Podcast Episode 115: Episode 87: Lead Through It Live Panel

Description

"These are historic times. Our grandchildren will ask us how we responded. Do something that makes them proud." -Jon EdmistonIf you missed a moment of the Lead Through It Live Panel, you can still catch this incredible conversation. During this time the Rock community has stepped up in incredible ways, sharing best practices and innovative solutions. 

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. Thanks everybody for joining us. We're going to kick this off. Thank you all the attendees who are here with us this morning. So you've joined us for the Lead Through It live panel, and this is sort of the culmination of the last few weeks of working with the Rock community as everybody is relearning how to do church in new ways. And we imagine that some of these ways will stick and some will go back to what used to look normal a little bit when this is all over. But this is an excellent time for collaboration, and we have really seen the community shine in entirely new ways. So we wanted to bring together some of the churches we've been speaking with to share some of the exciting ways that they've been working so that we can all learn from each other and start to share some of the things that are bringing success in each of our areas. So this morning, we are going to talk with four very helpful people in our community that you've probably all seen at one point in time or another. We will go through. The format will look this. We will introduce each speaker, and they'll share a little bit about the things that they've been doing at their organization. And then when we're done with that, we will take questions through chat. So you should be able to see a chat window on the side or you should be able to enable that with a button. If you put your questions there, we will answer those. But we'll ask that you hold those questions till the end so we've gone through everyone. Otherwise, we could be, having so many questions come through at the beginning that by the time we get there, we could we could lose, some of those questions. So do use the chat window, not the Q and A button. Go ahead with the chat. That will be great. And that's where we'll answer all those questions. So let me start out with a couple of quick announcements. One is that we have been trying to collect a lot of great information that churches are putting out and the information that we've been able to put together, the solutions we've been building for churches, and put those into two central locations. So you will find all of that information on rockrms.com/coronavirus, where we're posting about the tools that we're putting out as an organization. And then if you follow our blog and social outposts, you'll also see some of the community focused content that we've been helping pull together as well. So those are two areas you'll wanna keep an eye on as we're learning more and, understanding what it is that churches need to be doing to reach people in new ways. I also wanted to mention that you'll hear a lot about technical solutions today that are working in addition to ministry solutions. If you hear about technical solutions and they sound great, but they're a little beyond what your organization either has the time to focus on right now or they might be outside the scope of what your staff, is able to work on. We do have a great community of Rock partners. So I would encourage you to, engage with someone, maybe even for a short term, help as you operate through what we're working on. That said, we have, a consulting arm of what we're doing as well, and they're all fully trained on all the new tools that we've put out as an organization, and we also have the capacity to help. So first, let's start with some introductions. I'm Emily Forman. I'm with Spark Development Network. Jon Edmiston is also with Spark Development Network. You've probably heard us on a podcast or seen us before. We're so thankful that you've tuned in here. We think this is gonna just be a really empowering and incredible event today. I'd also to introduce Frank Grand with Newspring. A little wave there Frank. You see him in the picture at the top of your screen. Tyler Vance with Life Church. Chris Nelson with Traders Point Christian Church. Adam Hahn with LCBC Church. So these are our panelists today and we have some really great things to talk with you about. Now we're going to get started with Tyler this morning. He does have a hard stop in a little while that he'll have to step out for. So, Tyler, we spoke on the phone last week, and you shared with us some really exciting things that are happening at Life. Church right now. And the way your organization has just positioned us as an absolutely incredible opportunity that's putting people at that intersection intersection of where their faith is really important and they suddenly have more time, in many cases, unless they're on the tech team at a church right now. So you've you've been sharing with us some things about, live streaming, about using social media differently, about the things you've been doing to help other churches. So you mentioned that that, your organization has been stripping branding out of children's curriculum and even out of some weekend messaging so that other churches who don't have the same technical capability still have good content for their organizations. Just some really huge ministry opportunities. And what I I think everyone's gonna wanna hear about is how Life Church has been actually calling every attendee because that struck me as very significant that your organization was able to to do that. And then if you don't mind addressing some of the internal effort categorization that you did before this even came up and was on our radar, that's kind of helped you guys hone what's most important and what to work on. Yeah. You gave me thanks, Emily. You gave me a a really wide bucket there to to jump into. Thank you guys for putting the call together. John, Emily, what you do with Spark and RockRMS and how it serves the local church is phenomenal. And that's why we're kind of gathered here today. And I don't want to lose sight of that. So thank you guys for having us all putting together something for the community. Ministry looks different today and it's difficult and it's hard. And we all are technologists, so we love that church technology is kind of the forefront now. But that doesn't mean that we're not people centric and space between people is hard. And so of all the opportunities I wanna talk about today, I just, they are in the context of this is a hard season. And if you're in a place where you feel it's a hard season, it's okay. You're not alone. And just to encourage you to lock arms with people around you. And if you can't lock arms with people around you because they're drowning or feel they're drowning too, there's a larger community that's gathered here with some of that. But we are seeing some incredible ways for the way that God is moving. A month ago, church online was an expression of what the local church could be. And in many cases today across the world, it is the only expression of what the local church can be. And as far as we meet in a digital space. And so some of the cool things that we've seen are 19,000 churches that have signed up in the last couple of weeks for the Church Online platform. Last week we saw over 6,000,000 people attend church online. And then we've seen last weekend and this isn't during the week numbers, this is just the weekend we saw 31,000 salvations through the church online platform, which is just incredible to see what God is doing and the opportunity that's there in our everything around us is about fear right now. And when people get a sense that their world is turned upside down, thankfully they look to God. And in many cases invites are the easiest they've ever been. From a digital perspective, The barrier of entry to coming to church is the lowest it's ever been. We think walking in a building is a great thing. If you are unchurched or you've not been to church in a long time, the barrier to walking in a building is pretty high. And so we have such an incredible opportunity to invite people in to hear about the hope of Jesus and that he offers that, especially in the midst of a time where there's seemingly little hope in the world. And so just a reminder today in the in the breath of that but from a from a technology perspective we're all trying to figure out what does church look in a digital sense and so a couple of the things that we've done. You'll see us try some midweek services, trying to do kind of a stripped down version of what church is, just to kind of continue a touch point with our people. All of our campus pastors are utilizing social media in an incredible way. And because we have these campus teams that aren't running services on a weekend, we've kind of reallocated their time to call every person that we know has attended our church in the last twelve months and so just the stories of care and I know that when the doors of the church open back up, then God's gonna flood them because we took the time to pastorally care for people in a way that when we're running the play weekend after weekend after weekend, we don't always get the opportunity to do. But at the same time, we know that there's some churches that are coming online with Church Online platform. They're entering a digital space for the very first time. And so what we did is we went back and all of Pastor Craig's messages going forward. Say that give some grace here. We're trying it out. We're stripping all the Life Church branding off of it. So we're basically recording our weekend message twice and putting that in a pre packaged church online instance for those churches that don't have the ability, they don't have camera equipment, they don't have a way to record their pastor so that they have a generic branded message that they can get across to their church and continue to reach their church, have their own chat, have their own things going on with that. And so it's not a Life Church product, it's a product of their church. It's just using our message. We also recognize that man, one of the big gaps we saw was that church online has been around for twelve years now, but there was no online kids curriculum. And so we went back in a couple of days, we recorded all the intros and all the places where we would have a teacher in a classroom do any kind of presentation and put that and packaged it together. And it's available on open network for free download. And so you can send that out, you can distribute it however you want. So you have a kid's curriculum for your church to use. And so I know my wife and I, a couple of weeks ago found ourselves we're now our kid's school teacher, we're the lunch lady, we're recess duty, and now we're their small group leader, but it makes church possible. And I think that's really stinking cool. And so it's just the mindset of how do we shift opportunity after opportunity, see where the gaps are and step into them as quickly as possible. Emily, you mentioned a couple of months ago, we had done an activity as a team of just prioritizing the things that matter, right? And so we actually did this as an entire organization. If you're taking notes, here's two or four tiers