Podcast Episode 133: Podcast Episode 106: Focus on Ministry with New & Familiar Features

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Don't miss this behind-the-scenes review of exciting new features that are in the works, a couple of features you already have but might not be using, an update on RX2021 and more.

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 Rockcast, the podcast where we take you behind the scenes with Spark Development Network. We look at Rock, what's coming in the product, what's going on with the community, and just kinda get you up to speed with the latest. I'm Emily Forman. I have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo here today, and we're gonna tell you everything that's going on. Can I start by telling people what's going on with 12.3? Absolutely. Alright. 12.3 is now in early access. So we we released that, I think, a week ago. Gosh, it's hard to keep track of time. Things move They do. And we are working on 12.4 and v 13, but there's a bunch of stuff in 12.3. It's kind of amazing how many fixes and little improvements are in there. So if you haven't moved to that, we would recommend you move to that as soon as you can. I'm surprised how many things you guys already have in twelve four too. I mean, that's that's gonna be a good release. It may not have the breadth of stuff in twelve three, but it has some pretty significant performance improvements. And Yeah. I was just about to say that we kinda worked a little harder on trying to do some more performance, tuning on the check-in manager stuff, and I think we got some good stuff coming in twelve four on that. That. Yeah. So look for that a little quicker than probably normal. Would It's kind of what we're planning right now. Yeah. Yeah. I think at the moment there were 12 or 13 fixes in twelve point four, and I think we get it to 20 this week. Maybe we'll start an alpha shortly after, maybe end of next week or the week after. Mhmm. And there's some actually some new features in there too. I mean, stuff. Yeah. But there's also some concrete being poured for foundations in there that so you won't see it. It will be underground, but it's coming soon. Yep. Always. So we haven't slowed down around here? No. Not at Definitely not. Well, what else is coming? That is a very difficult question to answer because it seems the team is just moving so quickly right now on stuff, and there's so many things going on. But a few things I thought I would highlight, for 13 to to be looking for. Probably one of the most exciting features for me, at least, is the giving analytics. I think we've mentioned it a couple times at a very high level, but it's gonna really allow you to see and visualize a family and person's giving in a much nicer format. Also gonna help you a little bit with some, reports if you wanna do some reporting on that. Obviously, there's a lot of things you can see with that feature, but behind the scenes too, there's actually some performance improvements about how we store salutations for a family, which if you've ever worked with giving, that's always one of the slowest parts of your reporting is the salutations. So definitely some speed improvements. But one of the things that we when we think about giving, it's a kind of a scary topic because it can be used as a as a tool for good or or in some cases, you you could use it as a weapon. But what we're trying to do here is is really improve the the toolness of that. So not only can you see things better, but there's also gonna be some alerting that's gonna be built in. And, that alerting will let you send communications or launch workflows or set, connection, requests when certain events happen. So if if you get a gift that's significantly larger than normal for the family, then you can recognize that. So that's a very positive thing, , not that people are giving to get recognition, but it's nice to, celebrate with them the decision that they made, and the commitment that they, , are showing. And also too, if someone's maybe has a pattern of giving and all of sudden that pattern has stopped or slowed, it also allows you to send out some just health checks. Usually when giving changes, something in life changes. As a church, we want to be responsive to people's life change and be able to step in and help and assist. So in no way are those alerts about, the dollars themselves, but it's really a reflection of what's happening inside that person's life and being responsive to that. Celebrating when good things happen and then just checking in when things maybe aren't, or things are just changing. Sometimes change is not a bad thing, but it's still a time to step in and just do a check. So really excited about that feature. It's actually a feature that we've been having in the works in the in the crock pot for almost eight or nine years. So it's great that we finally pushed through that, working in partnership with Life Church to get that project, executed and funded. So that's really great. Another project that we're working on, which is kinda new, it didn't hit the the official road map till recently is what we're calling media. So in the state of digital church, one of the most important things, from the digital strategy is content, and one of the major content points for churches is media, whether it be audio or video. And so we really feel we needed to beef that area of Rock up to support that. Obviously, you can do that today. You guys know that. Attributes on content channel items is pretty much everybody's go to. But what are those attributes made of? , what, , what does the attribute represent? For a lot of people, it represents, , maybe a Wistia video, but that's a plugin. Sometimes it's having to hand type in a YouTube or a Vimeo link. And, , that works, but it's not super great. This this media will give models and entities to support and store all that stuff and allow for more plugins. So plugins now have, , a concrete thing to to build off of, whether that be, , syncing with Wistia or YouTube or Vimeo. , that can all happen, and some magic can kinda happen under the scenes. And then you can directly