Podcast Episode 114: Episode 86: Special Edition - COVID-19 Response

Description

In this special edition, Jon, Emily and Nick talk through the ways the community has stepped up to support each other and their communities in response to COVID-19

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 a very special edition of the Rockcast podcast, where the three of us, Emily Forman, Jon Edmiston, and Nick Airdo are all joining you as we are working from home on a special podcast related to the coronavirus and the ways that our organization and your organization is coping and in fact thriving with what we are changing and doing. So welcome, we're excited to join you in a new format and, hope that everything is going well. We have some very interesting updates to talk about with you and let's just jump right in. We've had to learn to do some new things fast. Does that look here? A lot of new things. It looks working from home everybody, but it feels very different and especially doing a podcast from home. It does feel different. A lot of new tools used today. Yes, definitely. I hope there's a little grace in case something comes across a little bit funny in this recording, but I think it's pretty good. Yeah, we're learning. Learning lots of new things this last two weeks. I'm sure everybody in the community is too. I think it's just amazing to see the community just pulling together, working harder than ever. I feel this is the community's time and it's just amazing to see all the effort and the learning and sharing that's going on. This community was built for this. Yeah, I would say they're actually shining right now. Definitely. This is definitely the kind of thing we talk about with the community and then when we've seen this sort of crisis happen across the world and we look at what the community's doing, it is definitely playing out. It's incredible. Yeah, it almost seems God had built this for almost just this reason or maybe this is just the first of many reasons. But it's remarkable. I do see though, and not necessarily in our community, if you look out in the church space, there seems to be two reactions. One is survive and another reaction really is, hey, this is an opportunity. We can learn a lot. We can do a lot. It's remarkable to see that the differences between those two camps, those that are leaning into it and making an opportunity, or actually some of them are growing hugely. The amount of people who are watching services online is through the roof. Emily, I think you've even talked to some churches where their giving has gone up. We have, yes. Some senior pastors have had some really incredible ways of leading their staff through this and their congregations where they've stepped up and said, Hey, we're being told to socially distance and so we'll follow CDC guidelines, but the way we're gonna phrase it is we're socially leaning in. We're just using every tool at our disposal that doesn't require us to be within six feet of someone and really calling to the congregation and saying, if this is something you wanna get behind, , support it because we're gonna need your support and that can only come through online donations at this point. So please do that and we'll be back in touch daily or weekly to give you updates about how we're impacting the community with the funding that you're bringing in and it's working. I think that's smart that that was called for the senior leadership actually told the congregation. I think that's needed. People are looking for something to rally behind right now. And so if your messaging and your communication is, hey, a lot of people are lonely, are anxious, are in need, and the church is uniquely positioned to help with that. Let's figure out just a new tool set, but we've got this. I think people are getting behind that. I think a lot of these tools or ideas or concepts or innovations are gonna keep going even beyond this. Think there's so much good things that maybe the church is realizing, Hey, we should've been doing this anyways, but now it's forced us to do it and now we might keep doing it. reaching out to seniors. Think a lot of churches are probably gonna keep that going now that they have the tools built for it. I think you're right and it's been so interesting to see churches use a combination of new tools and old methodology to reach people in new ways. So for instance, calling everyone on the phone. Churches haven't done that in forever but everyone's pivoting, everyone's calling, calling the most vulnerable people in their congregations or just calling everyone and dividing it up and it seemed that's been a very successful tool for churches. Yeah and that kinda, know, syncs with all the calls I've been making this week too is obviously no one is enjoying this process and no one thinks this is a good thing by any stretch. There is a certain sense of positivity from the reaction of, hey, this is terrible but we can make good things come from it. It's just exciting to see that spirit that people have. So we're a couple of weeks in and the churches that I've been talking to have had pretty common themes. Week one, they had to quickly figure out how to get all of their services and their content for different ministries online and how to kind of connect people differently. Week two was really how to get their staff working efficiently from home and what roles looked because they might have changed up since there weren't on-site weekend services. Then how do you administer digitally? What does that look ? And then also how do we transition our givers to online givers where they may have been check or cash givers. And all of those things seem to be the really critical points for churches. But I what you're mentioning, John, is that those who are really setting their vision beyond those critical points, they're saying yes, we have to cover these but what are we doing here right now? Those are the ones that are really seeing that the spike in attendance or views online, which is kind of attendance right now and giving go up and some of those other markers. Right, it just shows the value and the importance of leadership. If you take the bull by the horns and innovate and lead, you can even thrive in a hard time. I have to give you a shout out. If you're not following Jon Edmiston on Twitter, you really should because that video that you put out there about Ride the Cat, talking about how to just jump in front of the situation and make the best of it was pretty great. Yeah, I've actually had that little video in my store of social media ideas for months. I've just been , I don't know when I'm gonna use this, but and then I was looking at it, I'm , oh my gosh, this is the perfect video for this. Oh, very well played. So little social plug for you there. Oh, thank you for all five of my Twitter followers. Maybe I'll get a sixth today. Maybe so. Couldn't that be something? We've been busy too. We have, yeah. Our teams had to pivot. Not doing things the same way this week that we were two weeks ago either. Yeah, mean, top of all the normal things that we do in a week, we've been keeping up with that, but we've added a lot more to our plates. Obviously we're jumping into the community and trying to figure out and scope out what's needed and we've come up with a few features. One is a connection campaign. So to help enable those of you who want to make