that we put everything into. Tier one would be anything that's absolutely mission critical. And you might rethink what absolutely mission critical is. I put it as the reason you get paid or the reason that your job exists. Tier two would be very important and strategic. There are things that might move the ball forward, but don't aren't necessary for your job to function. Tier three is meaningful, but not vital. That means that it might be a good opportunity, but it might not be the right time to take that opportunity. And tier four is meaning full, but externally initiated and lower priority. These are the things that kind of are thrown across the fence at you. And I know in technology life, we have a ton of stuff thrown across the fence at us. And so what we did as a team is we had already been through and we knew what the tier one priorities for us were. So we kept those in play and we eliminated everything else and allowed our team to incredible, to shift in incredible ways. The data side of my team has shifted to open network and they're helping churches gain metrics around things and our site reliability engineers, they actually moved off of all their individual teams and are focused on an individual product right now. And so you see the ability to shift and move as a team, where those are some really stinking cool ministry opportunities that we're in front of. It's an exciting time in the church. It doesn't mean that it's not an easy time in the church. It's a hard time, but it's an exciting time where we're seeing God move in some incredible ways. And so Emily, does that the bucket? That's very wide and great. So I think what just really stands out to me and all of that, Tyler, is the the fact that you honed down to your tier one most important efforts. And that happened earlier to set yourselves up for success as a whole organization. And then out of all of that in the midst of this kind of crisis that churches have found themselves in, you're reaching out to every person. Your teams have been calling everyone who's set foot on a campus or attended that that's in your database, And you're also helping provide for the big c church. And the duality of both of those having top priority and having so many people's efforts immediately focused to them, think says really great things. Yeah. We're still local church. And and technology doesn't technology enables that, but it doesn't eliminate that. Yeah. That's incredible. Thank you. Let's talk to Frank. So, Frank, at Newspring, we've seen some really cool things that happen that you guys have done lately. So a lot of churches are talking about things how to get my service into up on the web live streaming. How do I get live streaming services? And Newspring, in fact, has pivoted entirely the other direction and has some new things that that you've been doing on the front of breaking up your messaging differently, how you offer your services, how you've re envisioned your homepage, in fact, to be the center for services. And so we'd love to hear more from you about what some of those strategies and directions are. And also the very interesting fact that you were able to scale up your server right before all of this hit. Another interesting thing that, , Life Church had done prioritizing, you had done thinking ahead about server performance and the timing of that was pretty good as well. Yeah. I guess let me start by saying Pastor Vance, I think he looked at all my notes from the very beginning stuff. So all those great pastoral things that he said, I was gonna say them. But thank you Tyler for leading the way in that. But yeah, so I guess speaking to the I won't take credit for the creative decisions that our team has made because I mean, they've fantastic. But I can't speak to kind of my understanding of the thought process that went behind it. And so yeah, that first Sunday and I know going into the kind of the crisis, different parts of the country were in different parts of the thing. But we a church that kinda said, I think on a Wednesday and Thursday, we said, hey, no, we're still gonna this was three weeks ago, I guess. We're still gonna have church this week. And so we kind of said, well, what should we prepare? What shouldn't we? And again, we kind of looked at, alright, let's make sure we can crank up our server instances just in case. But that first week was literally a Friday at whatever o'clock in the afternoon of, okay, hey, we're actually gonna go online. So thankfully, I mean, we had an online presence already. So there wasn't a whole lot of craziness for us that first week other than it was kind of an empty auditorium. Actually, a lot of our staff were there, raised a lot of questions of, hey, thought we weren't supposed to meet, why do ? But we had some staff there to help. But pretty quickly realized if work from home was gonna be a thing and if for sure it was gonna be a longer period of not being able to gather on a Sunday, we thought through what can we do to still make this excellent? So one of our core values, we want our gatherings to be the best experience of the week. So whether that's virtually, whether that's in person, I mean, know that's just the tenant that our creative teams always try to hold. So we went to on demand. And I know at least from the technical side, that's way less complicated. We didn't have to worry about sim live and how to how to set that up and which one would record and how do we process all that. The message was prerecorded and anybody could watch it at any point. One of the questions we had was, how are people gonna react to that change? So it's not a, hey, I have to log in at 09:15 or 11:15 or whatever it is to watch. And I don't know that we've collected a ton of data, but at least the subjective data that I've heard is people have really liked, oh, hey, whether it's 08:59 or 09:26, I can start it whenever my family's ready to start and we we can get the entire message. So at least initially, I don't think we have any plans of going away from on demand. And it seems to be working out really well. Another piece of that was And so we're branding everything newspring at home. I mean, that's the idea , hey, we're still gonna do church. It's just gonna be at home. So that's kind of our branding is everything's new spring at home. So again, going back to, I can't heap praises enough on our creative team and our teaching teams of I'd love to take credit but can't. Where they're saying, hey, well let's take one of our spaces. And it's actually our volunteer headquarters areas where they do the filming now, which already had a lot of soft seating and kinda had a living room feel. And they made a quick little kinda mock studio. And we do a worship set in there. So I mean, again, don't I think it's just that idea of we're going all in on this aspect of it's newspring at home. And so we want it to look it would be at home. They even tried something different that I wasn't even aware of until until the first service came out. But the sermon is structured differently. So it's not just a straight twenty, thirty, forty minute sermon. It's kind of broken up into chunks. And then we kind of even put a little, okay, hey, pause the video and now discuss this. Which the first week I'll admit was kind of strange. It was just me and my wife and it was hearing the message and it's , we'll talk about that. So we kinda , okay, we talked about it. But now kind of week three is last week was really kind of cool to know that that was coming. Take an opportunity to We would discuss the sermon maybe after church on the way home or something prior, but having a spot in the middle. So I think we're hoping that that's just the way to better engage. And again, kinda make it feel this is just church, it's just church at home. Trying to look through yeah. You mentioned our website. So one of the goals previous to all this, of our main goals for our external website, where we wanted people to find our locations. We wanted people to find our physical locations and watch previous sermons. So everything was driven around those two things. And so we made a switch of, we wanna make it really easy for people to do NewSpring at home. So our homepage now is where we wanna try to direct everybody. And the idea is everything that you would need to experience NewSpring at home, you start on our homepage. And so for us, again, that's a click or that's a button on That Sunday will pop up the sermon message. Our youth services on Wednesday, there's a button for that. There's resources for parents. There's our Kidspring page. So Tyler mentioned the great stuff that they're doing Kidspring wise. That's a huge ministry for us. We develop all of our own kids ministry, give it away to churches for free both on our site and on the open network at Life Church. And that's been a cool area where in the past, kind of the way our kids ministry works is it's in person, they have a large group lesson, which is live acting a little bit, and then a video message, and then their small group curriculum. And so previous to this, that was kinda how our resources were distributed. You had video lessons and you had music videos and stuff that we also produce. What they what what KidSpring was able to to do pretty quickly was our the series we're in, we call it best the current series we call best day ever. It was our Easter series. So they quickly pivoted and said, alright. Now we're we're gonna create a new series called best day ever at home. And they actually reshot all of the things that would have been live in person, and we packaged it up. Now it's just, hey, here's the preschool set and here's the elementary set. And then there's Tyler mentioned too, it's been cool. We're putting out parent guides, which is I think in in person that would be the small group leader guide. We're equipping parents to try to do that too. I haven't I haven't been as brave to try to go through that list yet. It's kinda just been, hey, kids. Watch the video and let me know if there's any questions. But but we're working on it. We're working on Trying to accept that. That's been kind of the biggest the biggest initial shifts we made. And yeah, you mentioned that first week, we spent a lot of time with with the Sparkability group making sure to get our pages as efficient as possible. Because our website, our external website is now in Rock. We did that last year. And we knew we had some performance things that we wanted to clean up. This was a great opportunity and a very close deadline of , alright, we're expecting a whole lot of traffic on Sunday. So we were able to reprioritize some of the things we had and get our website performing as well as we can. So those are kind of been the initial technical things that we've kind of shifted to. So far it's been working great. We've had great interactions. Another thing we did, we're also doing daily content and then we're calling it NewSpring Daily. So we have a daily devotion list that we send out through text. Mean, it goes out to about 11,000 people every morning. And traditionally, that's kind of a traditional devotional series. But in this week, it wound up working out to where we had three or four days of whatever series we were in before. And now each morning that daily devotion the I'm sorry, the NewSpring daily gets texted out to 11,000 people. And again, just