link those into your content channel, or they can ask actually, to build the content channel for you. So if they if for instance, plug in sees, hey, there's a new video in Vimeo, I can actually it can actually be wired up to create a content channel item for that video. And then someone else can go add the metadata if if need be to that. But maybe the metadata is already in YouTube and you don't need anymore. So that's that's pretty cool. But what we heard from the community, and this is what really spawned this to to happen sooner, is that a lot of people love the capabilities of the Wistia plug in in terms of being able to track the views and track how much of this video has someone watched. But there are some limitations actually in in Wistia. So in Wistia, for example, if you watch the video, it can track your usage of that video in that session. But if you leave that session and you come back the next day, it doesn't stitch that together. It's , oh, this is another watch. I I know it's the same person. , it's smart enough to know that. But it's not smart enough to say, well, you you've already watched half of this. Let's start at that point and let's combine that usage. And what we're seeing is it within a lot of churches, they're wanting that. They're wanting, people to watch these training videos. They could be significant in length, , either half hour or forty five minutes, and people may not have time to watch the whole thing and they need to be able to aggregate that. , working with the community is great because the people who want that have reached out to Wistia to request that, which is awesome. , that's exactly the right answer. But I don't think it's really in their road road map to to really want that. I mean, they're going in a different, they're going for a different thing more about marketing videos, and that's really not a big feature set for them. And, , we get that, but we really feel we wanted to step in and do that. So the feature will also allow allow you to track those watches, provide you analytics much Wisti in terms of, , heat maps of watches. And the cool thing, the best thing about this is that it'll work across web and mobile. So if you watch a video on web and you need to to Rock Mobile later to watch to finish the video, it can remember where you were were and append the map together so you can kind of see that all happening. It's a big feature, , it's it's gonna be one those features we roll out and then we're gonna have to keep adding and adding and adding to. So I would say this this is a one o release of the feature, but it's gonna be very robust. So that's something that kind of hit our radar quickly. And we're trying to respond actually with some immediate needs that people have. So Wow. It's kind of a rush to get this because we there's some people who actually really need this for some projects and we're trying to meet those needs. But you just dropped those two feature concepts on us that's just a normal everyday thing. Do you remember when we were talking for years about, hey. We have to just circle the globe once with features, and then we can take off and start doing incredible things. Yeah. I mean, the globe , I think we went around the globe, but actually, I think the globe changed. I think you might be right. Because I keep thinking back to, when we started this whole thing, , we're talking about we didn't call the church management system. So glad we didn't do that. But the whole church management space has changed. Most of the vendors haven't. They still see it the same way, but it's really a digital church strategy. And what the features that what's once made up a church management system are archaic and, , needed but not important as much. And so I think if you look at what the mission we thought we were on in the beginning and we look at what the mission is today, it's Yes. Hugely different. But that becomes a struggle because our funding is really not there to really envision that. And I feel the vision is being held back, necessarily by the funding. That said, we're fighting mad to to still get this thing done. , that's not we're not, well, there's no money. Well, , we're just we're still gonna figure out some way to get done, , sometimes it's it's it's a little depressing sometimes because what you could do. Mhmm. , you got all the plans, you got all the ideas and and we have the community. It's it's it's not there's a small group of people with the ideas. We have this community who's giving us these ideas. I I both love and hate when I get emails, from the idea system. I love the ideas. I hate the fact that we can't make every one of them happen. Yeah. We just need, , two more developers sitting over there feeding ideas to to get them into the releases. Yeah. Because for I mean, almost to a t. I mean, there's always of course, not every idea is the best idea, but for almost a t, they're all good. Mhmm. And it's , yes. That's a good idea. And and I think you'd be surprised how many of them I immediately turn into a little sauna tasks in our project board to to get done because, , if they're if they're good and and quick, we , let's just get it done. But I think that's that's always gonna be the the the chain that slows us down is is being able to fund it and have the right team of developers. Because I think if you look at our developers too, , you'd be shocked at how much how small that team is compared to even the next biggest product. Not even comparing ourselves to the largest, but even to the next person above us, our team is so much smaller. And when you look at the team, it's easy to think, oh, that's the whole team for for Spark and it's not. most of the developers are are are funded through projects that are directly for churches. Right. The the core funding for the for the programming is pretty small. We are pretty scrappy in the way that we get things done, which is great, but it does have limitations. Yeah. Yeah. Was gonna say it also you're not really looking at the fine details, you wouldn't notice it from outside because you see a lot of But what you don't realize is what John just said is those are