I was curious kind of guy to ask any question. He's , oh, those are my notes. And he just randomly took one off the shelf, opened it up, and it was a ledger. Was an accounting ledger, but lined and everything. And he had all of his notes from every meeting. And he's , this bookcase is almost priceless because people come in here and ask me about this model engine, and he goes, I can pull in I know the year, I can pull up that year, I can find any note in this. Wow. And I was just so impressed by that. And I actually followed that process for a while. Honeywell actually got the same ledger as he had. And I was just thinking the other day, I should go back to that because I was never more prepared. In fact, I remember consulting once at Dial. This was between Honeywell and moving into the church space. I was consulting at Dial, and I was I was only supposed to be at Dial's SOAP for a couple weeks helping them with the document management project. And I remember didn't No one had a network map. And I was , Well, I need to know from a firewall perspective, how we're going to architect this. And I went over to the network guy and I kind of mapped it in my little book, my little journal book. And I remember before I left, a couple of people came up to me and say, Hey, before you leave, can you make a copy of your notebook of some of these notes? Because these guys have worked there forever and they didn't have any these Wow. I'm , Oh, sure. Yeah. Actually, on my own time, I just made a nice digital one for them. But I just remember thinking, gosh, that's kind of weird that they don't have that. But okay, so now we're really off topic. We're back to notes though, if you noticed. Yes. So I think methodical approach, and I think we've been working really hard with our team on really, what does it mean to be a professional IT person. I I think the term now is engineer. everybody wants to be an engineer and that's cool, whatever term floats your boat. But engineer is a very important term and it's one that needs to be taken serious. I think I've said before, my dad wasn't an engineer, he's a metallurgical engineer, he took that really serious. Those state licensed, all that stuff. And I don't think if I told him that our industry calls us us engineers, he would probably say, Well, you acting one? I mean, you taking it that And I think we have to, we always want these titles, but we have to treat them with respect. Otherwise they'd lose their meaning. Great point. Another topic I think people are interested in, problem solving is really critical because everyone runs into problems and it's a universal value to our listeners. But another one we just keep hearing about over and over, and sometimes in the context of Rock features, and sometimes in the context of just custom responses to things their leadership wants, is the concept of the dashboard inside Rock. So it would be really helpful, I think, to just share some thoughts about dashboards in Rock, what makes them successful. Is that a potential feature? How might it be constructed if so? And what do we need to know right now about custom dashboards? What kind of approaches are valuable and helpful? Yeah, that's really good. First of all, I'd say this is not a technical problem first. Woah, pause on that for a minute. It's not a technical problem. It's an information design problem. I've worked on a lot of dashboard projects, especially at CCV. And I started with going back to, go to Amazon, find the books, right? I know that's so old school, probably just dated myself, but go find books on how to build dashboards, how to build KPIs. Go get yourself schooled first, because I think the executive teams at most churches, some of them have people on them who get these concepts. Some of them have heard these concepts. So you gotta become a consultant first, and it's not a technical consultant. It's a business strategy consultant or business data consultant because you can't you're just gonna make a bigger mess if you start just jumping in and start writing SQL. SQL is not the first step in this process. Right? It's probably the hundredth step. You have to understand what are you trying to achieve? Emily, I know you're on a call with myself, with Greg Weins, who helps us with all the assessments. We've been doing some work with him on just understanding the assessments better, which is really interesting. We're gonna be talking about that. But he said something that blew my mind too. And I know there's a term for it, and I wish I had it in front of me, but he said, When your measure becomes your goal, it no longer turns into a good measure. So if attendance is your measure and it turns into a goal, then it no longer is a good measure. And so understanding some of those concepts and becoming trying to be a consultant to that process is super important. Trying to understand , why do you want to measure that? That goes back to that. I think there's a video we've done on that too. you got to say why five times to understand , what's the real reason of what we're trying to do. So I would start there as boring as it is. And if that stops the whole dashboard project, good. If someone doesn't want to take the time to do that, they just want to jump to the sequel or jump to the design, that's probably good, because that's probably just going be wasted effort, honestly, if you don't want to go do the research and become an expert in that. It doesn't have to be two years, right? Could do it probably in two months. I remember when we did that, I would go back and say, okay, I got all that. So then I had to start sourcing the data. Okay, so you want to measure how