Podcast Episode 125: Episode 98: Setting Your Digital Strategy

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Join Jon, Emily and Nick as they discuss the importance of a digital strategy and how to create the best strategy for your organization.

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 that takes you behind the scenes with Spark Development Network as we're growing and building Rock the product and Rock the community. Lots of great updates for you. I'm Emily Forman. We have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo, and, we have a lot of great updates again today. 2020 has been quite a year, but we definitely have seen a lot of growth, a lot of challenges, and this podcast can take you behind the scenes on some of that. So give us the version update, Nick. Sure. We have just released v 11 dot three to our beta testers. So within a week, that should be into production. It's gonna be a fast turnaround on that. But the good news is v 11 v 11 through two and then three is now general general release. If you were It is exciting. Kinda on 10 dot three, and now, it's in general release, so you can jump over to that. And then we got one more little bit of news. We got version 12 coming soon to alpha. So if you want to get kind of a almost all the bits sneak peek, if you looked at the pre alpha release site, that's where you can see the pretty much everything except this last bit of workflow stuff we've got brewing. Which is gonna be amazing. Yeah, it's gonna really simplify certain parts of workflow entry when you're filling out workflow, and a lot of processes that involve people. Yeah. I don't wanna spoil any thunder. Yeah, we don't wanna spoil thunder, but we do wanna thank The Crossing, Jim Michael and his team for bringing us some ideas, and then being able to collaborate together on how that solution is going to go and then most importantly, the funding on that. So I think it's going to be mindblower for a lot of people. But I would parrot exactly what Nick said, get on Pre Alpha now. Do not wait. Get on pre alpha now. Look at the new connections features with the connection board. Look at the group scheduling. Don't wait till alpha. Don't wait to beta. Don't wait for your release. You need to get on there and try to understand how it's going to impact your ministries. Pretty much I'm close to guaranteeing that's going to make a huge benefit to your ministries, but everybody has a slightly different use case, and so you just need to get on there and look at that. Yeah. And and I'd add to that the check-in managers. So kick the tires on that as well. It's had a huge overhaul. Many new features. Yeah. Many new features. So I always felt check-in manager was a little bit kind of a thorough on add on at the last minute when we originally did it. And it had a lot of good features, but we we were moving quickly on that. And this is this had some serious weight to to and new options to check-in. Yeah. Really looking forward to people seeing that. Yeah. And I'd love to hear the feedback on anything that you find. Well, that's exciting. We're really moving at a good pace here. So let's talk a little bit about our release process again and the stages that we go through, because we're gonna see a little bit of a change to that in 2021. So we've mentioned here that we first go into the alpha phase, and we do have some alpha testers in the community. We're always looking for more people who wanna be a part of that team or our beta testing team. And then the first step after beta testing is a release to what we call early access. And early access is what is available to those members of the community who are donating at the suggested rate or above. And they get access three months before general release at this point. And there are a couple of reasons for that. One is because that funding is critical for Rock to continue building, developing, and growing. And so we need to remind people and keep that front and center that that is absolutely critical for maintaining and growing the foundation that they're building their organization's digital strategy on. And the other is that we often find that those churches that are engaged in donations, similar to what churches find with their donors, are also more engaged in the community and in other aspects of Rock. So they're having fluency and familiarity with our new features and getting kind of the why behind it, having their hands in it, understanding how it works for three months provides added value in the community. When general release happens, they're there to help kind of backstop some of the questions, answer things, and provide the insights that they've been discovering over the last three months. So all of that adds not only value to the community, but it also maintains the status of funding being so critical to what we're doing. And that's the area that we're going to see some change. So in 2021, we're actually going to be extending the early access period from three months to six months. And the focus on that again is because our funding is critical. We have a donation based model. That model's in place so that the new and young churches that can't afford the same level of technology as other churches can have access to that enterprise level software that really is required in connecting people in today's current age. And they can have access to the same tools because these are going be the big churches of tomorrow. That's the goal. That's the reason we're set up this way. We're not set up this way so it can be free software. That's not the goal. Because, I mean, we've all been through Econ one hundred one, that's not a thing, there's no such thing as a free lunch or a free Rock. Somebody has to provide for that. And we believe the best insurance policy is if you're using it, you should fund it, unless