sends them right back to the website or in our app and opens up in their app. It's a four to seven minute video from one of our teaching pastors. And that kind of stuff we can film ahead of time and I think they do. I'm seeing them. I think they film three or four at a time. Our Sunday sermons, we still try to not get too far ahead because everyone's situation kind of changes by the day. We wanna make sure our teaching team wants to make sure that we can speak to an issue when we need to for the people. So it's not we have all the next eight weeks of our Sunday sermons already recorded. I think that was everything, Emily, you mentioned the first time, but I think that's kind of how we've tried to attack it so far. Yes. I think that's a great summary and thanks for sharing that, Frank. It's been interesting to see how uniquely that your creative teams and your leadership teams and your tech teams have focused things a little bit different than other churches and it seems to be having great success. So for those of you who haven't seen that homepage, completely re envisioned Church on Demand that you should check out at newspring.cc. Is that correct? Is that your great. Alright. Let's talk with Adam next. Adam, at LCBC, I think we could describe your culture as being really uniquely attendance based. And that's one thing that maybe not every church has in common with yours, but has been something that you've had to then pivot on because attendance means something different now. And it's something that you needed to focus on it from a very early stage where many others are starting to think about that after they've done some other things as well. So I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about that culture, about how you did checking in for your first service because you had very short notice most churches did. How you are checking in now, what formats you're using, and then you have a really great staff intranet page that you shared about how you've been keeping staff engaged and what methods you're using there, and how you're communicating with people. Can you share with us a little bit about those points? Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. And thanks again for, being, inviting us into this call. And, again, it's just a crazy time that we're in right now. And it's been cool to be able I know our team has really enjoyed being able to support the church and our ministry teams in different ways than what we've had before. Yeah, so I'll jump right into the attendance stuff. Our church has had a culture for a long time of just asking people to check-in on the weekend. And that's literally what we say. And we're , hey, we'd love to know that you're here and it just helps us care for you better. And we have anywhere between 60 to 70% of our head count on a weekend. let us know that they're there. Even first time guests do this. And we have two primary ways. Typically everyone gets a little paper program on the way into the auditorium and there's a little slip they can fill out, put their information and put a prayer request on or anything that. And then people can check-in through our app as well. So it's just a culture that we've created over the years and people always just check-in and I'm not sure what it is about it that works, but people do it. And it's super helpful for us because it really does help us care for people well. We have a lot of processes on the front end and the back end. people stop checking in, follow-up that we do, just so that, we can, help people, stay connected to the church well. So anyways, going into that first weekend where we knew, church was moving to online and we weren't gonna have any physical gatherings, we're , how are we gonna let all of our people check-in that don't have the app? , we don't want that to be a burden for them letting us know that they're watching online. So Brad on my team jumped into some workflows. We found the I think it was Southeast Christian had a text to workflow recipe on the community site. And there was another workflow we created with lcbccheck-in.com. So we were giving people three options to check-in either through the app, going to the website lcbccheck-in.com and texting check-in to a number that we had set up. So we went into that weekend. , we just got it working, I think, on a Friday afternoon, even to the point where the schedules for each gathering, we were going and manually changing that in the workflow after each service just because we didn't have time to figure out how to use SQL or Lava to do that going into the weekend. So it was very much quick, stand it up, figure out a way to support that. And it was cool. People used it and, we were able to dive in there. And then the following week we kind of went back, we were able to kind of find a way for Brock to automate through the workflow to see what schedule is active and automatically assign the schedule to the group they're checking into. And then the following week, we figured out a way to loop through a whole family and say, hey, it looks you have other people that can check-in. Do you wanna check them as well too? So each week we've been kind of iterating on this check-in process. And I think we've had around I don't I didn't look consistently at the numbers, but I know this past weekend we had right around 6,000 people check-in and tell us that they were watching online, which was really cool. And we know that people rep that represents a lot of families and households and people are inviting neighbors over to watch church online. So that was part of that attendance piece that we wanted to continue to lean into very similar to what Tyler shared. We're calling all the people that have been checking in. It's cool to hear you guys are calling all the people that attended over the past twelve months. We've been kind of leaning into people over the past few weeks that have been checking in and just praying with them, seeing what type of care we can provide through that check-in piece. So that's kind of how we leverage that check-in piece of that. One of the other things that we were digging into were we're very kind of we have multiple locations spread out through Pennsylvania, but we're very high touch staff, probably as a lot of churches are. So we were , how are we gonna just stay in communication with each other well? So we have a biweekly central huddle type thing that we typically do where staff come in to our central location. So our leadership said, Hey, through this time, we're gonna meet weekly on Tuesday mornings. And we're gonna do a video kind of conversation between two of our senior leaders. And so we used the opportunity to kind of stand up a quick content channel within on kind of our main homepage in Rock. And as staff log in on a Tuesday morning, they see that morning's huddle link show up and they can click in there and watch that stream of that thirty minute meeting where our leaders are kinda giving us direction for the week. We're talking about what it's working from home. We're talking about Tiger King, , things that that are, , just to keep it light and fun, but also the things that we're focusing on as a church right now. So that really just kinda helped us create a centralized location for staff on where to go to get that communication. And long term, our goal of ours is to have more of some type of intranet where staff can go for resources, and this is just a step in that direction. And honestly, over the past three weeks, a lot of the projects that we've been wanting to work on over the next year kinda got slammed into a two week window where we're figuring out how to stand up TV apps, how to do a lot of different things around digital initiatives that now our church is counting on to to keep moving forward each week. So and then the other thing was just how do we communicate well with our people? And we had email lists that we were using in Rock, And a lot of that was criteria based based off of, , connection status or, attendance behavior or things that. And we realized that there would be new people coming to our church in this time that might not meet that criteria. And we just wanted to give them a way to get information from us. So we set up a quick workflow and we put a link on our webpage for people to jump into and to sign up for this email list. We've done another one where in this past week where we're doing a daily thing called a song and a prayer, where our worship leader and a campus pastor kind of share a song and a prayer and people can sign up. And in the past three days, we've had about 5,000 people sign up to get that content on a daily basis delivered in their inbox. So just some cool ways in which we're leveraging that type of setup to be able to communicate with our people well. And yeah. So I think that hits most of the stuff that you were asking about. Hey. Yeah. Hey, Adam. Adam, isn't it didn't aren't y'all having a Rock a Nursery this week at LCBC? True. Today is our one year from when we went live with Rock. So yes. Yep. It's been Congratulations. Yeah. We we were very thankful in a lot of ways and probably very similar to a lot of you guys. A lot of the conversation has been, look at all the stuff that God's been preparing us for over the past year or two that lead to this, to lead to the situation that we're in today, either from a technology standpoint on our end to we had a big financial peace university initiative last year and there's people that are , I have an emergency fund now and that's helping us get through this time. So it's been very cool. So yeah, today's our one year rockerversary. What are the odds? That's awesome. Congratulations. Thanks. It's so relatable to hear you talk about we just had to get this out in two or three days, so we did what we had to do, and then we've been iterating on it every time. I think everybody is in that position. So thanks for sharing a little bit about that because it's completely relatable, and it's interesting to look back and realize that some of our best innovations and our best creativity happens when the constraints are so tight that it looks it's impossible. I think people are really rising to the challenge in that. So thanks for sharing some of the things you've been doing in that area. Alright, Chris, from Traders Point, we would love to hear from you. I know when we spoke last, you mentioned some really interesting things that your organization's been doing to step into some of the social gaps that we have with people, and that's with your attendees, and it's also with your community. In fact, you shared with me that you've been designated as an essential worker in an area that's been really locked down because of some of the things that you're doing with the organization at Traders Point to pour into the community in new ways. And I think I saw a tweet from your senior pastor this last weekend about the local regional indie churches doing some really incredible things for hospitals too. Can you tell us a little bit about what it means when your campus is open and how your pastor is encouraging everyone to step in and to fill some of these gaps? Yeah. Man, I really wanna echo too just what Adam said at the end of his talk there. We have talked a lot as a staff just about for such a time as this. , we feel everything's been leaning this direction, and we've done