targeted things that are coming churches that want a specific thing solved. Yeah. And I think it's been hard too because of the roadmap. I really hate the term roadmap in my life because it's so hard. Because people want to hold you to it, which I get it. Road's always turning off to you. Yes. I I would want that too, but there's some things on the roadmap. It's , it's not that we don't wanna do it anymore, but it's just they've lost sometimes the importance. I saw a great post last night on Twitter. It said, a twelve month roadmap is a a box of a dozen donuts and you can and you eat a donut, once a month. So by the eleventh month, do you still want that last donut? No. It's no. It's stale. It's , we don't really need that doughnut. I don't want that doughnut anymore. That's kinda an idea. It's on your roadmap though, so you better get it done. I know. There's some things on the roadmap that are again, they're not bad features, but it's , is that the feature that we that that people are screaming for? And it's always that one or two people are screaming for it, and I get that. Right. Yeah. A community is not gonna be in lockstep on their needs. I even saw that this week too, Tesla's having their, , shareholders meeting. And one of the big questions they have this system that they use that you can vote up questions. And one of the biggest questions was , hey. I don't the fact that your roadmap seems to be defined and it's private and it's really only released through Twitter. What you need is a user voice where people can vote up the , the community can vote up what the what they want. And at this stage of of Tesla, it's kinda , gosh, I don't know. , Maybe you want that visionary to pick the features because do we all want a better glove box? I don't think I do. I want the thing I'm not sure I know what I want. What I see in the cars is , gosh, I never would have thought of that, but that's amazing. So Right. But you do need the ideas, and I think that's what the the community is really great about giving us, and it it's that collaboration. I think that's really driving the road map right now. But back to what's new, the last thing I wanted to mention too is Lava. , we all love Lava. So couple things in Lava that are coming, a new engine, that's gonna make it much faster and is also going to know, drive us into the future in terms of dot net core support. So, , that's gonna be great. I will warn that that is gonna be a switch that you can turn off and on. It's gonna be a little bit legacy Lava. You , you're gonna have to make sure that all your Lava is completely compatible. We're striving to make it as compatible as as possible, but every engine, , liquid engine takes a slightly different approach. And you'll even notice that if if you really look at, , real liquid, Shopify liquid, it is a little different, than than Lava, and that every implementation of liquid that's out there is slightly different. And so we're just trying to reduce that change, for everybody, but there will be a few changes. And many of them, no one's doing it that way, but we just need to call it out. We are also adding, some new capabilities to entity commands, which are gonna make them much more performant. I think entity commands are amazing, but I do think most people don't understand, the lava inside them, the impact that that can have, how many database calls it's actually making that you're telling it to make actually. It's not it's making that call, you're telling it that way to do that, but you don't understand that. Even we didn't really fully get that until we use it a lot. And so we have some patterns in our team that we try not to break to make sure it's performing, but we're gonna bring a lot of changes to entity commands. What you do today will still be there, but we're gonna add a lot more capabilities. And some of those capabilities actually been in there for a long time. We just we're a little worried about releasing it from a supportability perspective and and we've done a lot more testing. Wow. That was a whole lot of amazing content. I mean, it's it's pretty incredible to see the the tip of the iceberg of what's being created and and looked at. And there are so many other things that we aren't mentioning today that are still in more of an ideation phase or in, , the not quite ready for public discussion yet. And that's constantly happening. So it's incredible to be able to share a little bit of that and to see it as it marches through. Yeah. And I think really that's only 10% of what we're actually working on. The one thing I wanna keep hitting though, we gotta keep this on the forefront. And I know some people don't this topic, but we have to be careful about what we're asking for and what we want to work on and make sure that we prioritize as a community ministry features over administrative features, because I feel we're really spending way too much time on administrative features. And, , I'm just gonna keep saying it too. Those are the devil's features. Yes. We need those. Okay? So we can't be completely unbalanced and only working on ministry stuff. There's administrative things that are just needed. Those are important. So I'm not saying we don't need any of those, but when those become the Yeah. The only thing we're doing, that's a problem. Yeah. And it's funny. I woke up out of a dream this morning, and that was the first thing in my head is , we gotta stop. We gotta start working on the features that are gonna change the church and expand the church and spread the message and send people overseas and send them across the world to all the people groups, but there aren't any churches asking us for that feature. Or just a person group next door who who who's who's on who's on doesn't know God. Right. Right. And and I think, , the enemy is smart. , if he can't stop divert the army, and he's gonna have them work on things that don't bring impact. And, again, it's not to say that we we we can't have any of these features. We have to have those. I get that. But it's rare that I the ideas when they come in, the rare ones more are the ministry ones. And when we hear those, it's