you fit into the category of churches that outlined. And honestly, about half of the churches that we consider as being maybe too small to be able to donate are donating at or above the suggested rate. Yeah. It's often the small churches that seem to be the most generous. It's true. And I would say if you if you are a larger church and that your budget could afford that, don't feel that if you don't give, you're not adding weight. Not giving, there's not a weight or a badness to that, because it is. You're keeping back those who do. It is a lead weight that we're pulling and having to drag because every church adds a little bit of weight to the community and has impact. The opportunity cost of what we're missing out on because we're not fully funded is felt by all. Right. And then we have to honestly have people here on our team that are following up on those kinds of scenarios. We would rather have them working on other things as well. Well, fixing their issues and answering their questions and providing the community tools that I mean, it just goes on and on and on. Everybody adds weight, so if you don't add your share, you're actually taking away from others. Right. And honestly, when the small churches are funding and some of the large ones aren't, they're kind of covering your tab, which is a little awkward. But the point is that we're moving from three months early access to six. We hope this doesn't impact the larger churches. If it does, you probably should look at your information again. And this is budget season, right? So, this is the time to evaluate where you are, what you're doing, and help push the case forward of why it's important to fund Rock. Maybe the original statement that was given to your leadership about how Rock works isn't fully accurate, and maybe that picture needs to be repainted. And we'll be happy to help engage in conversation and provide some tools for that if needed. In fact, our organizations page on our website got a revamp a little bit this year. So if you go to rockrms.com/organizations, you will not only see the list of churches running on Rock, self reported of course, but you'll also see which churches are donating and which churches are donating at the suggested rate or above. So that distinction, that final distinction we actually put on the site. Because we do have churches, larger churches reach out to us and say, hey, who can we help talk to about this? This is critical. We wanna make sure you have a go forward plan. And honestly, the funding is community issue. It's not a Spark Development Network issue. So we want to make sure that we're as transparent as possible in that regard. So thank you so much to all the churches who are donating. At this point, we have about 64% of churches that are running on Rock Live today are donating at some rate. So that's higher than it has been. But don't get too used to hearing that number. It's not necessarily a great one. So we need to keep pushing forward. It's been a challenging year for a lot of people, but honestly, the donations that we've seen aren't actually critically linked to COVID. So that's kind of a fallacy from what we've seen. So have those conversations, let us help you have them if you need to, but we need to continue moving funding of Rock forward as much as we're moving forward the other areas of Rock. Now we've talked a little bit about what to budget for in regards to funding and why that's important. You also will want to consider the other areas of Rock for your budget conversations right now. And those include a lot of things. One is the classes that are available for training. So you may have new staff coming on that need training. You may have ministry staff in some areas that need some light Rock kind of a survey, so they understand more about the platform in general. You may have someone that needs deeper training, and we've got a lot of options now. So we're working on publishing our twenty twenty one class list soon, but you will see a range of classes. Not only do we have masterclass, which is great for your main admins, a lot of people benefit from this class. But we've also been asked to provide some less deep, higher level training. And so we put together the Rock one hundred one and one hundred two classes this year. And those include a survey of the features of Rock with some on demand video training, q and a with an instructor, a Rock instance to play around in, but no commitments homework and some of the other deeper things and instruction in Rock because not everyone needs that level of training. So that's another great option. In fact, we just wrapped up our first of those standard classes last week, and that went really well. We've also gone into a deeper level class for, that's called Rock Sequel for Rock, and that should be debuting sometime in January. So look for that to come soon. We will add some navigation to the community site to make it a little easier to find the class options that are available. So make sure to add a budget line item for classes. And don't forget the Rock Conference. Rock Conference was a little bit different this year. We're hoping to get right back onto the normal path next year. We haven't, we don't have enough information to publish the page for that yet, but don't forget that as a line item in your budget. We will definitely be having the Rock conference either in this year's format or in the previous in person, and we're really wanting to aim for in person this year if it's possible. Yeah. I mean, we're planning on it full speed ahead. Yes. We absolutely are. I hope it's unlikely that it would be canceled again. I it doesn't seem likely that would be the case. I think it will be in person. Budget for in person. I guess that's the main thing. Yeah. Plan for that. Definitely plan for it. We are. That's right. More on that