Podcast Episode 139: Episode 112: The Power of a Rock Website

Description

Version 12.5 is coming! Join Jon, Nick and Emily as they discuss the cool new features in the latest Rock update, the upcoming RX2021 conference, and the ways that you can use the data views from a Rock website to better connect with your church members.

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, the podcast where we talk all things Rock. I'm Emily Forman, and today we have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo, and we are going to tell you a little bit about what's going on and share some of our recent thoughts inside the community with the product and and the people. We are so thrilled that you've joined us today and are ready to have a great conversation. So, Nick, we always to start with where are we? Everybody wants to know. Twelve five will be going to alpha, I'm sure probably by the time this podcast goes out, unless the podcast goes out today. 12.5 is pretty big. There's 45 fixes. Some of those are public issues that were open in GitHub. There's 21 improvements and a handful of additions and improvements. I'm just gonna name a few of these because I think they might be interested. People might be interested in them. there's now a property on the schedule to allow automatically inactivating it once that schedule is done. There's another feature, which I was surprised, is in here. It's the conditional fields on workflow forms. That's a huge Wow. That's a huge feature. Yeah. Don't let that go hidden. Exactly, it's , that's in a dot release? Well, we had to get it in there, so that's why you guys get it. It's gotten some limited use, but I'm sure you guys will test it during our beta and alpha phases. And there's a whole bunch of other things. There's some mobile additions for mobile block stuff. I don't wanna go through them all. Yeah, but there's maybe one more, huge addition, right? The links and The which one? The links? Links. Bookmarks? Oh, oh yeah, bookmarks. That's well, it's not in the release notes yet, right? So there's this new feature. How could I forget? It's the one we're, , working on night and day to get done. Yeah, it's really cool. It's actually really fun. There's a little bookmark now at the top. And also, in addition to being bookmarks, where you can go put your favorite pages and whatnot, There's also a quick return feature in there. So if you were just on that group five groups ago or three clicks ago, whatever, you can go back to that group right through the quick returns. It's really cool. Yeah, and that was a feature funded by Christ Fellowship. So, I mean, it's really great that the model, I think, is awesome. When people come up with a need, they help fund it, and then everybody gets it. Same thing with conditional on workflows that was funded by Newspring. So it's just really great to see churches investing in a tool for themselves, but also for the big C church. So 12.5 really, I mean, it's a it's a major release, really. I mean, it's got so much good stuff in it. Yeah. I think yeah. That's probably a a good way to look at it. It's it's a big release. And we'll be talking about the conference, how we need to restructure, how we do these releases, because the dot releases are turning into major releases, and we need to probably just shift our naming strategy a bit. Yeah. So super exciting, though. Yeah. That's that's the story I have for you this morning. So the development team has been busy, sounds . Right? Oh, yeah. Yep. We're firing on all cylinders, and everybody's here, I see, working hard right now, and we even have a new person over there. That's awesome. Yep. That's great. Well, thanks for the the bonus feature review. Don't forget if you're not updating regularly, you should be. So have a plan, and don't do it on a Friday. Little bonus. Great. So let's talk about the conference. The conference is exciting, and the conference is coming right up. We've seen most people that we typically see register for a community event, are getting their tickets purchased already to either attend in perks in person or attend virtually, and we've described a bit of the difference in those two options, and and it's, described very well on our conference site. We have several different audiences that we see come to the conference, so don't be afraid to consider whether you're bringing the right mix of people. Especially if you happen to be virtual, there may be some sessions that you want to include someone maybe from your leadership team or ministry team, and we will have that information in hand as to what you'll see here pretty soon on the virtual side. In person, consider, are there members of your leadership team who should attend? There is a leadership and innovation track, and that has great content at a high level for people to really understand what's possible in Rock. There also is a great spot on new to Rock. So if you're an organization that is either considering Rock or working on moving yours your church over to Rock right now, that's a great spot. Maybe a few people go there and if you attend elsewhere. Ministry leaders, there will be content for you as well, and we should have that scheduled publishing here very soon so you can just dig in and see for yourself. We've tried to have speakers this year help identify the technical level of their talk as well as the audience they believe would be most benefited by it. So that will give you and your team a chance to kinda map out where to go