so exciting. Someone brought up one that we are actually very passionate about. We and then we have plans for, and there's just no funding for it. And there's no time in the current desires for it. And it killed me because of, , here's someone else who recognizes the importance of this feature. And so, , I think we just need to keep saying again and again and again, ministry over administration. Yep. Because there's a natural tension. Well, all the the administration stuff will always be there. It'll always be easy. It's so much easier to think about that stuff as a church employee. I I remember that. , can how can we make our jobs easier? Right. But that's not what it's about. Right. It's a senior pastor at CCV used to say that, , it's really reaching people for Christ. That's the thing we have to keep our laser focus on because that's the hard thing. Training ourselves is easy, , comparatively. Keeping your mind focused on on yourself is easy. But when we have to push out and do that uncomfortableness in terms of outreach, that's what's really hard. So if if we say we wanna have a balance of reaching new people versus growing the current people, that's good, but we have to be saying reach new people 90% of the time and 10% on the other because it's already has a natural affinity. Mhmm. And I think that's the same thing with this. If if we always talk about ministry, ministry, ministry, it'll probably actually be balanced. Yeah. Right. I think you're probably right. And it is easy to think, oh, but if I just had this this small tweak of something here, my job would be so much easier. I'd save myself ten minutes every month. And and, , over I'm guilty of that too. Right. And over time, the focus becomes, , a little bit more and more of that. And sometimes you just have to reset and go, oh, yeah. That's right. I'm focused on this. Because I think there's a creep in that. , there's a it just it moves a little bit that direction, and you don't even realize it's gotten off center. Yeah. And we as a community are responsible to to stay in alignment. Right. So I think that reset is the right word. Let's reset every year at least. And I feel there's some of reset that happens at conference every year because people get so excited about the ministry things that have happened. I mean, there's excitement around some of the administrative things too, but people get really excited when they see new ministry things and how they're done. Yeah. And I think, , , going back to the giving analytics, that that project was probably one of the biggest hardest ones because it's a lot harder than it looks. we did advanced statistical modeling and analysis to find out the best models to use, really deep, deep stuff. And luckily we have a, , a strong team to help with that. But it didn't feel work because it was ministry. There's other projects that feel extremely memo work because it's just administration and it's this minutiae. Again, not that it's not important, but gosh, it's just so fun to work on on ministry stuff and administrative stuff. Not not not so much. But because of all those features that we wanna work on and have worked on and the ideas that John just talked about, can I talk for a minute about alpha testers and beta testers? Yes. So we rang our team through the ringer in the past few weeks. We ran through a lot of patches and updates, but we're always looking for more. So kudos to everybody who participated. And if you've been kind of on the bench, busy with other things, and you're on the team, you want to get back involved, we really need you for the summer to get through 12.4, 12 point five, and eventually 13. And we're really looking for more alpha testers. I think we said that last time, if you are a beta tester and you can move to alpha testing, it just allows us to fix things that you find during alpha before it goes beta. Once it goes beta, it's a release candidate and we have to, if there's a serious thing we find, we would just postpone the release of that release and start the next alpha. So please consider that and contact me or Chris Womack if you can get involved in that team. Yeah. It's such an important team for especially for a product Rock. I think some people think, well, why isn't this piece tested better? And I think in some people's minds, a feature might be a light switch, up down, that test it up, test it down. Whereas Rock is not that. It's so extensible. It's almost go to your church's soundboard. That's what Rock is compared to a light switch up down. Yeah. And if it was easy as up down, , trust me, , we would be doing it. But when it's the soundboard and there's every permutation of every single thing, that's why we need the alpha beta testers because every church is using it in a different way. And to get the code, the coverage of testing, we have to have all those environments tested. So for those of you on the alpha beta team, man, you're on the front line. You're the warriors who are making sure that those bugs don't get past us because it's literally impossible to test every one of those edge cases. Yep, that's very true. In fact, we just heard about a possible iPad Air issue. So if you have iPad errors, we need you to join our alpha and beta team. Definitely. It's such a high value service, and it's not maybe as widely publicized as other things but it's so critical. It is, you said, right on the front lines. Mhmm. So also a shout out, a thank you to the people who do that on a regular basis. It doesn't get talked about all the time outside of the circles of the testers, but you are really making a difference in the in the quality of Rock. And Speed. Our speed for sure. Thank you. Alright. So we have committed to talking this year about some of the things we believe are underused features in Rock to try and help inspire people to take a closer look at what's waiting right there inside their current Rock instance that maybe they just haven't thought about in a while or haven't taken full advantage of. So today, have two because one, I wanna talk about, but, , we still have some more features to build around it. So I wanna give another one