Podcast Episode 142: Episode 115: Special Edition with Adam Hann

Description

Special guest Adam Hann joins Jon and Emily to discuss LCBC's strategy to leverage data for ministry purposes.

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 edition of Rockcast. It's a special edition where we get to interview, someone in the community that you may already be familiar with, and we are so excited to kick this off. I'm Emily Forman. I have Jon Edmiston here, and our special guest today is Adam Han of LCBC Church. He is the digital director at LCBC, and that is a church in Pennsylvania with 18 locations plus an online church, experience as well. And, Adam, we are so grateful to have you here. You've been a incredible member of the Rock community for many years, and this is a great opportunity for us to have a conversation for the community. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having us or having us, having me. But, yeah, I'm glad to to to be on the podcast and to talk with you guys. And we we love Rock and and love being a part of the community. So looking forward to our conversation. 18 campuses. Wow. That's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. We added three locations this summer, and there was a church with some transitions going on in leadership, and they approached, LCBC and asked if they could become our next three locations. And, it was kinda cool. It was the or at least to my knowledge, it was the first Rock to Rock migration. They were a Rock church already. And we, they migrated over, this summer, and they've been kind of onboarding and learning all of the the LCBC way of doing things. And, they're up in Strand, Pennsylvania. So anyone that likes the office and the, the electric city, we've we've made a lot of trips up there to to hang out with with the new team members. Nice. Very cool. Yep. How long have you been in in a part of the community, Adam? Yeah. So I think it's been probably around four years, or at least I've attended four different Rock conferences. Okay. And the first one the first one we attended was before we, actually implemented into Rock. So we've been at least in the community for around four years, our team, just listening and watching and slowly, hopefully contributing back. But we we launched, InterRock, I think it was April 2019. Okay. And you have some unique things about your church and about the way you approach ministry that you've also been, , obviously crafting your tools to fit. What are some things that set LCBC apart? Yeah. Probably one of the biggest things that people that know us or have maybe heard some of our Rock, talks at the conference, one of the unique things is around our check-in culture that we have for adults. And, it's something that we've always done. And it's it sounds weird when we talk about it, people think we're we're, , giving stuff to people, , to get them to check-in. But we have, pre COVID, I think we had around sixty to seventy percent of our adult attendees checking in on the weekend. Right now, I think we're kind of, , 40 to 50 percent. Our head count's a little weird because we're also factoring in online, and there's this weird kind of, , factors that we do for online attendance. But, , a couple of weekends ago, we had over 6,000 people check-in either through SMS or through our mobile app, which is a workflow that we run through with Brock to to give attendance. And we talk about, , from the stage every weekend, our campus pastors or whoever's on stage will say , hey. When you check-in, we check-in with you, and it's our way that we help care for you and know that you're here. And we literally do. We have processes that we follow-up with people, if it's their first time at LCBC, and we run through based off that check-in data, or if they've been attending for years and just kind of, , every eight weeks for trying to reach out to people who, call LCBC home and just check-in with them. So that's probably one of the unique things, that we do. Probably another thing too, and I kind of assume that this happens probably at other churches. I don't know to what level, but we have really been on a mission to leverage our data, for our ministry purposes. And when you look at the the data, , the the data that's in, different Rock instances across the country, I mean, there's such rich data in there Mhmm. And so much information we know about our people. Whether you're doing, , a checking culture or not, there's still a lot of information in there. And we can do lot of ministry around that information. So we've we've tried to set up a lot of processes, or or ways of leveraging that data to know our people well to help them grow, in in their faith. Yeah. Love that concept of the adult check-in. It really kind of is the holy grail of church data, is knowing who's there so that you can have that deep ministry to follow-up with them if a life change happens or something in the course of life changes. I love the way that you guys have just done that through just your culture and accountability. Yeah. I was really interested in your presentation at the conference that we just wrapped up, and you were talking about tracking engagement. And every and that's a hot button word. Right? Everybody wants to talk about engagement. But you really drilled down both at the beginning and at the end after you'd shared all the complex and interesting things you've developed over time that the strategy is the first important thing. And Yeah. And it does seem you have quite a strategy behind the process that you were just explaining. Yeah. Definitely. So for us, the the strategy for us I'll I'll talk more to the engagement