when. We have a lot of tracks and a lot of content. It's gonna be a great event. On another topic, I'm not sure whether or not everyone has heard yet, but one of our keynote speakers, Will Mancini, has written the book A Future Church. And so he will be joining us on stage at the beginning of day one, which is available both to in person and virtual attendees to really talk through what does the future church look , what paradigms and models have we tried in the past? And what do we need to be doing when it comes to discipleship and engagement? How do we view the church? How do we get people in? And then how do we help them get to discipleship? And sometimes it it can feel a splintered approach. you have to either focus all on the people coming in the door or all on the people in the discipleship area, but what's the right balance and model? So really intriguing insights, for those who have read the book and have not yet. I think you'll have an opportunity to gain some things that will be valuable at every level. One of the things we talk about a lot here in Rock is that we're focused on ministry. And so to bring in someone with ministry insights is always a great idea to help flavor our perspective and our approach to how we're using our tools. Because it is so easy to just build things that make our jobs better. Yeah, and I think it's just even having them as just a reflection of the community that we have and the core team in that we're not, you said, looking at what's needed now, we're trying to figure out what's needed in the future. And we're really at that inflection point where everything's changing and we want to be thinking ahead of that. And I think you'll start to see some features coming out that are definitely ahead of the game. And we'll be talking about those version at Rx in version So lots of exciting stuff coming on that. If you haven't signed up, don't wait. Get that sign up in. We are having to go to our venue and lock some things in, so make sure that you're part of that lock in. Additionally, the rooms at the hotel are almost completely sold out. We have had our block sell out a couple of times, and so we keep increasing it little by little. But, , the hotel will only go for that for so long, and, and our block expires on August 6. So after that, you are going to be paying the regular hotel prices. So get those hotel reservations made as soon as possible. And the reason to stay there is, one, there's a great rate inside our block. And two, everybody's gonna be there. So if you wanna be hanging out that the hotel has, , this little, lower level area that's gonna have a lot of furniture all set up for just hanging out, getting together, sharing those things you've been doing, reconnecting, and to be able to have all of that in one spot, and then you just hit the elevator up to your room. , it's gonna be a really cool experience. So don't miss that. Okay. I think that's it for the conference. That's a lot, but we're we're pretty excited about it. It is. I just wish we had another extra month to get ready for. I know. , we we had a little bit of a late start because we didn't even know if it was gonna what it was gonna how it was gonna be. So it kind of pushed back everything. So we're majorly scrambling on the other side to get everything ready and we're trying to introduce some new technologies at the conference we always do. So Yep. There is a lot going on. There definitely is. We might be a little crazy between now and then, but all for good reason. And sleep deprived, John? A little bit. Yeah. So in terms of podcasts, we to talk about features that maybe are under utilized. So the one I wanted to bring up today, and it's it's kinda two faceted. It's websites run down running on Rock. So two facets are one is maybe you haven't implemented that yet. And I think the big miss there is you have all of this data inside your database that you can present and personalize out to your website. Now we've talked about personalization being a feature coming up in future versions of Rock, but that's a little bit of a misnomer because you can do amazing amounts of personalization today. As we build websites for churches, we're doing that, even just the beginnings of that. But even the beginnings are amazing things. So just remember, you have this treasure trove of information about your your attendees that you can help personalize that and understand them better when you have that information. We've been in some meetings with churches the last few weeks, and it's just been really fun to unlock the potential of the data that we already have. So a lot of the talks and features that we've been talking about is just showing that data and summarizing it and aggregating it a little bit more to do some more analysis. But it's just amazing how much data is in there. When you have a website that runs on Rock, that goes through the roof, how much data you have, because now your people are telling you what they're interested in by what pages they're traveling to. So that's the other side of this is once you have a website on Rock, and I know many of you do, what are you doing with the data that it's creating for you every day? I even know years ago, when I was contacting volunteers or interacting with a lot of people in church community, I was always on their profile looking at when was the last time they were on the website? What were they looking at at the website? Before I would have phone calls or or send emails, just to make sure