all this preparation, and we look back now and see, man, , that it's amazing how God prepared our church for this time. Our one year anniversary is coming up in about another forty five days. So totally with you on that there, Adam. So for us, it's all about posture. As a staff, we talk. The executive team is adamant. Hey, social distancing is real. We need to be safe. We need to keep our people safe. But as the world leans back, we are going to lean in as a church. And we say that exact phrase all the time. Internally to our staff, we say every day. We say every campus is open right now. We are just only meeting online. So what you do is even more important right now because your campus is open, and it's in some ways harder to get to you and in some ways easier. So figure out how to leverage the technology that we have to get things done. We've been we have a great relationship with local law enforcement across a bunch of different jurisdictions. We use those guys to help with parking, all kinds of stuff, and we have leaned into that relationship over the last several years. And so it was really great to be able to as the restrictions got tighter and tighter here in Indianapolis, the Surgeon General just singled us out as a potential new hotspot. So that's always what you wanna hear. But we were able to stay in touch with law enforcement, and we're thrilled that our local sheriff in particular believes that what we're doing is incredibly essential, and so has enabled us to have some special protection during this time just to make sure that we are able to get into the office if we need to, to do things that we need to do. Still maintaining all of the CDC guidelines, still keeping it under 10 people, all of the distancing protocols. But that's been really helpful and has allowed us to step in with the medical community really hard. What we did on day one, as soon as we knew, Hey, we're going online, we're going everything's gonna have to be digital, we the executive team formed they added a couple of people to it, me as the CIO and then our comms director. And they basically said, okay, , what do you need? , let's lay out all of the church's resources, and let's knock down any barriers. So we created a daily meeting where we meet with the executive team and just whatever we need. They tear down barriers for us, point us in the right direction, help us make quick decisions, and then we can go execute. We took a look at our staffing across the whole organization and tried to identify people that we thought would have more margin, or maybe their job was strictly physical. And we kinda got to pick and choose some people that we felt could really help us move our initiatives forward on the technical side. And we waited a week and a half to do that because we knew the first week we were just gonna be heads down, didn't even have time to bring on new headcount. But for us, we already had this kind of concept of a Rock star team, which is people in every ministry area of the church. There's at least one person that contributes to these monthly meetings. They have their own. We use Microsoft Teams pretty heavily. They have their own Microsoft Team that they communicate in, and they stay up to date. So, we doubled down on that group of people. We're on version 8.7, sadly, of Rock. And we wanna start doing some texting workflows immediately. So we're trying to do our typical one month upgrade process. We're gonna try and get that done in about four more days. So doubled the size of the Rockstar team. We've asked all those people to really start helping us with testing. We so we've got one person kind of laying out all the test cases and then telling everybody to charge. And of course, people are hungry to do that. They see we're really clear in our communication about this is what we're trying to build on the other side. So let's get really specific with the win and clarifying that so that our people can charge after it. So that's been really helpful. The other thing we did, we know that we've been streaming for quite a while. And thanks, Tyler. We use some of your services as well. I think does everybody? I think everybody does. So for us, what we did, we know that there's a lot of local churches that don't have that opportunity. So what we did, we were very fortunate. Again, I work a bunch of Rock stars. I mean, blown away at the creativity and the people I work with, kind of echoing what Frank said, just there's some really talented people on our staff. And our facilities team immediately jumped in and learned all of the CDC guidelines for how to properly clean a space, how to limit the spread of COVID. And there's some really specific guidance from the CDC and the World Health Organization on that. So they learned it. And then we stood up one of our one of the places where we record every once in a while. It's right near an exterior door, so we kind of secured that space and offered that space up to local pastors that maybe don't have any of the equipment or the facility. And there's two days a week now that we open those doors in a scheduled timeframe and allow those pastors to come in and record their church's message. And we package it all up and we use Church Online and help them get all of that set up. Because, again, for our team, that's not a very complicated process because we've been doing it for a long time. And for some of them, it's the difference between their church meeting and not meeting. So, I'm also really glad to hear about some of those other Life Church resources. I'll be sharing those with a lot of folks as well. So, that's been huge for us. And one of the things that we talk about, because we've got this posture of leaning in, it's made it easy for us to go out to our congregation and say, look, we know a lot of you don't necessarily do giving online or giving regularly online, and we need to continue to resource the community through this experience. And we have a huge network just because of the church that we are. And so we've actually seen giving go up since this started. Last week actually was one of our biggest weeks. It was our biggest week of the year. And we're able to turn those resources very quickly and put them back to the community. So our lead pastor is doing he was doing a live at five. We've we've scaled that down as the crisis is kind of continuing on. We're trying to make sure we don't do information overload to our people. We think there's a lot of noise right now on social media. Internally, we kind of have a running joke of what's the funniest COVID email you've received from a vendor, the person you least expect to send you something. That's been pretty great. There's some fantastic examples out there. So, don't want to just fall into the noise. So, we've toned that down a little bit. One thing we were able to do, we have a lot of great surgeons and doctors on our staff. One that is right in the battle. He works at our downtown location. He's a former elder as well, just an amazing guy. And we were able to kind of partner with him. We found another organization here in town that was able to order masks, N95 masks, which if you all know, those are really hard to get your hands on right now. And we found out we had the finances set aside. We were able to move really quick. And then our lead pastor, Aaron Brockett, he's got a cohort that he started as soon as the crisis started of other local pastors of some of the larger churches. And I think it's kind of open as well. But he was able to get on the horn with all 12 of them, pooled our resources, and we were able to turn that into 200,000 N95 masks that are already approved by the Indiana Department of Health. We should be getting those in very soon and getting those right down to the front lines. And we already have a plan in place through that same supplier. They are able to produce a lot more. We're hopeful to turn that number really big, really fast. So we've been looking for every opportunity we have. One of the people that's on the board of the largest homeless shelter here in Indy, an amazing organization. We've partnered up with them. They've experienced one of their homeless men was diagnosed with COVID. And talking to our doctor that we mentioned earlier, talking to our doctors and some of those folks, they've said that homelessness is where a COVID outbreak really starts to overwhelm the medical community because it spreads so fast through that population and many have existing health problems already. So anything we could do there, that was one of the top three things they gave us to focus on. So we were able to very quickly reach out to them. And we just launched a couple of campuses. We have some extra facilities that we might be able to turn around and use for that purpose. We're still trying to iron out details. But again, it goes back to that posture of we're looking at every asset that we have and trying to figure out how to turn it to something useful in this time of crisis. And just thinking through that mindset that every campus is open. We're just only meeting online, that's what's enabled, that's for us what really unlocked the creative potential of our leaders that work at those campuses, because they feel this great sense of urgency to get the word out. In terms of using Rock, we were historically using this Formstack form for our prayer requests. I've kind of had it on the back burner. It's funny, I think a lot of us could probably say this. I've had about 15 projects that I've been dying to get to that I just haven't been able to. And then last week, I got to all of them in about four days. So this was one of them we converted to using the Rocks prayer features, and that was an immediate win. We took it a step further even on the version or actually on 9.4, our testing. We're trying to link those prayer requests back to an individual record. We'd just to be able to see that those conversations happened when we do profile matching. So we've just about got that worked out. So prayer request, that was a huge one. We've been telling everyone we think that prayer is one of the biggest needs that our people need to feel connection. So on the entry form where you put in your prayer request, we've added a box for people to say that they want to be communicated with so that we can reach out to them via phone or email, whatever preference they have. If you go to tpcc.org/prayer, that's our prayer request page. And it's probably going to change again. We've already iterated twice, but that will probably change again. And we're looking at all the different ways that we can utilize Rock tools. I love the fact I hear you guys talking about calling people. We had an I the idea of just calling everybody that's attended. I think that's a really good idea. We were we've kind of broken the organization into a handful of teams for this time. And one of those teams is our Pastoral Care team. And they've been brainstorming , what does that look ? I love the idea that they had of trying to identify who they think would be the most at risk for loneliness and isolation during this time. Things people who've had a death in their family. And we can tell that from a Rock event in the last year. People that may be single parents, parents of kiddos with special needs, that kind of stuff. who would be most at risk and running lists. And then we're