many people came on a weekend. How do we measure that? Well, usually it was the Usher count, right? So then I would go on the weekend and go to the Usher who does account and I try to understand his usher counts. And then I understood that there was some adjustments made to usher counts. And I would try to understand why were those adjustments made? Then turns out, well, we actually really had two counts. And then I found that we had actually three different types of counts. And it was sourcing all that information before I even got to design. So trying to understand all that. And the whole way you want to be documenting this, because if you don't document how it's measured, whatever dashboard you create has to tell you that information. Whether it's a little link at the bottom that says, how are these measures measured? Cause someone's going to go and call foul within the year and say, well, how is this measured? Well, you go back. I get this from that lead usher who measures by counting each section, a section leader will document all that. And how many minutes into the service do they? Yes. Yep. Someone's going to ask Oh, that's a good point. And you have it when you're doing your research. And then eventually you'll get to the design. And again, I would start with a pencil. I go back to at Honeywell, Cliff Triplett was my director when I came out of college and he would say, Never do something on a computer that you haven't done on paper, with a pencil. And so maybe that doesn't mean pencil in this case, but it means probably do it in PowerPoint before you do it in Rock. It's easy to change PowerPoint, very hard, Figma, whatever tool you want. Do it a couple of weeks, do it a month or two, and you're going to get a lot of changes. We did ours in Word, in Excel, at CCV for a couple rounds, and then we did it in our church management tool. So don't jump. I feel most people are gonna wanna jump in right to the Let's write some SQL. And that might be a good tool to get you some rough data, but don't Just consider that thorough way, and go figure out where this is all sourced, get that all documented. We have a new saying within our team too, which you might as a community. Do that description field in Rock? The one that doesn't have a red dot next to it, assume it has a red dot. Every description field in Rock is a required field for our team. But if we're working internally or we're working with a client, it's a required field. Description is a required field. It's probably too heavy handed as a core team for us to actually make that a feature, because some people would go crazy and they'd probably just type in gibberish anyways. But for us it is required. But yeah, so prototype it in some other tool. And then as we talk about dashboarding as a feature, which is a feature we're interested in, as we've done prototypes, the one thing I can tell you is there's no silver bullet for this. I almost don't want to do the feature because I don't think we can get people what they want in terms of expectation. As we work through internally, as we work with dashboards, we have a set of reusable components that we use that we kind of go to. And so I think the best thing we can do is provide limits, standardization. , I'm sorry, we can't draw everything in the world, but we can draw Here's our reasonable couple Legos. But I feel the expectation might be that we want the ability in Rock just to make anything and pull from anything and then be performant at all times. That's a good point as well. Yeah, because I think a lot of the teams are working on this are finding that it's often good to use persistent data sets and not make it real time. And then we have some patterns where we just put data as of, and then we put the date of date and time. Because most of the time it's , I don't It's Wednesday, this weekend attendance doesn't often change on a Wednesday. And when it does, it's probably for a very bad reason. Someone's playing with your numbers, stop it. So yeah, there's a lot to that. I know the internal team also, even this week, standardized all the icons they use for dashboards, which I thought was really cool. So baptism is the tent icon, which I think that's pretty standard, but they have a whole sheet of them. And I just think that's really cool. Why should everybody use a different icon for some of these random topics? I love that level of maturity that comes to that. But I guess to get off my soapbox or to repeat my soapbox is , don't jump to just solving it. A dashboard project is not a one week project. It's not a four week project. It's a multi month project because it should start with research. It should start with interviewing. It should start with then go to design, then go to iterative design, and then you're doing your final. And that's probably not what you're going to be handed by your executive leadership, even an expectation that it will take a long time. In many cases, I have heard that an executive team may hand down a term and say, I wanna measure this word, and I want it to be in these colors with this type of chart. And that's not a starting point. That's something to shoot for, but that's not the place You can't go from that to solution. Mhmm. And that's where you might need to quickly do a test and say, I understand what you said. Are you are you interested in doing it exactly this way? Or are you saying that you want to measure these whys and this is your initial thought? Because if they say, No, it's exactly what I want, I might recommend waving the white flag and just saying, Okay, well, they just want this. This is not a strategic dashboard. They might think in their