that you can start and fully use today. But the first one is probably one of the most important features in Rock, it's interactions. People don't see that, but interactions is the future of Rock. Knowing and being able to track how people are interacting with the church, whether it be opening an email, clicking on an email, going to a webpage, liking a prayer request, there's so many things that are written to the interaction. There's a gold mine in your database right now, and it's called the interactions table. And, , I hesitate a little bit because you have to kinda dig for it a little bit today. , you need to write data views or some lava or some SQL. It's there though. Couple things, start using it. For those of you who can, , do a data view, hopefully everybody can do that. Start thinking about that. Look what's in there. Try to get your mind going , hey, how do I present this up? Also make sure that you're trying to get as much stuff written to interactions. So get your website on Rock. Yes. Make sure that you really emphasize that your people on your website are logged in so who they are. And there's some strategies you can do to get that, , to happen. Give them content that is personalized. That makes them want to log in. Lots of things there. Communications all are in Rock. , if they open it and not, , there's a communication history, consider teaching your staff how to go back and see the results of their of their emails. So many things that we get from an IT perspective, products, services that we want, we dream, oh, this is gonna change my life. You get it. You use it once. You never go look at the analytics. You never go back. You tell yourself, I'm gonna oh, the analytics will be so valuable. I can see of what the click through rate is and all, and you never look at it. Mhmm. And I'd say, , that's what we have to learn to do. And that stuff is inside of rocks. So when someone on your staff sends out email to a thousand people or 2,000 people, follow-up with them a few days later and send them a link. Hey, that email you sent out? Here's the analytics to that. Here's a link right to it. Check it out. And then, , don't check it out today. Check back on it a week from now. Get to understanding how people are interacting with your content. That's a small thing. So I say interactions is a , we have a lot more we need to do from a core team to present that data well, and we're working really hard on that. We've spent a lot of time in the last few weeks looking at some more performance improvements within the interaction model, doing some really deep engineering and statistics and on on some new types of indexes that we can bring to bear. So we're investing heavily into that, but you need to start getting ready for that. But let's talk about another feature that's a little bit more that you can start right now. And it's one that we've talked about before, but I wanna keep hammering on it. Assessments. , they are so valuable. Use them. , use them. Conflict profile, I think, is amazing one that you can bring right to bear today. Go run that on a small sample of your staff, or maybe even a small portion of your task staff, maybe just your team. Then dream up what that could look at a on a macro level and take that to your group's pastor and say, imagine if we had every group member, small group member, take this assessment. And then with every group, we can say, hey. The people in this group are high winning. They wanna conflict. They wanna all win except the leader. , he's trying to he likes to appease people. Do you think that leader's in for a tough road? Probably. I mean, so what does that mean? Well, let's give that leader some knowledge about, , the dynamics of his group. Not that he's not a good leader for that group. He just might need a little bit of coaching. He might need a little bit of encouragement, acknowledgment that this isn't him, that this is, , the wiring of the group and that there's just a natural those are ideas that I think you can take to to the group's pastor. But the group's pastor, a, doesn't know the assessment exists, b, doesn't have the vision of, , well, how could I use this? And but I'm telling you, you give him a or her a little bit of a glimpse of what they can do, they'll run with it. , they'll they'll come up with ideas you'll never come up with. But they need to get that little that little fire needs a little bit of a spark. That's just one idea about assessments. I mean, spiritual gifts in terms of involvement and serving, why would you try to get someone to be an usher if their spiritual gift is administration? Hospitality maybe, but, so and I think it's common for us who very who know a lot about these things to to understand the differences within our in ourselves, but I think most people assume that we're all the same on the inside. And when they don't make it as an usher, it's because they're not as good as the next person, not because they're different. I know that was the case for me. I remember going through these assessment classes at at CCV and realizing, oh gosh, I I I'm just different. And that's God's intent and plan. And I shouldn't feel bad that I'd make a terrible usher because I can, , really, , kick butt at being on the administrative side. Definitely. And, , I think our ministry teams have been limited in the past by the fact that there is a huge cost to take assessments. And so the they couldn't they didn't, establish strategies around the value of if I had that information because the cost factor would have been prohibitive to have $20.25 dollar assessments for everyone in your church doing any kind of engaged activity. It's just too much. And so those strategies didn't get created, and that happened a long time ago under a different non Rock model of paying for all these assessments. Inside Rock, the capabilities are different. But, again, the ministry doesn't have a strategy already built around that, so it takes a little bit of show and tell and a little bit of vision casting. And then I think you're exactly right, John, when you say just give them one idea, and I think they'll take off and and come up