gonna start some calling campaigns using new Rock feature to get ahold of those people. We've already done some calling, but it was extremely sporadic. We didn't record anything. It was just, Hey, let's really quickly get on the horn with our key volunteers and people that we already know of that are at risk. So I was really happy to see that new feature on your COVID response page of sorry. The coronavirus page, rms.com/coronavirus, of seeing the the calling campaign feature. I think we're gonna leverage that and try to record those things on the person's profile record. For us, that's been the other thing. This has allowed us to get we had rolled out Microsoft Teams. We had rolled out Rock. But really, there was still a lot of cleanup work to do. I mean, we're less than a year in right now. And this has allowed us to get really specific with our staff and say, here's the data best practices. , here's what you need to be doing. I've taken one, two people actually, and have them doing nothing all day except writing up guides, just little one pagers or quick videos that they record through Zoom or through Microsoft Teams meeting of just here's how you make a person note, and here's why you should do that. Here's how you find this information in Rock. Just those really simple things that, again, there's some people that are really talented power users. They might not be true IT people. They're not going to be messing with your routers and your network settings, but people that are more than capable of making great videos to force multiply the rest of the team. So for us, again, it's just all about posture. Did I cover everything you'd asked, Emily? I think you did. That's fantastic. It's so exciting to see churches that are reaching further into the community when so many people are spinning into chaos. It's really something to see this, and this is happening across the Rock community. Thanks for sharing what that looks at Traders Point. Yeah, and I think that's one of the things we have a group of people also that's on our prayer team, and that's a large part of what they're doing is praying every day just for guidance and how we might lean in. This is a time when the church is really needed. And if you're watching this video, if you're sitting on this panel you're here for such a time as this. That's true. Thanks for the reminder. And that was also a good lead in to John, who I'd to ask to speak about some of the things that he's been leading our tech team through in response to what we've been learning as we've been talking to churches. He has been turning around and working with our technical team to very quickly pivot the work that's being done internally and develop the tools that have been needed most by churches as quickly as possible and look for the fastest way to release those to the community. So John, could you share with us what that's ? Yeah, definitely. I think I agree with everything that everybody's saying that these are hard times and we have a choice. We can either freak out or we can run forward. And I think it's important to look back in history and see a lot of the companies that we look at today, the ones that we admire the most, we either started or grew during the hardest economic times. I think back to a Procter and Gamble, just a regular soap company until the Great Depression. And they chose that time to lean in to innovate in market in new ways. And even today we still have concepts the soap opera, which was created by them during those times. And I think hearing what all these guys are talking about, these are the things that we're going to continue doing. They're going to be new normals for us. Some of these new tools and technologies and just ministry concepts. And so I think we can look at this in terms of an opportunity. Yeah, it's hard times. It's not the way we'd to innovate, but it really is the catalyst that helps the best innovations. And that's what we've chosen to do too, to lead through it. We're trying to keep in mind, and I would encourage all of you to keep in mind, these are historic times. These are times when our grandkids are going to come to us and ask, hey, what did you do during the COVID-nineteen situation? It might be because they're interested or might because it's a school assignment and they have to. But either way, they're going to be asking and we get to answer , oh yeah, it was a great time for me to catch up on my binge watching on Netflix. Or do you want to say no, I was able to lean in and innovate and help people already hearing the numbers from the four other churches, hearing that watches are going up, people are being saved. It's all because of that innovation. And I think it's important to keep that front of mind because I think it can be tempting to go into a shell. But this is the time for us to come out of the shell. And while we're not a church, we have always prided ourselves that what makes Rock different is the fact that it is a community and the community is doing amazing things. We're just hearing just little glimpses of that today. But if you go into the community, there's hundreds of other stories that are just so encouraging. And so always, we're trying to jump into that trench and trying to help out. And so in the last week, we have created a few new technologies that we felt were immediately needed. And so we deployed those even last week. So one is a connection campaign. So if you're familiar with the connection tools within Rock, it's a great way of leading someone through a process of connection, of touching out to them, communicating out to them, providing accountability through it. But we added a tool that can actually help create calling campaigns through that. And so you can find that in the Rock Shop right now. Already, I think as of Monday, 30 different churches in twenty four hours had downloaded it and that number I'm sure has grown quite a bit. We also just released prayer request workflow action. I think Chris is exactly right that prayer is going to be coming so important over the next few days, few weeks. And so we're looking for new ways that we can get those prayer requests put into the system, get those out to the teams. Unfortunately, I feel the prayer request feature set within Rock is one of the strongest feature sets, but it's probably up until now has been one of the most underused feature sets. Typically, it's one of those features that it's always I'll get to it eventually. And I think again, this is a good catalyst to get to it now because it is such an important tool. So again, if you need help with that, reach out. There's help in the community. There's help in our partners. We can help through spark ability on that. And so we're going to continue helping to increase the prayer capabilities within Rock. We've also been piloting some other projects on smaller scale, trying to test to make sure that they're going to work. We've been playing with some video chat capability where you can capability right into your Rock pages. Still on the pilot stages of that, but that's something that we're looking at continuing this week. We've also been doing a lot of work with performance tuning for churches. As many of the previous folks were talking about, they're seeing a lot more traffic. And Rock can scale that traffic, but it's a two way street. Part of it's on Rock and part of it's on configuration. So we've been jumping into some trenches trying to get that tuned up. The outflow of that is we're working on some great documentation to share those tips and tricks of how to get your performance just really snappy. And we're working on that. But we're also keeping our ear to the ground trying to figure out where are the next features. We know that the features from last week are not the features that we need this week. And so we are constantly looking at that. But what I wanted to encourage everybody is just to see what the difference is between those churches that are moving forward and those that are maybe having some trouble. And that comes on the preparedness on digital platforms and the importance of digital platforms. I think we're seeing in the last few weeks, digital platforms are critical not only during these times, but during any time, but especially when things go wrong, we really need to be able to communicate and innovate on these platforms. And I think it's really great to see that a lot of these churches have been prepared for this. And in some ways, God knew exactly what they needed they planned for that. But maybe you're feeling maybe you weren't quite as ready for this or you don't feel you're quite as prepared. That's okay. It starts today and let's just go. Let's roll forward. Let's lean into that. If there's anything we can do to help with that, reach out to us. There's some different ways you can do that through the community. Feel free to reach out to me, to Emily. We have various properties if you need help from professional services. We have sparkabilitygroup.com. We have our partners page. There's so many ways that you can invest and get on track quickly with this. I would say too that we're seeing the importance of having your website built on Rock, Being able to innovate and change course is a lot easier when you have access to all that data on your digital platform. But again, investing in digital platforms today, don't wait till it's all over and then, okay, we can catch our breath and go lean in. This is the time that we need to be making differences. This is a time where people are needing our help. So let's just get going on that. And if there's anything that we can do to help with that, it would be our honor to help. And Emily, I know you've been talking with a lot of other churches. Do you want to share some of the other interesting things that you found over the last few weeks? Absolutely. So I've been having a lot of conversations. I know, John, you have as well. Our professional services consultants have been having great conversations. And what we're seeing is that churches are leading through it, and there are a lot of fantastic examples of that. And today, four people from the community are sharing how their organizations are doing innovative new things in ministry for the Big Z Church and for their attendees. But what I can tell you from the calls I'm making is that that is not, a group of four. That is just a representation of what we're seeing is a common theme for churches in the Rock community. And that's what's so exciting about this. We really have, a community of churches that are working together to try and make sure they share things quickly, they innovate quickly, they collaborate quickly, and the four that we've heard from today are doing incredible things. There are so many others that are as well. So we are working internally also to help collect those things. I know I mentioned earlier some more people may have joined that we have a lot of that collected and curated on our blog and on our rockrms.com/coronavirus page. So if you're not following those or our social properties, you should because we're helping push out the great things we're learning as we're talking to churches. We're also, I wanted to mention, going to be we had a master class scheduled for April. We are still keeping that class, and we're turning it to an online class. So that's a great opportunity. Your tech