as soon as we can. Okay. So I think that covers the main announcements. If you have any questions about how to budget well for Rock and what that looks for your team, let us know. We'll be happy to answer those. Now we are constantly working on growing and scaling here in addition to delivering features for the community and the product. And sometimes we're just working through some concepts and some ways of looking at things that seem to add clarity. And John, you've been working on a concept a little bit lately that's been a great one. Would you share about that? Sure. This concept is being worked into an architectural video that we have been putting out, and with those continues still to come to go out, so please find them. I just did one on SQL that was I think can be really interesting and giving you some warnings about what not to do, but then encouraging you in other ways to to make it even easier to to to write some of that SQL. But one of the things that I want to talk a little bit about today, give a little bit of a sneak peek to a video that's coming up, is just on digital strategy. And the more we're working with people day to day, and it seems every hour we're having this conversation with somebody, is how to set your digital strategy post COVID. And really, , view COVID as a catalyst for this. This should have probably been happening at this rate anyways, but we've now had this immediate catalyst that's heightened the importance of it, but we're not going back. People might be coming back, but we're not going back fully to a non digital strategy. The digital strategy has to be there to help supplement what we do on the weekend, to do that throughout the week, every day, provide content and connection to people beyond the weekend. And that's not going away. So how do we mature in that? How do we start thinking about that? How do we go to the next level on that? And we've put a lot of thought, we've been working with a lot of people on this. So, the first thing I want to talk about is how do we think about it? And I think every church needs to make a few decisions in their mind. The first being: how complex of a digital strategy should they have? And the analogy I'm going to put out there is using a toy. So typical church may be kind of maybe in the middle of Rock sizes, in the 5,000 range, on the weekend attendance. , you might be thinking of yourself as a LEGO kit. Right? Legos are awesome, you can do a lot of great things, powerful things with them. So you might think, well, from a complexity level, we're going to be a Lego. Now, other churches, it might be that they're even bigger than that or smaller than that, but because of the nature of where they feel they need to be, they might have something simpler than that. And they might want or need to do something simpler. And so that might be more of a Duplo strategy. And I know what you're thinking, Duplo's are for , yo's are for babies. Don't think about that in terms of digital strategy. That's not something to be ashamed of. That's not something to be put down on. It's just that's a simpler strategy. You can still do very cool things with Duplos. I mean, just go on on YouTube if you wanna see crazy things people do with Duplo. And they're quite amazing. And that's a valid strategy. No one should feel bad about that. Now, if maybe you're larger or maybe you just feel that your organization needs something more complex, well then you have the technique set. And if you go to the store and you look at some of those techniques sets, or maybe you've created some yourself, they're amazing. They're very complex, but they're not fragile. They're very well structured and well engineered, but you don't give one of those to a three year old and expect them to put it together. Those are more for, , the advanced children slash adults, and but they're amazing. The problem is if you have the wrong strategy or the wrong complexity than your organization can meet and can do, then you have problems. If you wanted techniques, but you don't have the things that support a techniques type kit, it's giving that technique set to the four year old. Nothing good is going to happen. You're going to have a mess. People are going to get hurt. You're going to build something that's not structurally sound. Much better to do a duplo strategy. You can do amazing things. People can be connected and reached. And so you start to see a little bit of that maybe wrong strategy for the wrong organization. And so what I wanted to do is break it down into five different things you should consider your organization on as you make your strategy. So I would write these down and then rank your yourself as an organization, not as a person, but as an organization on these on these items. And again, those are there's a video coming on this that I think will be helpful. First is skill set. Look at your current skill set as an organization. Do you have the technical skill set to be Duplo, Lego, or Technique? Be honest. You have to think through that and see where on that continuum would you put yourself. Then, you need to have an engineering mindset. It could be you have the best skills in the world, but your mindset's not quite right. And it reminds me of the guy in Jurassic Park who was running the computer system, , brilliant guy, , that's, , the story tells me. Look at his desk. It's a complete mess. He's, , smoking a chain smoker. He's knocking things over. The whole park goes crazy, not because of his his skill set, but because of his mindset. And you have to have both. You can't be skilled, highly skilled and have a non engineering mindset and still be successful. You're still doing Duplo, even though you have the capability to do technique, you don't have the mindset to do technique. So skillset, mindset. The third one is resources. Maybe you have the