with many more ideas. But, again, that strategy was never created for that. It doesn't mean it doesn't have value. And when the the cost factor is removed as it's been done in this in in the Rock scenario, it's a whole new game. Yeah. And a lot of these features within Rock are came were birthed purely out of righteous anger. , $12 for a disc test. That is come on. That is Robbery. It is. Because back then, they're all paper. Right? Yeah. It's a 2¢ copy. And I get, , capitalism. , we all it's great. Capitalism does so much to improve the world, but there's also gouging. And $12 for a piece of paper is a gouge. I mean, they could have charged 50¢ and still made good money. And it's also supply and demand. You charge 50¢, you're gonna get sell a lot more of But we just ripped that rug out. It's all it's all free. You can do 10,000, and it's the same price as one. Yeah. It's, , thanks to people doctor Greg and his team and his his spirit and heart. , that's a gift. The entire church has been given that gift through Rock, and now it's time to be a steward of that resource that you've been given. It's free. Yeah. So, again, on this assessments, I would just challenge you in the next week, do something with it. , get it used within your team, create some ideas for for ministry within your organization, take those ideas to people, get them sold on that. This is also a great feature now with with the times they're at they're at. We can't do a lot of other stuff that , it's coming back, but we can't do all of that stuff. But this is something you can do right now. , it's all these assessments are taken in the comfort of your own home. So get that out to a lot of people , hey. We Maybe maybe your groups aren't meeting right now. Perfect opportunity to get those people taking those assessments. And I think some Rock churches are not realizing that some members of their team are still using paid assessments because those teams don't know that that's a possibility inside Rock. So you might be surprised when you start digging around who's still paying for assessments that actually could be free. Mhmm. And if you aggregated that over time, you could then connect with healthy leaders who wrote the assessments and bring them in for some specialized training for your leadership team or, some other interpretation type things. And then now you're taking the value of the dollar you're putting into that and really getting an exponential return on it. Yeah. And I I would recommend use it yourself, get your ideas, take it to the other people, get them sold on it. Maybe get a few little pilot projects started, get the addiction going on this feature and then bring in the the the train trainers. Once you get the addiction going and you see the value, then you want to make sure you're using it well. But I think if you go to your small group and part of that before you even started as a full training suite, gosh, now you've made it, oh, there's risk. We're not really sold on this yet. Drug dealers give away the first one for free for a reason, right? So they're trying to bring down the barriers. Pardon us, we're going to take a break for a PR moment. Or I'm told they do, I don't know for sure. But that's what you wanna do. Bring down the barriers. Don't throw up a whole bunch of barriers. Don't make it sound hard because it really isn't. Right. But but there is a lot of value in that training. But I wouldn't sell that right off because I feel that might be a slow pro slow down the process. And so much of getting underused features into a more used state is going to be a grassroots approach. It is proving value to the people that would receive the because you're not because change is hard. Right? And and everybody's extra busy. And, and nobody's looking for a different way to do a thing. So if you're showing and providing value, then suddenly it's a different conversation. Yeah. And I think you hit it around the head nail on the head. Everything you do, I believe, should be grassroots. , when I went to CCV, I came from the corporate world. I had a lot of great experience in the corporate world. I consider it a gift that that experience was not valued at first. Because what I didn't understand? I didn't understand ministry. And if my gifts were overvalued in the beginning, I would have pushed a secular strategy on a ministry that it wouldn't have worked. And I have this is a whole topic I I'd love to make a whole podcast out of, but I'm so grateful that the senior pastor I worked with pushed back hard on some of my initial ideas because he was right. , I did not understand ministry. And it was only when I had been forced to slow down and understand that and and do grassroot projects and have projects have to build organically that I learned the right way to implement the these things. And so, yeah, don't wait for someone to to give you the responsibility, the budget, the priority to do these things. Just create small little grassroots thing, little experiments, things that or even little hobby projects is what I call them. Get other people to buy into them. Learn from them because your initial, , thought is probably not gonna be the one that wins in the end, but it's the one that's gonna get the the spark that lights the flame. Definitely. And I know, from past experience too, if you show up as the person with, the ability to help relieve someone's current state, whatever it is, and you show and demonstrate care for their situation and empathy for their goals and objectives, you will have a seat at the table that you need to have a seat at, but you can't just show up and demand it. Right. I mean, all the stuff we did at CCV was not asked of us. It was just we saw a need. We experimented with a small little thing. No one came to us and said, Hey, build a church management system for our church. Never would have happened because, it would have made sense. But instead was, hey, a lot of it, we just heard in a staff meeting, oh yeah, this is a new initiative that we wanna do, and this is gonna be challenging. And then we could see, oh gosh, from a support and data perspective, it'd be helpful to have