teams have been scrambling for a few weeks to get things right side up. Now that they're leveling off and we're understanding what we're working on, Your admins from ministries and those on your tech teams who work with Rock and have not been master class trained yet. This is going to be an online class. It's not our intention to go to online only format in the future, so it is a great opportunity for you to get your people there while they have this chance. We're also leading strong on the professional services side. We're meeting churches' needs now. Sometimes those are things that everyone needs, and sometimes they're things that are custom or unique needs based on their ministry and where they're at at the time. So we've been able to help. Lot of, I'm sure it's something everyone can relate to that the technical and communications teams have been hit pretty hard with extra work at the organizations. So sometimes they don't have the ability to support the other things that they need to do quickly because they're maybe doing remote tech support to get their staff online to be able to function and some other things. So we've been able to help in that area as well. And as we're talking to a lot of church leaders, I can just tell you that what I'm hearing is is exactly what you said, John. Those who were prepared digitally, whether that's from online giving perspective, from having a a website that's powered by Rock, having a great digital strategy, those are the churches that are able to quickly respond and thrive and really invest back in their communities. The other ones are having a bit of a harder time getting going. The first few weeks have been difficult, but now that they're finding their new normal, I would just encourage these churches as I'm talking with everyone, this is the time to invest in the digital strategy. And I bet you have your leaders' ears on that. So I would lean into that as you're finding time to do that. This is a temporary situation, but it's a catalyst for a new reality. And I think that's what's exciting about it because that's what gives us the opportunity to innovate. It used to be that the digital platform and the strategy was kind of the icing on the cake. It is the cake right now. So take advantage of this opportunity. Let's learn as a community. Let's approach our leaders and make sure that we are getting the future forward resources put in place and the attention that we need to on our digital strategy. Because this is something that is right now going to be a temporary thing, but it's going to set us up for success in the future. I will say that some great recipes are being created by the community and put into the recipe site. So if that's not something you've seen yet, you really should. I know, we helped Shepherd put one together. When I spoke with Jeremy Hoff, he had a really great thing that their church had done immediately. They had a high percentage of their givers were, giving on-site through cash or check. And he said they made some quick communications to their to those who usually give, he called them analog, I thought that was a great word, analog givers, to help them with two things. And so we helped create a recipe that we just published yesterday for him, and that is to offer them the ability to receive a self addressed stamped envelope, which has been a real win at his church, or to have someone call them and walk them through how to set up online giving for the first time. Both of those have been big wins. So if your community's, organization's struggling with that, check that recipe out. That is actually on our coronavirus page, and we have that on our blog as well. We have documentation written up for how to do that. Additionally, I know Rob and Andrew at Emmanuel have been working. They've been doing some text to workflow things that have been really powerful at their church for a long time. They have some really robust workflows, and they're publishing recipes on that. I think they just published a new believer process this morning, and they have, another new here process that's coming. So there this is all, again, a representation of a lot of work that's going into recipes. If you have some at your organization and you haven't converted them to recipes yet, please take the extra time to do that because there's a lot of community benefit. So content is king right now, and I think, Chris, you said it best, relevant content. So what you need to make sure that you're doing, churches have more access to great content than most organizations. That's why we're getting these bizarre emails from companies about their COVID response when we don't really care or have time to read them. That's not relevant content. Churches have such relevant content, but it needs to be positioned differently. Right now, people are consuming content through their computers and through their TVs, and they're used to consuming content that way in small bite sized chunks. So some of the things that you're doing, for instance at Newsprint where you're chopping things up into smaller chunks, that's really critical. So you wanna make sure that your communication teams are evaluating the quality and style of communication and making sure it fits with the new outpost that you have at your disposal. You no longer have an auditorium of people who have nothing else to do for an hour. You now have divided attention, and people are used to bringing content into themselves in different ways from a screen. So you can also maximize that. Cut it up, push it into social, drive it, make it live longer, cross post in places. Those are things I'm sure your communications team is thinking about or should be, but that's something that we're understanding is important. Also, again, I'll reiterate, if your website isn't running on Rock, you are missing an opportunity for some very powerful personalization and digital understanding of who your people are, where they are, and what they need. This is the time for you to look at when and how am I going to move my external website to Rock because it is mission critical. It's the only way to understand engagement fully right now. Alright. So all of that to say we have heard from some incredible people. There are other really incredible things happening right now in our community, and this is a great time for us to take questions that our panelists can answer. And so if you have questions for anyone, if you can go ahead and submit them in the Zoom webinar chat window, we will be happy to direct those to panelists. And panelists, if you see your name, come up on one, we'll get that to you. So, Frank, I see something here from Chuck, and he asked with on demand, how are you handling real time host chat? Can you speak to that? The the short answer is we don't do on real time chat. We haven't been doing that for quite a while. It's a much longer story as to why. But that's why for us, we were using the Church Online platform, but really we weren't using it to its fullest capabilities. So it was easy for us to kinda just do an on demand video, put it on our front page website. It's stuff we've talked through, and that and that may be something we've got in the future, especially as this time period extends out is, again, how how can we have as many touch points? But right now, we're not handling any kind of real time chat. Great. Thank you. Josh Emmig submitted a question about online groups, and I think this is something that everyone can speak to. What are some best practices that you're using to give group leaders tools to do small groups over video, and what are some best practices around group finder and group member registration for new members? Registration for new members? Yeah. So I think for us, we've sent out an email communication recommending that we've recommended three separate tools and just said, Here's what we would recommend that makes it easy to see your whole group at one time and to do this inexpensively. And then here's the cost if you choose to take those tools pro, using Zoom versus Zoom Pro. And we have found that some people still need a little extra help. And our support teams, because we've already kind of done the work to get our staff mobile, have a little bit of margin. So we have asked if the group's team can front end those technical support issues, but then anything they can't handle escalate into our support team. And we're willing to at least give it a shot to help people with their home Internet. Prayer is appreciated for our support team traders. And then as we've talked about setting up some new temporary short term groups and just using the Group Locator, throwing that out and offering some new short term groups, and we keep going back and forth. We're trying really hard not to build things that won't live beyond the COVID crisis. We talk a lot about let's use what we have first, and then let's figure out if we need to really build something temporary. So right now, we haven't done that, but it keeps coming up. I feel that might be something we end up doing. If we do, we're gonna wanna do it in the next week or so while it's still relevant. One of the things with groups that we're doing, we're leaning into the Group Finder tool that we have. And what was funny was we were literally about to start a new round of groups, about to open up our group finder when all of this happened. So we pumped the brakes, and we kinda went back to all of our leaders and just asked them to, , be willing to move to online groups. And we have, , a contact the leader workflow set up so people go in, look for a group of content that they're looking for. We're actually leaning a lot into our campus staff and just asking them to host a group right now. Again, , their their priorities and their job responsibilities are shifting drastically because of, the the current status. So, we have, campus staff jumping into that. And I I don't know if it's okay for me to talk about this, John, but the one of the, , the plugins that they're testing out is this, , potential, , video hosting tool. So we've been playing along, with that a little bit and kinda build in some functionality in our group's leader toolbox. So, we've we've created some resources for our group leaders to know how to set up a Zoom call or a G chat or whatever. But we showed our teams yesterday how to jump into the group leader toolbox and kind of fire up this tool that we're kind of checking out with the Spark team and I know some other churches are and showing them , hey, you could just literally hit a button that launches a workflow to fire off an email to the people in your group and they can click on that and jump into a video chat together. So, we're kind of playing around with that a little bit as the the Spark team is, , figuring out how that works. So Adam, here's another question that Gordon Arber's asked about text to check-in. Have you updated that workflow at all with the knowledge that you've gained over the past few weeks? Yeah. Yeah. I I think each week, we're kind of adjusting it a little bit. So we're using the SMS pipeline, and we each time we kinda do it, we tweak it or we see things we don't about how it's working. So right now, we're we're basically checking everyone into one group, which is online, and we've turned off all of the data automation jobs that would change someone's campus because