skill set and mindset, but you just don't have enough resources, enough people to do a technique for the church of your size, the organization of your size. So that's another consideration. Do you have the right number of people and the right types of people? The fourth one, after skillset, mindset and resources, would be leadership. It could be that you have the right resources, mindset and skillset, but your leadership is not bought in. Or they have the wrong mindset. They see that this should be, Duplo, , and they don't support you in the right ways, and they don't plan for things in the right ways. It's just as important about processes as about technology. You might have, , your engine ready to run, but if the track's not there, you can't run the car as fast as you want. And it's the leadership that's gonna provide that track for you. And if they're not there to provide the the strategies, the process, the support, the encouragement, then you can have all the skillset mindset and resources that you need, but you're still not going to be successful. So you need to put on the continuum where you think your leadership is, because that's going to pull back down to a simpler model if you don't have that. Or it could have pushed it up higher. If you have really excellent leadership, but maybe your skill set mindset and resources are a little bit lacking, that's still going to get you further than maybe if you didn't have that. Leadership can actually be a multiplier or a detriment, depending on where they're at. And so you kind of need to look at that. And the last thing after skillset, mindset, resources, and leadership is budget. And you might think budget and resources, what, that kind of sounds similar. Maybe we could have combined that. But I didn't intentionally because you might have all the budget in the world, but that's not to say that you can find the right people and resources. We know that to be true. Sometimes when we go to hire people, we've had budgets sometimes for quite a while, but we can't find the right person. They're very hard. I mean, we pay more towards market. Well, we actually try to pay market, more so than even churches. And we still have problems trying to find people who are excellent. We just don't pick anybody. We want excellent. And you're going to have the same problem. So that's why I broke it out. Budget is super important on that. So again, the five things to consider, skillset, mindset, resources, leadership, and budget. The one thing I wanna throw out there that's a little scary is it's hard for you to self evaluate on many of these items. As people, we don't know what we don't know, especially when it comes to skillset mindset. Resources, you can probably evaluate that pretty well. Leadership, be careful with that one. Sometimes you might be biased one way or the other. But that one's probably easier to evaluate. Budget, fairly easy to evaluate. At worst case, you can compare resources, leadership, and budget with others in your community and come up with that. The skillset and mindset are two that you're really going to have a challenge on. I think everybody has a challenge on that. We simply don't know what we don't know. And if I look at myself, whereas I might think on a certain technology, I might give myself an eight today. In six months, I might look back at myself and say, No, I was not an eight. I was a six. And now I'm a seven. And in a year, I'm going think that seven was really a five. , And it's not because I mean, technology does move and grow, yes, but so do we. And I believe that when it comes to skill set and mindset, in most cases, you're not gonna be able to evaluate that yourself. That you're going to have to go to somebody else and say, Hey, can you tell me where I'm at? Where do you think I'm at with this? You have to go to someone who's been further, farther, and to look back and to evaluate that. And so I would kind of challenge that. I would either try to find a partner or spark or maybe another church that for sure is further ahead than you are. Don't pick someone who's at the same rate because that's not gonna be very helpful to you. Find a church that's further farther and have them say, hey, I know this is awkward, but could you evaluate what you believe our church's skill set and engineering mindset? Could you could you ask me some questions and help me to to come up with this? It's a very humbling thing, but actually, you're never going to grow unless where you're first at. Those are the two you're going to struggle with. The other thing is to consider is that you might find some of these measures your organization's a little behind on, and yet you still want to go to the next level. , yeah, we're really Duplo when it comes to skillset and mindset, but we really want to be Lego, or maybe we really have to have a technique, but we have the budget and the leadership support and process, but maybe we're missing the resources too. There's other ways you can shore up skillset, mindset, and resources. You can go to partners and work with them, But make sure that you evaluate them, to make sure that every partner's going to be in a different level on this too. Just because a partner Let's just say a partner is Duplo. That's not a bad thing. Again, Duplo is very, very good. As long as you stay in your swim lane. , well, our skill set's duplo, but we're very good at getting that implemented, and I know we're at it, and we're going to stay in that. Perfect. That's still success. That's huge success. Or maybe they're LEGO. It's , hey, do LEGO projects. But you need to put them through the same filters. And one of the ways I think you can do that is evaluate the output of what they're doing. Look at some of the projects that they've done and evaluate that. Ask them questions , how did you come to that? How what's