these types of tools. And, again, they didn't say, well, here's the money. Here's the time. We just said Right. Let's just do a little experiment and show, oh, that yeah. That's amazing. , you blow their minds on a few things. You get pulled into those conversations. You don't have to push your way in. And so I do think that that's something that I see is that people are waiting to be asked by given budget, direction, strategy. Instead, just have a little experiments. And a lot of them are gonna fail, but it's that's that's life. That's right. And keep your empathy hat on. Sit in the other person's seat for a minute, not your own, and think how will this impact and how could I communicate in a way that makes them feel valued, not kind of cornered. Yeah. And through humility, it might be you can't be looking for the win for yourself. You're looking for the win for that pastor. Yes. , I did a lot in the beginning with the group's pastor because they had the most need, and and that was the biggest piece of the ministry at that point. And I didn't care who got the credit. , I just wanted to do cool things and to see that that product. If I if it if it's only me sitting in the corner, watching the corner and seeing the work having impact, that was the reward for me. I I didn't need to be recognized or on stage. I didn't wanna be on stage. It's just cool to think that what you did had a little impact. But if you're trying to put your name on it, that's not probably not gonna go well. So those are a couple of good features to remember. One is going to really impact people at a ministry level, and one is gonna give you ministry insights. So make sure that you're using both of those. And, again, let's reiterate, using Rock for its CMS components in web and Rock Mobile is, an incredibly powerful strategy for your long term ministry needs. So if that hasn't been on your radar this year, we definitely encourage you to take a look at that as soon as possible and consider what kind of, impact that could have on on the work that you're doing. Definitely. Alright. The question of the week is all about the conference as it should be. So there's a lot of interest that's been stirring up about what is going on with the Rock experience this year, and we are working on building out registration and a web page that should be live pretty soon. There's been a challenge in that it's hard to know what people want to do, how they want to gather, how their organizations have determined, conferences fit into their strategy this year, or travel for that matter. And so we've done some surveying, and thank you to everyone that's responded. And then we're also working with our venue to determine, , what makes sense this year. And some of that is around commitment to space, and we don't really know how many people will attend. So we're trying to be flexible, and we're asking for your flexibility and grace as well. We're going to have a couple different options this year that, are that include an in person live component, which will be similar to a live conference you've seen in the past, although probably a little smaller and a little less wow this year, and probably slightly different in that way. But for the most part, the same elements of a live Rock conference. We're looking at the dates of August 31 and September 1, and, you will have the ability to fly in. It's going to be in Phoenix. It'll be the same venue we promoted for the original RX twenty twenty. We'll be on location. We think that it's going to be an incredible opportunity. There will be some potential, social distance measures or mask measures. We're not really sure what those are. It is up to the corporate mandates of the venue. So we are just gonna be flexible and roll with whatever they say it is in August. It's not our call. It's not the state's call. It's the the venue itself. So, we're not really sure what that will look , but we do know that there is a a a good group of the community that wants to meet in person that plans to be there that are planning currently speaking presentations on some really incredible topics, and we'll still have the opportunities to connect kind of around the clock in that one hotel setting. So keep an eye out. We will, I promise, bomb your email inbox as soon as we have registration up. The thing to keep in mind is you want to stay on-site if you're going to be joining us in person. So don't book a hotel room yet. We're working out some of those little kinks right now with the venue to make sure we have the right space allocated, but you'll get the best rate booking through the link that we'll have on our site. So that link won't be live yet when you are able to purchase your RX ticket, but keep an eye on that, and we'll let when it is because that's the way to get your, hotel space. So that's one option that's in person. And the the second option is virtual. So if you're not able to travel due to budgetary constraints or other considerations, we understand that that's a situation that some are in this year as well, so we want to have an option. Now you can imagine if we're running a live event, how challenging it would be to try and livestream every breakout session that existed in multiple venues and and locations and rooms. That's not possible. So what that means is the virtual event will feel a little different than last year's virtual event. It means that there will be live streamed keynotes, so you'll have access to live stream content on both of those two days. But all the breakout sessions will be filmed live at the live event in person. So it will take some time for us to get those cut, edited, and, and up and available. So the virtual event includes access to live streamed keynotes and access to the content subscription that goes with conference. So when the rest of the sessions are available, you will automatically have access to that for your whole organization. The other main difference between in person and virtual is that the in person ticket is per person because you're showing up there per person. And that's really hard to gauge in a virtual setting because a lot of teams to gather in