everyone would be online right now. So we wanted everyone to we wanted our campus staff to be able to go and still find the people that should be a part of their campus. So we turn those tools off. We have everyone checking in the online. And then we've been adjusting. I think I said earlier, we have family members showing up that you could check-in now, , back to that that workflow. And then we're setting up for some other environments our high school ministry. When they meet on Wednesday night, we're setting up a a text to workflow for them, and we're working on one for our we do, , a newcomers first steps class once a month, and we're gonna try to do that next week via Zoom. So it's gonna be a big experiment, and we're gonna have an option for them to to check-in that way as well through through text workflow. Hey. I'll jump in too and just kinda give another plug for having having your website and Rock. The idea behind of, , for us with connection statuses, , so we've got kind of we've got our our highest level of connection we just call engaged, but then our second level is called participating. And that's that's basically geared to a physical check-in somewhere. And so over the course of the next, , however many weeks, that's that's not gonna happen. So we that's kind of the next phase we're investigating. Kind of the exact same things Adam is talking about. How how can we do some text ins? But the benefit we're having too is because everything's in Rock, if we can get them to sign into our web page, we also use Wistia as our video provider. We're playing around with the Wistia integration so that as long as they're signed into the website, we can even pull if they've watched the video. And that may be one of the things either and I see someone's question in there in terms of how do you sync people watching online with email lists. But again, know it's kinda late. It's probably not. You're not gonna snap your fingers necessarily move your website to Rock this week. But that's a benefit moving forward of having everything in one place because we now have lots of options that we're able to talk through to say, hey, as long as we can get people the value of signing in to our website, there's a lot of information we can get that we can then turn back around and use use it to care for them better. Tyler, there's a question here from Greg Davis about how do you determine what's meaningful but, not vital? And what does external mean? Is it external to the IT team or is it external to Life Church? Yeah. I'm I'm looking through the questions now. I'm gonna pivot Emily and I'm gonna address Charlotte real quick. Okay. I know that's totally breaking all the rules. That's good. Do it. Charlotte, I think you should bother John and Emily about a way to handle church online platform with with Rock. I think that'd be a really great idea if you just bothered the daylights out of them. So now Greg, how would I determine what's meaningful but not vital? I think it's good opportunities and I'll speak in terms that we can all handle right now. If you're a church that does not have an active digital presence and you're ramping that digital presence up, some of the conversations around how to do online small groups are meaningful but not vital at this point. Right? How you get your content delivery message out is the most meaningful that is mission critical and the additional things. And so I put that in a it sounds kind of cumbersome to say it, but I think it's the clearest way I could say an example of what's meaningful, but maybe not vital in this season. They're really good opportunities that you wanna take. They're just probably not the right opportunity you need to step in first. And I would say externally initiated is externally initiated outside of yourself. And so you have things that they're not team dependent. They're initially externally initiated outside the very mission critical things that you feel in your role you need to be working. So hopefully that helps. Great. John, do you have anything to say to Tyler's bother John comment? Yes, I highly appreciate that. It is something that we are very interested in. In fact, we do have a meeting, I believe tomorrow with the CHOP team to talk with them and again in a couple of weeks. So it is something that we are heavily leaning into. So it's always been one of those things on our list, but now it's really high on the list. Yes. And we have heard from a lot of people the same or similar things. So we also see your comments. We do feel officially condoned to check that out. Before it gets by in the chat stream, I want to make sure we ask Chuck Bump's question here. What is the one big thing your church started doing within the last three weeks that you believe will continue to do when you get back together? That's a great question. I would love to jump on that one first. So one thing that has bothered me for years is that we have all these disparate teams that have their fingers in how we communicate online and digitally. And we have been trying to figure out how do we all get together, what rhythms do we need, what do we make it work. And with the necessity of having four days to turn around some massive changes, We just got some giant online chats going. We got the right people in the room. We've grown and shrunk a few times, added a name, taken away a name. And we feel we finally have the right group of people in really clear direction. And we can move so fast right now because we're all able to throw our comment in and get the right people. So there's a few teams that have been formed that has nothing to do with the org chart, but that particular group of people, we're gonna continue meeting on a regular basis and keep our online chat for the foreseeable future. , it it's been amazing to see the teamwork that's come out of this. Awesome. Frank, do you have anything that you'd to add to that? I mean, I'll just second that. For me, I think it's a little too early to know because I what I hope is , I guess the way I kinda thought about it was the first week was survival. Second week was, okay. Let's try not to repeat the failings of week one. Not not quite survival, but not quite, , the next phase. This last Sunday for us was kind of the first Sunday where it's , alright. We we feel pretty good that that no huge surprises are gonna come up and then Roku and Apple TV happened. There's some stuff happened to us. But all that to say, I'm really excited to see what happens in these next two to three, four weeks. Because into Chris's point, what I really feel it I'll second is I think the work from home aspect. Now I personally hope that that's not what continues forever, but it has really put a spotlight on the deficiencies in communication across teams, so at least for us. So I'm hoping that whether it's a new job or a new team or whatever, I'm really hoping that is one thing that we come out of this with is a more streamlined way to communicate. And then the second thing for us, for me personally is, again, I think NewSpring's been, I would classify us as an innovative church in terms of the digital side, but we still haven't. This is forcing the eyes on how do we make the online experience as and I'm trying to be careful to pick my words, but as excellent as our in person one. And I think the innovation that will happen that I don't and hopefully it's not the technology team that has to come up with all of them. It's hopefully we're there to support everyone else's dreams. But that's what I'm hoping is the innovation there. Even we go back to physical presence, we can still keep up a high quality digital experience for people and just have that also maybe not be the forefront for for NewSpring. I don't know that it'll ever be a forefront thought, but at least not, oh, yeah. Let's make sure we're streaming our service on something. So it's been it's been really cool and I hope I hope that continues. I'd say, Emily, we're we're still too early to answer that question. But one of the things that I anticipate is that obviously with any great shift systems break and we're all feeling the pain of systems breaking right now, which usually means that we are able to increase efficiency on the backside of that. And so I'm looking forward to that, looking forward to seeing what areas that plays out into. And I think larger as a church, the system of church is broken. And so we're gonna go back and be able to reevaluate the things that are necessary and unnecessary. And I think you'll see a lot of churches that reevaluate what their programming looks as essential or non essential. And so I think that'll be a really cool shift to see, but we don't have anything yet. I mean, a really practical standpoint, we rolled out teams in one day last week and we're probably not gonna unroll that out. That would stink. I wanna throw another thing out there too. I hope stuff this continues. Because I think it's easy to kinda just be in your own thing and do your own thing. And this has kinda really been a funnel for the big C church to kinda go, hey, yeah, we still got our theological differences and what all are but digital right now is what everything one thing we have in common. So I've always been passionate about it, but I hope that the collaboration that happens and throwing it again to my bro crush Tyler down there. Life Coach led the way with providing that for the kingdom. And so joining together, having more collaboration amongst churches, just I mean, if it's as simple as I mean, have four or five guys that I meet with regularly. And I tell you that honestly, biggest benefit I get yeah, we share some ministry things and we share but it's personally , hey, I'm sharing prayer requests with guys. Not only are we sharing about our church's prayer requests, but I'm talking to guys that really understand exactly what I'm going through in terms of the work side. So I mean, I I hope this digital funnel, the and the collaboration that's creating is another big thing that kinda moves on even when we kinda go back to our individual on premises services. Great. Another great question here that we're getting from, from the community is with the massive switch to digital platforms, what metrics are you looking at to report to your leadership? How do we adjust from reporting online attendance or weekend attendance to online attendance, and what other metrics are important? Emily, you may need to just mute me. But sorry, Adam. I spent a ton of time through the years around online digital metrics. And and what I found and I'll I'll I'm sorry. I'll shut up and throw it to you, Adam. Here's what I'm realizing. And I know it's important, right? Because it's it's important because leadership wants to know how to resource things. And so, I mean, we you need to have as accurate as number as possible. But what I'm really coming to realize is you gotta just pick a number and track the trend. Because every number is going to be different. And I'm telling you, I've looked at all of them with all of our digital products and the thing that's supposed to be the same can be 60% different. And it blows my mind. So literally it's just been , we pick one watch the trends. Sorry, I'll shut up. No, that's great. Adam, what do you have to share on that? Yeah, no, I think I love what Frank has, what they've shared and what we've learned from