process right now. We really wanted to think through how, again, how we can leverage that data to help our people grow. And and when I think about, , our mission statement, , always try to tie everything back that we do back towards our mission. So for us, it's to introduce people to Jesus and together fully follow him. That's kind of probably very similar to a lot of different churches out there. And the engagement process we have is more under that together fully follow him bucket. And really, it helps us see, how people are engaged, at LCBC across four different categories or engagement categories and helps us know how we can help them move to their next step. And we kinda have this premise of, , an engagement score on the profile, but the number isn't the most important thing. What's most important is being able to look at someone and be , hey, we can help them. Maybe we can help them move, into more engagement in a in a small group for more engagement on the weekend, with their attendance. And there's different things that we can do as we help interact with people individually, through phone calls or care calls that we have, or more at, , a bigger scale when we're doing kind of, , bigger communications, or we're, communicating about different events that are coming up, and we can identify people and and and essentially kind of target or communicate to those people, appropriately and in a in an appropriate way, not in a creepy way, but in a way that helps move them, towards, , more engagement. And we believe that if people are engaging in these categories, it's gonna lead to and create the opportunity for them to grow in their faith and their relationship with Jesus. And what are those four categories? Yeah. So, gather is the first one. So that's based around weekend attendance. The second one is connect, which is, , around small groups or what we call adult groups. Serve, that's the serving in the church. One we have is called get out, and that's around inviting people and kinda being in our community. We're still figuring out how to track Mhmm. That engagement. And then the the other one is live generously, which is based off of, giving and kind of that spirit of trusting God with your finances and that spirit of generosity to others. Awesome. Yeah. And I liked that you said we can identify people because that sounds really simple. But unless you have very clear data strategies and clean data, and it's something that you pay a lot of attention to, and then you synthesize, , your church mission down into these categories, how do I measure those categories? It sounds a quick hop from engagement strategy to to, messaging people, but there's a lot of work that goes behind the scenes to try that, to clean it up a little bit, and then to find things that you can measure in those categories. Right? Yeah. Definitely. We we spent a lot of time, kinda testing these concepts. So we didn't, , go out and build the , this dashboard that we created, , on day one. We spent probably months, and a lot of this was actually happening during COVID. So, , along with putting out fires and figuring out how to do church online, during quarantine, we were kinda running this other project along with it and figure and almost because, , we had to because we we didn't see any of our people face to face. So we had to find out different ways to kinda track their engagement with us. But we spent a lot of time kinda digging into that data and and kinda just playing with it and seeing, , kind of it probably wasn't as deep as, , statistical analysis, but, , looking at changes, , hey. If we set the giving threshold to this, what difference does it make, versus, if we had it set at this other time frame, , and kind of playing with that data and and kind of doing the best that we can with the information we have to kind of feel , hey. If they're hitting these kind of milestones, those milestones, those are the types of things that we wanna do when we say, , they're engaged in a specific area. And then beyond that, when they're engaged in an area, doesn't mean that they're good. It doesn't mean, , if I'm engaged in giving, , I'm , hey. Adam's good with generosity. There's still probably a next step for me in that generosity kind of journey then. So, yeah, we did a bunch of kind of diving into that stuff, and then it's even forced us to kind of review some of our processes. So one of the things I didn't talk about much at the conference is that we're we we created, , a baseline metric called active leads, which is kinda previously, we would have compared off of, , weekend attendance, , weekend attendance. It's , how many people do you have engaged based on your active, or your average weekend attendance? And we're saying that's, , a metric that doesn't work anymore. It doesn't show the full picture. So we went to this active lead metric, which is based off of the engagement categories and minimal kind of activities that people have done in that. And then beyond that, we're looking at actually an active record type model where we would start to leverage active records as kind of , if you're thinking through a marketing standpoint, almost the top of the funnel or kind of the very base interaction that someone has had with our church. So it's making us go back and kind of review our active record policy or procedures, , that that we might have. We have not been very good with that. If you go into a Rock instance, we have way more active records than what we should right now, or or at least we believe that. Everyone has kind of their own philosophy for that. But so, yeah, we're we've been kind of reviewing our processes, our data processes, and looking for ways to track and measure, those things around around this engagement model. Wow. That's a very interesting and exciting thing to think about. So many churches, we've heard ourselves as well, they'll come and say, hey. I I'd really to track engagement. Can you help us do that? And and it's really hard to help them step all the way back and say, we've gotta figure out how do we align that with because your engagement strategy can't be the same as someone else's. LCBC's needs to be unique because you're a unique church with a unique mission and unique people attending. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. It's definitely unique per church and per the mission. And the other thing too that this helps with when you can land on it, depending on, , the context of your church and how the teams are structured, , for us, it gave our campus and our central teams, , a common language. And now a campus can go and they can look at their engagement scorecard and see how they're doing as a team. , how well is that campus pastor and that campus team moving their people, in their faith journey? And then they can, , identify, , weak spots, or or areas where they're maybe, , under average of where the rest of the church is at. And then they can come to Central and be , hey. What kind of resources do you guys have for us to maybe increase our giving engagement? Maybe there's, , a ninety day tithe challenge that we can run at that campus or a financial peace university class or something that. Really, , , when we roll this out to our teams, you can kinda see the light bulbs going off between our campus and our central teams of figuring out how to work together and having that scorecard up. Yeah. I love the idea that you just said that that you're using the data to help at a campus level determine what they need to work on. So much, it's , oh, we're looking at the global, , all all campuses and and then making programs off of that, but you guys are are looking at the data and being responsive to the needs of of each, , individual body to to give them the resources they need. That's cool. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's been and it's not it probably doesn't work as well as what I'm, , saying it right now either. ? It's it's still we're we're we're figuring it out. We've done a lot of campus central teamwork over the past few years. And again, depending on your church context, that that might be, an irrelevant conversation, but still that the idea of having a common language and a scorecard kind of that you're working for and how you're doing. And what's even more important and cool about it is that it's affecting people's, , eternities and their Mhmm. Their life now here on earth, as as they're growing in their faith with God. One of the things too I've been impressed with, , working closer with you guys in the last year and a half is how much, , your leadership and your staff is high effort. , there's so many things that you guys are doing, the phone calls that you're making, intentional leadership development that you guys are challenged to do as staff. I mean, think that's really great that the effort that you guys put into the ministry and it's not a passive thing that you just think, oh, well, we just, , we'll do another weekend and see what happens. You guys are so intentional. Can you talk a little bit about some of those programs, maybe the leadership program or other things that, , high effort that you guys do? Yeah. That's one of the things that I've loved about my experience at LCBC is it's I won't get into a ton of details, but I came in as, , a worship leader, with a computer science background. And I had kinda given up the the computer stuff, , in college, and I was gonna do music stuff. And, ended up here I am, , fifteen years later kinda leading this this technology team. And a lot of that is the the effort that we put in leadership. And there's a lot of times where I was given the opportunity to influence even though I wasn't in a position of influence per se or, , in a role, , in a manager role or anything that. And what we've I I feel as a culture we've developed over the years is this kind of culture of of building leaders. That's what the church is called to do, is to equip, the saints to do the work. ? And and that's where we've really been, leaning into that, as a as a staff team. And that's , our campus teams are responsible for developing leaders on their campus to come to help do ministry. We're looking, centrally. I've been super, challenged by Tyler Vance at Life Church recently just about, , how can our technology teams have volunteers? How can we pull in either, , consultants or or people that are in the industry that we can learn from, or they might even wanna help us with things or small little projects? So that that's kinda baked into our culture a little bit. And then on top of that, then we have very specific staff development, kind of purse not classes, but opportunities that we do at LCBC. So, , once a quarter, we get all of our teams together, and we kinda do, , an all staff day. And it starts with, , worship and and vision in the morning. And then in the afternoon, we can pick some electives that we take. We've done, our team has done some classes, , , Rock hacks, we call them, which is just really the right way to use Rock in different situations. Or, , we do fun stuff too. This is it doesn't have anything to do with leadership, but there was someone that did, , a canning class, and they, , can jam and stuff that, , in the class. So we try to just provide learning opportunities. And and along with