one room or one location to kind of, watch those keynotes. So it is going to be a price per organization, which is based on your organization size if you're attending virtually. Our website will have all of that information. But, just to give you a heads up, one thing that is an important consideration is we have, we have commitments to the location. So we are not able to be flexible on changing tickets. So that means if you purchase a ticket that is in person, you're not going to be able to cancel it or exchange it for a virtual ticket because we have hard costs behind that as well, and the nonprofit, can't, can't manage that. So just consider it. Take a little time while the registration's, getting made live so that you're able to make the decision of where you wanna go. And if you have questions, let us know. But it would be super helpful to us if you're able to book your ticket sooner rather than later so we can keep tabs on that count and make sure that everything is, ready to go. That was a huge explanation. That was huge. I would just say too and and add to it is the big word is grace. Yes. We're all going through a weird time. We none of us have really the ability to change some of this stuff. And, my kid's school just made some changes this week and I love their email. Was so well written that we just have to have grace with these. There's always gonna be difference of opinions, but what we can all do is just be unified within that. And, honestly, I didn't necessarily agree with some of their changes, but I I I totally respect where they're coming from and the difficult position that they're in, and so I fully support their decision even if I don't necessarily agree with it. I think that's where we all need to be with this. And because we're all gonna come at it with different experiences and different ideas, and I think the one thing we can learn through this pandemic is this unity, even if we don't agree. Unity, harmony. Yeah. Yeah. And if someone disagrees with me on a certain topic, it's okay. I just need to have grace to understand and respect their point of view, even if I don't necessarily agree with it. Yeah. And you can be guaranteed that there are attitudes that each person who's gonna be there is gonna have. , they may not one thing, but it's not the time to share it. I mean, I'll keep my stuff bottled up, and we'll all be in harmony, and it will be great. That sounds a therapy ad right there. Well, only thing I know for a fact is none of us will know what was right until ten years from now. That's for sure. , we just need to have grace. That's why we're trying to provide options. It's a little bit running two events at the same time. Yeah. Sure. So please give us grace, but we are trying to provide options because we want everyone to be able to be comfortable with what it is they choose to And be there. , that's gonna be huge. I'm just excited to get to see everyone again. Yeah. And I think it always goes back to the conference. It's not about how big the screen is or how fancy the event is because of the costs and the risks that we have involved. We can't put as much into that. It's about the people. Yeah, for sure. So enjoy the people, Enjoy the relationships, and we're gonna have a great time. We are. And we have a great lineup of speakers already, sending their topics and information in. So I can say that this is, again, an event you don't wanna miss. And if you're a part of the Rock community, if you're a church that's running on Rock, that value that comes all year from knowing what other churches is doing is coming this year too. Don't miss it. Alright. One last topic. Around the conference time every year, we recognize the people who have been acting as Rock stars in the community. And I'm saying acting as Rock stars because we do look at the activity that's happened in the last year. And sometimes that's mistaken for only rocket chat question answering, which isn't true. It is definitely a component that's really valuable in the Rock community. But remember how we were just talking about assessments and everybody's strengths? We have a lot of great opportunities to be involved in the community, in a way that makes a big impact on a regular basis, and it doesn't all have to, rely on the same strength. So check out the get connected page on the community to see a range of options. But realize that the, recognition of Rock stars does happen every year around the conference. And, , once a Rock star, not always a Rock star, it is definitely based on the last year's, contribution to the community. It's patterned a little bit, the Microsoft MVP program, which is hard to achieve, and you have to, , prove that you've done what it takes to stay in the program. And the reason for that is this isn't supposed to be, something that you're just kinda grandfathered into. It's supposed to be focused on really helping empower ministries in Rock. And a lot of people are doing a lot of great things year after year, but it isn't really something to coast into. So if you aren't there yet, go check out some ways you can get involved and make it a habit. I think that's the easiest way to do it is find your lane, make it a habit, and and start contributing. You don't have to do everything, but find the thing that you're good at. And if you are a Rock star right now and this year's thrown you for a bit of a loop, now's the time to jump back in and make sure that your contributions are, are happening. So we just encourage you to do that. If you have any questions, let us know. But we're so excited to to be able to gather and connect again virtually or in person with the community this coming August and September. Well, was a lot of content. It was a ton of content. Forty eight minutes. Wow. Thank you for being patient with us. We try and usually do something about half that long, but, we appreciate your listening attention. There was just so much good stuff to talk about this time. So we'll try and pull it together next time and shorten it up for you a little bit, but thank you so much for joining us today for. 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.