what's was the mindset that you used to put that project out? Or I think the best thing to look at is proactive communication on the topics. Someone who understands this and wants to share it is gonna produce content that's showing that they know that and trying to help other people. So I would look at the content people are putting out. Maybe look at the plugins that they put out and evaluate that way. It's a very difficult space, and it's, again, it's very difficult for people to evaluate themselves. Every time I think I know where I'm at with something, six months later, I look back, I'm , dude, what an idiot, ? Maybe not quite that harsh, but I look back and go, yeah, , I used to think that. And I can remember back, this is maybe a little humbling, but back in my career, this was a long time ago, This was probably about '98, '19 '90 '8. I remember, , I can literally remember the moment driving in my car. I had a long commute at that point from Honeywell back to to my house, and I was thinking, yeah, , dot net bubbles are really starting to get big here. , there's pretty much nothing in web space that I don't really maybe not an expert in, but I don't know something about. And I can just remember that drive just thinking, yeah, I was all that. And now I look back, and I literally know how I I can see how little I knew. Right? And what an ego that was. And so I still hold to that moment because I know myself today is no different. Maybe my ego's been checked a little bit, but I'm no different in terms of my skill set. If I look and go, well, I know everything there is to know about C sharp and this and that and that. No. I have now subscribed to more C sharp newsletters to realize I how little I know about, , garbage collection, gen two, , optimizations, and some of the stuff these guys are doing. It it's brilliant. And and I hope to keep learning, but I don't know. So that's gonna be the hard part in all this. So just to summarize, two things that you need to worry about. One is make sure you get yourself to know what level of complexity you want as an organization, measure and see the make sure that you're inside that level on most of these things. It's not you can have a couple things outside the boxes, but you can't have all of them. And then you have to make sure that it's congruent with what you're able to do. And if it's not, you're in trouble. , you have, , technique dreams with Duplo, , abilities. That's a bad thing. If you have Duplo dreams and Duplo abilities, that's a great thing. You're gonna get a lot done and you're gonna highly successful. More so than someone who wants techniques and can't do it. They're gonna be bleeding all over the place while you zoom by them with digital strategy that's just gonna make sense. So get that in check and check yourself and make sure that from a skill set mindset, , you're you're in the right places and that you're working with people who who have that too. And, again, this will all be in a video that, , probably have some prettier pictures and I can paint with my voice, But I wanted to kinda get teed up because I I do think that this is one of the biggest challenges that we see right now. Mhmm. And it's not it's a technology problem, but it's also a process problem. And that leadership component is huge. Mhmm. I love working with some of the churches that I get to talk with every day because they have that leadership and they get it. But I also work with some people who maybe don't have that leadership. And that's okay if you realize it. But when you're incongruent on that, you're going to have some blood on on the pavement. And we don't want that. No one wants that. And I think topic Nick brings up a lot is this technical humility and have being humble Because my new saying that I go around saying, feel I said it a million times this week is, if you're not humble in technology, you will be humbled in And it's better to just start humble. It's not very fun to be humbled. And I think that's our world today, I think that's what the Bible says, that God's gonna use the foolish to to make fun of the wise, and the wise are gonna be made to look fools. And I see that almost every day in our culture and our our media and our news. And then I do see it right now, not gonna mention names, but there's people that our culture sees as fools who are making some of the wisest statements ever. And I just smile because I'm , that's God. Thanks for sharing that, John. It's great to think about with the way you broke it down makes a lot of sense. And I think anytime our concept of self is different from reality, that's the pain point. And that applies organizationally, personally and especially in this area right now. Yeah. And , give it to God He's got this. We don't have to have this. , and we don't have to pretend we do. But as long as we stay humble and seek his mission and and, , good, amazing things are gonna happen. Those people in the desert who made all of the the finely crafted tabernacle and and things, they they didn't have those skills when they left Egypt. They were slaves. Right. And even if one or two had the skills, they didn't they couldn't have made everything they did. That that that's so that God could get the glory. And God's got to get the glory here as we go to this digital strategy. Mhmm. We're making the digital auditorium. We're making the digital church. And to think that any of us have what it needs or the ideas to do that, we're fooling ourselves. Let's give God the glory. Let's let us be humble. And let's go along for a pretty amazing ride. Yep. And we're all in this together. Right. Well, thanks for joining us for another Rockcast. We'll 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 powerful features. Are you ready to take the next step or share with another local church? Visit rockrms.com/hosting today.