that, hopefully, my team would tell you that I I try to do intentional one to ones with them every month and and invest in their leadership. And and I'm not gonna force someone in the leadership. I'm not gonna say, , you need to be a leader, but we're I'm always trying to find ways to give them opportunities to grow in different areas. Again, by no means do we have this perfect at all. Recently, we've been really challenging ourselves to even kind of build out even more of, , a development pipeline, I guess, you could say, of leaders. So our team resourcing team, they've kinda created some tools for us that we can use in conversations with giving team members experiences or critical conversations to kinda help them grow. So it's it's just been kind of a core of, , our senior leadership and our senior pastor. That's that's been his mentality since he came to the church thirty five years ago. And so this has been kind of baked in, I feel, to our culture as we've grown. And so, yeah, I don't know if that answers your question, but that's kind of some of around what we do Yeah. That's right. In in that leadership process. That's really interesting. So are you a master canner now? A master what? Tanner. Did you take the jam canning class? No. I didn't. No. I think that was actually one of the times we were doing a class on Rock, so I couldn't make it to that one. Yep. But it was sweet. They had this sweet setup and multiple cameras, and it was, , a legit, , almost, , cooking show that they did. Oh, how cool. With lighting and everything? Yeah. Everyone talked about it, and they were super happy, the people that went. That's a fun idea to have such a variety of topics. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool investment. They even another random one they did was, , a self defense class, and they brought in someone that used to be on staff, still attends LCBC. She was a cop in New York City, and she's, , a tiny little person. And, they came in and trained, just how to do self defense. And they had some really big dudes come in, and they're flipping them around. And That's cool. And as an example. So this kind of fun stuff. Speaking of fun stuff, what do you to do for fun when you have time on your hands? Yeah. So time with my family. My wife and I have been married for fourteen years. We have a son named Lincoln who's, eight or seven. He'll be turning eight. So, , anytime that we can do fun stuff together as as a family. Personally, I I love technology. So I'm always, , messing with stuff. , I'm one of those guys that has a bunch of, , smart home things and a Raspberry Pi, and I'm messing with it at home all the time. I'm a I probably spend too much time playing Fortnite. I playing Fortnite in the evenings. And I'm big transformers fan, so some comics and things that. So yeah. Yeah. I love the fact that even around the the transformers, it's you get into it. I people who get passionate about a topic. And Yeah. Actually, the transformer chipsticker is kind of, , in in reference to that hobby of yours. Yeah. I just thought that was so cool that get into that. And I I just to see people who are passionate about things. I guess I I get that way too. And, no matter what the topic, I think they're just cool hobbies. There there's a guy I found online who's, a a pastor at a church, and he also loves transformers. And he would write blog posts about this is a few years ago. He would write blog posts and, , comparing, , different transformer episodes and kinda, , some truths about god that he would pull out of it. That's cool. And I was , I'm here all day for this. This is great. Sometimes I watch Goldbergers, and they have they have some of the transformers I had as a kid. And every time I see them, I'm , oh, I wish I had those. I'd send them to Adam. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen those. Yeah. So that's some of the stuff I do for fun. Well, thank you so much for joining us and just giving the opportunity for the community to hear a little bit about what it is that LCBC is doing in some really, very valid and important ways right now. Some of the things that set your you apart and how you approach your uniqueness in different ways as an organization, I think that's inspiring and something that every church can can learn from. How do I set things up so we are uniquely pursuing our unique mission? And and just giving us a chance to get to know you a little bit more. Thanks for joining us, Adam. Yeah. You bet. And, guys, thank you for all the work that you guys do. I know you guys you John, you're talking about effort. I know you guys put in a lot of effort. You guys work hard and there weekly, our team and, our ministry staff, we talk through the different opportunities we have because of, of Iraq and things that we wouldn't have been able to do before and we can do today. So thank you for the ways that you guys have impacted our church and our ministry, and, all the stories that we hear that you guys don't get to hear. And I wish I could find a way to funnel them to you. But just thank you for the impact that you guys have had on our church through, the technology that you guys are investing in and building. Definitely. It's something that we love doing. Yeah. Thank you for the encouragement. It's an absolute passion project for the team. Yeah. Cool. Alright. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Thanks for joining us. And if you're listening today, thank you for joining us as well, and we will see 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 features. Are you ready to take the next step or share with another local church? Visit rockrms.com/hosting today.