that I could encourage them in in the things that they were interested in. And you can even automate that too. , having that church website on Rock is really valuable, but make sure that they're logged in. you got to give them a reason to log in, give them tools, give them the content that need behind that login, and then it's generating basically a trail of of their interests that you can then follow-up on. So there's tools within Rock that I feel are very underutilized in terms of data views that you can create that is are looking at those interactions that those page views are creating. So for instance, I I created a data view just for my own interest of people in the Rock community who are interested in learning. So what I look at is, , give me a list of all the people in the last two weeks who have looked at ROCKU or the manuals. So to me, those are people who are invested in or interested in learning. And then from there, we can send out personalized communications, communications that even say, Hey, it looks interested in groups. Here's some more group resources. So just realize those tools are there. They're actually pretty easy to use. You don't have to be technical to set up a data view, and it's actually probably easier than you think. So that's what you can do today, which is amazing, and there's, , way more tools coming. But I would definitely consider, , putting your website on Rock. It's usually a discussion in the beginning as you move to Rock that maybe communication department is is saying, hey. We love Rock, but we probably wouldn't run our website on that. And we commonly see that change of mind over time once they realize the power of doing that. In the beginning, it's not it's not prudent to to try to convince somebody to do that. It's better just to let them come to that conclusion by seeing that data. And we've definitely or have some pretty cool sites coming out soon that are gonna be showing that personalization in some pretty pretty cool ways. Yes. That is going to be very exciting to to add the visual to that. That's what I think will help, a lot of communication teams realize, oh, this is what's possible. It's absolutely next level. Yes, you might not be familiar with the toolset, but at one point they were trained on and learned the toolset they're using now. So it can be learned, , the new toolset can be learned and it doesn't require, there are a lot of ways a website on Rock can be maintained and updated that doesn't require a lot of intense technical work. Mhmm. It requires the same use of, features and content inside Rock. Can you do all sorts of things if you have, front end development skills on your team? Yes. Should you probably be leaning into building that a little bit if you have a website? Probably a good thing to have on your team. But there are lots of ways that Rock can be updated and, in fact, dynamically updates, when you're running your website on Rock. Yeah. Most websites that run on Rock, you usually are not updating the site from the front end. You can't. But most of time, you're just adding content, structured content of events, of course sermons and series, of promotions. Mhmm. That's all usually done by just creating content channel items. So you're just typing in the title, the the content body, providing an image, and then and then start time, end time of when to start and show it. It's it's very, very automated. It's clicking buttons and typing in content or uploading things. It's not the managing of that is not very intensely difficult. Right. Because I think modern websites, what's important is that you always are thinking about structured content. You wanna reduce the amount of unstructured content you're throwing out to that. Why? Because the unstructured content is a challenge to style if unless , unless you're a stylist, but you don't wanna give that out to your, , ministry leaders because they'll start making the font green and purple and blue. You don't wanna give those options. But another good reason is, more and more of that content needs to go across mediums. And so sometimes, yeah, the website is the first thing we think about, but it needs to also go to mobile. And if it's an HTML, it's more or less unstructured. Trying to translate that natively into mobile is difficult. So then you end up using web views or or things that, which are not optimal. But if you do it in structured content, it's very easy then to to dynamically convert that into native experiences for web and mobile. Or perhaps you have two websites. Maybe your pastor has a website and your church has a website and you want to show the same sermon content in both places. You don't have to maintain that in two places. You maintain it in one and you can show it in both. Yep. One of the challenges we hear from a lot of people right now about what's holding back their ministries related to their current websites that don't run on Rock is that their campuses can't get the kind of information they need onto their site. And so there are a lot of workarounds for things that, but it ends up being hamstringing their ministries because of what's possible. And working with campuses through dynamic content or through specific locations of things, that's something Rock's very capable of doing. And that ends up being one of the reasons people, I think, start considering a Rock website if even if they've had a little bit of resistance to it internally previously. On occasions, so you see that they wanna cling to