terms it is. It might appear to You're just gonna end up with 10 or 20 of these random thoughts, and then your data's just gonna be a mess. But you can't buck necessarily the system if they're But they might think they're asking for strategic. So you might need to put on your detective hat first and say, okay, let me do a little investigation into this and come back with a few questions or decision points that will help me know how you want this to be put together. And then outlined what some of those decision points might be. Are we really going exactly this? Could we go this direction? And it might just be that they didn't have the information needed to know there was a decision point there. Yeah. Or sometimes maybe you think, oh no, they're very I don't wanna use the word hard headed, I'm going to about this and Mhmm. You do it that way. But then don't stop. Then go come up with another more strategic idea that you can go back to and say, hey, , you really got you really were inspiring me with this. And, know, of course we did it the way exactly what you wanted, but you really inspired me. I was thinking , what if And then you can present another idea, but you've already checked their box. You've already showed, , you're not being disobedient. You did it what they wanted, but then you went back, read some more books, read some design. And also too is that these dashboards are very much an information design projects, or they're very creative, and you have to be thinking about cognitive load, you have to be thinking about what am I trying to show with this data so that your eye sees that. We talk a lot about that too internally too, a lot of this is graphic design. Want to reduce cognitive load, we want to figure out what does the person want to be able to quickly scan and see, and then we want to present that. The problem often becomes is that people get used to their charts and their tables, and so they come to us sometimes and say, This is what I want, exactly this. And that's where, again, we just say, okay, well, a good starting point or are you telling me this is the ending point? But sometimes, , we get told it's the ending point. And I feel badly because I think to them, they know that chart, but to the people who are also using it in that chart and inside their churches, the staff who don't live and breathe that chart, their eyes go cross because my eyes go cross. I don't understand it. It takes me forever to understand it. And while that is the center of that person's universe and they understand it, they have to understand that most people on staff, that's not the center of their universe and they don't. It's not easy to understand. Yeah, and so they don't understand They just go, Yeah, I guess I just send in my numbers because that's what I need to do, but I don't understand this chart and I don't know why it matters to me. So basically a lot to unpack inside the dashboard concept. It isn't an A plus B equals C. There's just a, It needs to meet your organization's needs the right way. Performance is important, design is important. What data is most critical? John, you to say to the team, and I think it's a really great approach that a quick way to know about cognitive load is to just close your eyes, open your eyes and see what jumps out at you first. And then that's what you've just told everyone is the most important on the page. And that's a great tip. Yeah, and just when you open your eyes again, just track where your eyes go from. they look here, they look there. I mean, I do that all day, just, okay, close my eyes, open my eyes, where am I looking? And I go from here to here, to here, to here, is that the right order? If not, change your information hierarchy to make it the right order. And I'd say if no one's asking for a dashboard right now, but you think that that could be coming, get prepared right now, start reading the books. Because the worst thing is when they want it and you're not ready, they often don't want to hear, let me go read a book. Because they're , we don't got time for that. So prepare yourself and it can be fun. So I also wanted to mention that our funding update. We spent some time in our last regular edition podcast talking about the change to the funding model for next year and what that meant and and why and how and what we were looking to do, which is basically reset the funding to be at an appropriate level for what Rock is today, which is drastically more all encompassing than what it was when it was originally created. And to do that, we basically need to pretty much double the funding of Rock. And so we had crafted a way to do that that made sense, which is to say, let's take the amount per weekend attendee and increase that in order to increase the funding and have that still weighted appropriately across organization sizes. This feels a good time to continue giving an update on how that's going. One of the things that has been an unexpected little bit of confusion, I think, just because of the whole COVID scenario is what does attendance even mean? An attendance has kind of historically been that item that we've attached our funding model to because it's a number that everybody has. But with COVID, a lot of attendance moved online instead of in person. And so it's been a little bit hard to say what that is. And at our last podcast we mentioned, hey, don't adjust your numbers now. People are still coming out of what is COVID. Some people have moved more online instead of in person. And there isn't a universal way to track online attendance right now. there is a universal way to to track number of people in seats. , that's just something