those guys too. I think a big thing is just as defining what the thing is you wanna track. So I'll say for us, we're tracking views in thirty minute views right now is a metric for church online. But I think part of the struggle is going to be working with your leadership to figure out , how does that count towards what we normally count? , , butts and seats and and IP addresses hitting a a, , a web view, , are two totally different things. So I think there's a a a bridge to be built there for everyone. I'm not sure if anyone has that figured out. And if you guys do, , please tell us. But , I think we're trying to figure out, , how do we track that engagement piece of it? , And I think for us, a lot of things that we're looking at right now is , is this an opportunity for us to get more people engaged with the church? Because people are looking for advice and help and prayers and whatever it might be. That on the flip side of this, whenever we get to walk back in our buildings again, that the trend through the whole piece is engagement and maybe not as much as how many people, but people that are coming back and saying, Hey, I wanna serve, I wanna lead. How can I help pick up the pieces of what's left behind after this thing is done? I think that's the conversation that we need to get to between the two different things. So that's of that's literally what we're trying to figure out right now and the conversations we're having this week around that. Fantastic. There's another really good question here about volunteers. So people who have on-site volunteers, what are they doing now? Are there new, opportunities? How can you use your volunteers? What are they what are you doing with them to keep them connected? Chris, do you have an example you can share on that? Yeah. So we've been talking about how can we better engage our volunteers. One thing that I'm excited about is now that we're using the Rock Prayer module, we're going to be able to build a prayer team that includes volunteers, people that aren't on staff, just because of the way that that's built and because we're we just finished literally in December, we finished moving our website to Rock. So, because we've done those two things, it's gonna make that really easy for us to include those volunteers. We're also looking at, again, every one of those initiatives that we have, even the stuff that's in the pastoral care. We have some highly skilled volunteers that we think we can leverage there. We have found some of the opportunities we have in our community, preparing that space for the homeless shelter. If we end up doing that, we think that our setup teardown teams would be very effective at getting that space ready and doing some of the physical work that's needed. So we take when we talk about redeployment as a church, we're taking a very holistic view of that and trying to find every method we can to engage our volunteers. We looked at our some of our coaches that we have. So we talk about team members, team leaders, and then coaches. And so we're taking some of our coaches and asking them to step into online hosting on our different platforms. That's been really effective to have a few hosts at each livestream and each event that we do. So, that's what we have off the top of our head, but we have a whole team of people. I have a meeting later. I'm sure I'm gonna get hit with a whole bunch of new ideas later this afternoon. So it's definitely a work in progress. I think, Emily, that question came from Mark Henderson at Passion City. Is that right? That dude's a stud at handling volunteers. He handles more volunteers than anybody I know. Ironic, but we're seeing volunteers still be engaged in especially our IT teams across digital mediums. What we've had to do is add a little bit more security measures so they can get logged in and things that. But it's still a pastoral care business that we're running. And so we're still seeing people that wanna jump in. We're seeing people that have a little bit more free time to jump in. I think volunteers are one of the cool opportunities that's out there in the church to start to see some movement momentum, especially in our technical teams. To throw out there too, I think we should encourage our churches to make sure , yes, of course we're gonna minister to our congregants, to our attendees. But what I love is our team, especially from internal staff, we're really talking about , hey guys, your first responsibility and the thing that's gonna be immediately right in front of you more than probably it is without all this quarantine is your family. So how are you leading your family? Personally, that's been a challenge. And so even to our volunteers, while we're still figuring things out and figuring out what the new normal looks , that's been what we've been communicating to our volunteers is, hey, yes, we will equip you and figure it out. In the meantime, man, make sure you're taking care of what's right in front of you and not missing the forest through the trees of all of this extra time you have as a family. That's speaking from a guy you'll probably hear him with four kids running around the house and a wife that's home that's used to not being That's not easy and I don't think it's trivial to not keep pounding that in, at least it wouldn't be for me. Yeah. Emily, I I just wanna go backwards one question. I'm breaking all the rules too. I'm not as cool as Tyler is, but I think I can still do it. So in talking about metrics, I think everybody is struggling to figure out how do you report things online. What we have come up with, and man, I would love to see you guys post some place where we can have some conversation about this as a community as this continues. A lot of these ideas, as a matter of fact. But as we talked about what we can measure, one of the things we keep coming back to is that less is more. So as an IT and a comms team, we have a ton of things that we track. And it's important for us to track and trend those. And occasionally to show those to our executive team and to some of our other decision makers. But at the highest level, we try to boil it all down to three numbers and then get a one sentence definition for those three numbers and then figure out how to get all the metrics from our other platforms to pour into those three numbers. And right now we're doing views, impressions, and then calls to action, which for us right now is prayer. So how many people how many prayer requests did we have come in? And then as those calls to action change, we'll change those numbers. But but those three are that's how we've boiled it down. And then every time we talk about them, saying the one sentence definition over and over again. Thanks for breaking the rules, Chris. That was really good. Adam, do you have anything you want to mention on the last two questions? I think that's gonna be the last of our questions for today so we can wrap up and let everybody get back to what they need to be doing. Yeah. Around volunteers, I think we're still figuring that out. I know our teams, our campus staff, they've been doing weekly meetings with their volunteer leaders and pulling them into a Zoom call and checking in and seeing how they're doing. And then I'm not sure if they're asking those leaders to go do the same thing or not, but I think they are asking them to check-in with their volunteers, volunteer leaders checking with their volunteers. So we've been trying to think through from a technology standpoint, this has been an area where we've wanted to leverage volunteers and figure out how to do that. So this is kind of forcing our hand a little bit. How can we do that? How can we leverage the volunteers in the church online platform? Right now we have all of our campus staff helping us host on the weekend to help to continue to create that campus connection with our teams. But I know on the backside of this, when everyone goes back to their campuses on a Sunday and a Saturday night, we're gonna have this gap of, hey, we need host for chat online. And so the time will probably be now that we need to start building those teams so people can help support that. So we're but we're still very much figuring that out. We're we're using tags in Rock. One thing that we did set up, we set up a COVID care tag. And as people are kind of letting us know through our website, we wanna help deliver groceries or pick up medicine for people or things that's appropriate for them to be able to help support people in their community. We're just kinda using a campus tag with that COVID care tag in Rock so that our campus teams have a list of people that as they're making phone calls to people that have been attending and someone lets us know of a need, they can reach out to that that volunteer team. It's kinda a temporary team to follow-up with them. So that's another thing that we're doing. Thank you for sharing. I know I've taken so many notes today. I think this has been so informative and so helpful, I just want to thank all of our panelists, and I want to thank our attendees for taking the time to ask great questions, to provide answers. We're all figuring this out together, and nobody has the answer for all the things today, so it's really great to be able to do this in a community that's so focused on doing the right things for the right reason. So a big thank you to everyone for joining us today. I did want to mention that we do we have been recording this and we do plan to post it on our Lead Through It Live page later today. We'll put out notifications in chat and on social media when that has been posted and is ready to go. Please feel free to share that with your leadership at your organization as well. Again, digital strategy, communications, and technical strategy have never been more important than they are right now. And now that we've passed the first two and a half, weeks or so of this crisis, we have the headspace to think, okay, what do I do with this going forward? How do I take these lessons learned and apply them into best practices? And our leadership is listening. I would also mention again, we do have people that can help. So if you've been listening today and you think, this is great. I don't have time or I don't have the skill set yet to implement this, do know we have a great selection of Rock partners that you can find on our page and our consulting team as well that can help you implement any of the solutions that you need, whether they're unique to you or there's something that's been offered to the community and you just don't have the ability to put them in place right now. So do not feel alone. We have an incredible community. We are also seeing some great conversations happening in the chat. If you did not get your question answered, please go over to the community chat. There is a, coronavirus tips, and discussion or something that, a chat channel there. Go ahead and pop your questions in there, and, the community will continue to have that conversation there as well. Thank you again so much. Please join us or have your staff join us at our online master class if they have not yet attended. We are very, very thankful for the community here, and we know that this is the absolute secret sauce of the world. 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. 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