the current tool, and instead they'll ask questions of us , well, how can I get the login to work on the new tool, on my old tool? And how do I get the interactions from the old site into Rock? And how do I get this data that I wanna personalize into the old tool? And it's really swimming upstream at that point, because now you're trying to basically recreate Rock in the old tool, which is generally not possible. And instead, swim downstream, just learn the new tools. And again, there is a little bit of thought you have to put into it. you're gonna have to scale up your Rock instance. Power doesn't come for free necessarily. When you scale your site, you need to scale your infrastructure. But that generally is pretty easy, especially if you're in Azure, it's just a matter of a few clicks. And there's lots of Rock partners out there who can help you understand that. But I would say that that's one thing that we've been doing a lot of training on and we have some videos out on is just on how to understand and, , the performance and and the impacts of that. Because I do believe that we forget that sometimes that we just add all this functionality and scale, and we forget about the poor server, the engine that's running it, and that it might need to be upgraded to. That's a great point. I know a lot of churches make baby steps toward a Rock website by having a Rock portal experience for their logged in members and attendees, and then a more marketing website on a different tool. And that has its own challenges as well that I don't know if people really understand ahead of time too much, but you're basically maintaining two websites at that point and getting people back and forth and having, , navigation concepts that work well for the user experience is a big challenge. Yeah. That's a great feature. Glad you brought that up. It's huge. It's bigger than some of the features we've talked about. Yeah. But think it's two factors. If you're not on it, get on it. If you are on it, use the data that it's providing. Again, there's a gold mine of data inside of Rock that that a lot of people are not using. In fact, most most of us are not using it yet. We've been collecting it and that's great. That's the start. And that's a lot of the things that we're looking at going forward is how do we synthesize insight from the data that we already have in these systems. And most secular world companies would die to have this data. We have it. It's first party. It's right there. Don't take it for granted. Right. Yeah. Don't. And speaking of the data view you were doing, community members interested in learning things. What tell us a little bit about what you've seen in the community recently. Yeah. So conference time is a there's different things that happen around conference time, different phases of the conference. And one of the phases that we do is we always start going in and looking at the community partly to create, , some some metrics for the conference, partly to start looking at, , this is the time of the year when we we look at the the Rock star, , class and who's gonna make the Rock star class of 2022, '20 '20 '1. So, , looking through there and and looking at some of the data, I thought some of the what was an insight to me was, , the COVID's impact on the community. I think COVID's impact on the community has been twofold. One is that there's been a lot of of of sharing of ideas, but I think the so, , maybe the quality of communication in the community in the community has gone up, but definitely the quantity of communication has gone down. And I think I'm I'm attributing that without a lot of science and looking into it, but it's probably because a lot of us are are really busy and we're and we have a lot of new stresses and a lot of new things that we need to we're worrying about. But I just wanna encourage everybody, , get this stay in the community. I know we're super busy, but in a sense, this is kinda the titanic moment. We need to help everybody get to the lifeboats, and it's a that's what community is, and that's what community matters when it when it when it's in a crisis. So, , keep in there. If you're experienced, , please keep helping others in. I'm starting to see a lot too, a lot more questions going unanswered that are answer answerable. And and if you're new, , keep asking. But I think this is a time more speaking more to the people who have been around for a bit longer. , I know it's times are busy, but please, the communities, what we've always said is the most important thing to what we do. So spend some time helping and growing that. Great. Those are really good insights. Well, thank you so much for tuning in with us. We are working hard to bring you some exciting information and a great experience at the conference. As John mentioned, we had to make the final decision on having this event pretty late in the game. So it it is scaled back a little bit in some of the areas that are, , bright shiny. But as far as the content, I'm impressed. We have more tracks of content from the community than we've ever had before, and it is an absolutely solid experience. So don't forget to join us for that. It would it's something that will make your whole year. And if that's all we're talking about between now and then, well, that's what we're doing, and that's what we're excited about. So thanks for tuning in. We look forward to seeing you in a few weeks at Rx twenty twenty one. 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.