that is pretty mostly universal, although with the different counts. So anyway, we had mentioned, don't don't adjust your numbers right now. Your number can still be pre COVID. Let's assume that it is. What this really is about is about adjusting the funding for Spark. So we've kind of aggregated changes so far. Here we are. It's November of twenty twenty one right before Thanksgiving in case someone's listening to this in the future. And we have about 24% of churches that had a commitment that have updated their commitment since this request. So it will be something we want to put in place by January. Currently, we're about a quarter of the way there of people looking at it. In total, what we've seen is an increase of about a hundred and $40,000, which is good. We've also simultaneously seen a decrease in attendance of 49,000. So the increase decrease, there's the whole calculation there. It's not surprising to see that people are adjusting their attendance numbers down. , understand it. It is a little bit confusing. But if that's being used as the reason to change a commitment, it's kind of not actually the way that was intended. And that's not what's happening in every case, but it's just something to point out that. It that will impact the funding model as it was intended to be used in order to fund Spark and Rock correctly. And so that's just something I think we should point out and keep in front of all of us as as a community. We're trying to make sure that the funding is properly set so Rock can continue to move forward at a good pace. Yeah. And we're still dedicated to a very difficult model. Mean, it's so much easier for us to just switch to a That's a good point. Consumer model that is , , this is it. And that's what every other system you're using in your church is. Go to your accounting system vendor and ask if they do this by donation. Can I go on a donation model? They're gonna laugh. And oftentimes those systems are as expensive or more expensive, many times more expensive than what Rock is, but the impact Rock is having in your church is huge. And we just want to make sure we can continue that impact and expand that impact as we have over the last four or five years. We want to continue to expand the impact to your ministry that Rock is having. And that just takes funding. It's true. And we are in the position of being stewards of your investment for the best go forward plan for Rock. And that's why we just wanna be absolutely transparent in what that looks and how it's going because we're we're just here to try and help move this project forward. And it really is a a community responsibility. Yeah. And it's actually a community request too. It absolutely is. So many times over the last twelve months, our ministry is relying on this tool, make sure that it doesn't go away. And as we grow, it just gets harder to scale without additional resources. It's hard to put words to that because when you used to be just a couple people, it's more efficient to do things. One person just knows and can go do all those things, but as it scales and gets bigger, it's just naturally. Less efficient. Yeah. It is. You can't turn around in your chair and go, Hey John and Nick, guess what? And then everybody's in the know and you can all move forward. It just it's the nature of an organization with growth. So what's going on as far as Rock events? Quick catch up. Don't forget Rx twenty twenty two registration is open. Get signed up. We experienced pretty much a sellout of the hotel rooms last year with a smaller attendance. This year will be in person only attendance. We're not gonna have a virtual option. And so we definitely recommend getting your hotel room booked early because we don't believe that that is going to have any issues with selling out again probably earlier than it did last year. So don't forget, book your hotel and book your conference ticket. Let us know you're coming. We are actively working on all things Rx twenty twenty two now, and you'll continue to see some of that made public as it's ready and available. We're super excited about the conference this next year. Lots of lots of effort, lots of meetings, lots of just thinking about 2022. It's so funny that by the time the event comes, it sometimes feels old to us because we've been thinking and working on it for over a year. It's so true. Lots of details for an event that. But there is and there's more details coming soon, but there is gonna be a pre day, That's right. With some content, Not just the fun part, which definitely we will be doing the evening before. So plan that late afternoon, evening fun stuff be there. But to your point, John, there's some other cool things we're doing. Yeah. So, , be thinking about that before you get your plane ticket that there'll be a optional Mhmm. Pre day that's going to be content based on much more deeper, probably content, more technical content, not new to Rock content. Yes. And that's again, all from input from the community. Yes. So plan the the days of the conference, the day before that is probably gonna be jam packed with some good stuff too. Yep. Optional, but you wanna know about it in case you wanna book travel. Definitely. Classes. So we are right now in the middle of a Rock one zero one and one zero two class, which is that very high level survey. Some of you are actively involved in church discussions with churches that are interested in Rock. Thank you, by the way. That's so helpful. One great opportunity for someone that's really interested in Rock is to have them take the Rock one zero one and one zero two, and they'll get an overview survey of what features are inside Rock and how they're intended to work together. They'll also have the opportunity to use a Rock instance to try a few things out while they're doing it. So it's kind of an extended demo for someone who is interested in leading their team through that move to Rock potentially. It's a great option for that. We I think it might be our largest class for that right now. Have 28 people going through that this week and next week or last week, I guess. Masterclass, our next one coming up is in February, and I think we have six people registered so far. Those tend to be, pretty, in demand as well. So if your budget for next year includes masterclass for anyone on your team, go ahead and get them registered for that, class as well. And SQL for Rock continues to be very popular. That's coming up in January for the next class instance. And we already have 16 people registered for that. So we do have some caps on those and you wanna make sure that you get that registration in as soon as you can. Some great classes. Mhmm. So last topic we wanted to kind of just mention, we'll go quickly on this one, but it is Thanksgiving, so it's time to be thinking about things that we're thankful for. And I think what we want to do is just encourage everybody to go out and and think one person, whether it's in the community or in your career, , think about that person that you can reach out and just and just show some appreciation to. I think sometimes when we do these things though, these are the less followed through on concepts. And I think as a community, if we think about the one community and making a huge impact and what huge means, I think being thankful is the spring that provides that river of generosity and unity. And so I would just say, find somebody in your life that you can write an email or a handwritten letter. And it sounds weird, but those things mean so much to the people who receive them. I would just say, find someone who maybe introduced you to, or hired you into your first ministry job, send them an email or a handwritten letter just saying, Thanks for doing that. It made a huge difference in your life. If everybody just does one, and you could do more, if everybody just does one, it can have a huge impact. That's a great reminder, John. I used to have a habit of writing a handwritten note to someone every Friday morning, and I've gotten well off track with that. I wanna do that again. Here I am putting it out there, my accountability. I want to get back onto that because it's something I think about, but if I don't express it, that person will never know. And what a blessing to someone's life. Life is hard. Right? Things are challenging and troubles come people's way. And that I know when I receive something that, it completely changes my perspective for multiple days on end. And additionally, I've been doing a lot of reading about neuropsychology lately, and just the way that your actions create memories in your brain and those memories end up creating habits and those pathways that make things easy and they literally rewire and change the way you think. And when you are able to create habits of gratitude, it changes the way you approach life and it changes the way that you interact with people. And it's just so very valuable that we approach life that way because otherwise, the reason sometimes that falls off and we just don't get to it is just busyness. And so we're we're our brains are rewiring every day and we're we can choose to rewire them in things that are very positive. Busyness happens and a lot of us just choose or don't choose, and it is done for us to just wire and wire and wire ourselves for more efficiency, more push, more endurance, more whatever that is. And those are all great. But if we don't balance them with the generosity and and empathy in other people, , we can find ourselves over time with some wondering why our life is looking a certain way. And those habits are things that we create on a daily basis by the choices that we make and what it does to our minds. Yeah. And I think we undersell what the impact is to the person. Totally. I mean, I have a box at home that has, I think every letter that's ever been written to me that and all the way back to Honeywell. I do too. So it matters to people. It means a lot. I think we're unique on that. No, and I think we undersell what it means to us too, if we do it. Yep. So highly encourage it. We have a community. The community is the first thing on our minds when it comes to the Rock, not technology, but community. So that's why we want to really emphasize that. And don't limit it to just necessarily the Rock community, but anybody who you feel God puts on your heart, go with that. In that spirit, I think we should give a quick shout out to Jim Michael, who's been our faithful podcast helper for many years. And he takes every podcast we record, he cuts it down, puts it into the right format, sends it back, and does a great job at making what we say accessible to the community. So thank you very much, Jim. Yeah. Thank you, Jim. And he often has to edit out All kinds of shenanigans. Let's say that. Shenanigans, but sometimes just mess ups. Well, that's true. Sometimes it's been known that someone will say, stop Jim, edit that piece out, and then it magically gets taken out. It's typically not me, but just kidding. It's most commonly me. Thanks again, Jim. And thank you all of you listeners and members of the community. Rock is really what it is because of you. We appreciate you and it's not seasonal. So thank you so much for everything that you do to contribute, and 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.