these calling campaigns, create those and keep them going from a digital perspective, we've created some features on that. And that was an exciting time. I think Nick and I jumped on a Zoom call Friday, last Friday was it? One week ago, yeah. Yeah. Smashed out the feature, drew out the feature, mocked up the feature, made the requirements. And literally it's been around the clock around the world. The team's been working. For those of you who don't know, we have one team member who's been with us for a long time in India. His name's Shivam. Love that guy. So passionate about working with us and we are equally passionate about him having him on the team and he's been working at night our night, which is his day in India. And when he's asleep, then we're working on it. Yeah. The old term that I got from Motorola, follow the sun. We've followed the sun from Sunday to Monday to Tuesday. I think we wrapped up testing. I've lost track of the days. Right. And it's been a mean, a lot of people on our team have been involved in that. Obviously, Nick, you were critical and crucial to being the ring leader master of keeping all the thing flowing. But Mike on our team was very impactful on that. Luke jumped in. Luke jumped in and did a good job on QA ing it and just making sure it was all working right. And when you move that fast, it's a little worrisome. But he did a great job on that and just kind of pulled it all together. And that's just one. That's just one thing that we've been working on. Right. But I think what's really important to note is we didn't just put it into a Rock release because then that could stall out and somebody would have to wait till they get that release. We made it a plug in so you can go get it right now. Yeah. Good point. Good point. So as long as you're running nine four above, you can grab it. People have asked, is this going in the court? And it will. We have a few little additions we'd to add, but we'd probably put it, we're guessing, don't hold us to it, 10.3, but we need to think through this. We're moving fast. So it will go into core. Don't worry if you install through the Rock Shop. We have a strategy to clean it all up and get it just right, so don't worry. If you need it now, install it. If you don't need it now, well, you'd probably wait and you'll get it in Core and you can always install it from the Rock Shop next week if you need to. But that's an exciting feature. We are actively working on today a new workflow action to be able to add a prayer request. So that should be in the Rock Shop hopefully today, if not tomorrow, Saturday. And then we're working on a few beta features too. So we're trying to work on a video chat ability to embed a Think of it as embedding a Zoom capability onto a Rock webpage. We're piloting that with several churches. We're not ready to roll that out yet. It's a little different because we have to actually host that. And so the hardware behind that costs money and we're not sure how it scales. So we're kind of slowly ramping in this end so we don't overload and kill some servers. But we're quickly innovating on that. We've done a lot of content. Emily, why don't you talk about all the content that we've put out either in social media or in document form? We have. We've been trying to do two things. One, we've been trying to get the content that we know, maybe an expert input onto the best way to use a feature or a recipe that's a little more exactly how to set something up rather than the lighter strategy approach. And then we've also been curating community content to try and have a central place that people can go to to get what they need without reinventing the wheel because that's the beauty of the community is that so many amazing things are being done in a collaborative effort that we just wanna make sure that all of the things that are coming in from core team expertise, all of the things that are coming in from community recipes and community ideas all have one central place that you can go to. So we have been working on that, we still have a lot of really fantastic content coming and you can find all of that content in a couple of places. One is on our blog. So if you go to community.rockrms.com, the blog is one of the main menu features on the left and you can follow us there and continue to get that great content. We're also putting out some quotes and some shorter style recipes or reminders on both our Twitter and Facebook platforms. And then as well, we also have a page on our website which is rockrms.com/coronavirus. I know it's super imaginative URL for that. It is probably one that everybody has but we're using that to consolidate some best practices there and some tools that we're putting out. So if you need to go learn more about connection campaign we're talking about, the hosted video chat beta feature that we're talking about, recipes that we're putting together, that page is a central location that can point you to the actual tools themselves. And so we're continuing to work on adding things there. And I will say we've had a great opportunity to connect with so many churches over this, whether inside of the community chat where everybody's very active in helping each other or one on one in phone calls and things. And we're trying to curate as much good information there and and get it out in your hands. So I do encourage you if you haven't been following us in those areas, make sure you do because there are some serious, gold nuggets that are quickly flipping through our blog posts and our social posts due to the the high quality of the content and what the core team's putting into it. Right. And we have more to come too. We have two guides that we're working on today. One will probably go out today, one may go out today. One is on just an overview of the prayer features within Rock. That's gonna be a major need here the next few days is more and more people are gonna be looking for, asking for prayers for loved ones, colleagues, friends who have come down with the virus. And make sure that you're looking through those features within Rock. We've been doing some surveying within Rock in the last few months, we kind of have facts on this. Rock's prayer features are very powerful. It's probably one of the underused features of Rock. So because we know that and because we know that they're gonna be needed, we're really highlighting that. That's why we're working on that workflow plugin. That's why we've been working on these guides. And as we've been talking with those of you in the community on phones calls this week, we've been really highlighting the need for a per request. We really feel that's gonna be one of the things that's coming next that people are really going to be looking for. Another thing just to put out there, if you're thinking about go forward and future, really need to be focusing on your digital platform and looking at the underlying infrastructure for that. We've been working with some churches more last week than this week, but a little bit this week, who are having some scalability issues with their Rock infrastructure. And a lot of that was just configuration. Actually, most of it was configuration. A few things that we learned that I wanted to pass on today is make sure that you have your cache strategy figured out for your pages on your external website. Make sure you understand all the options. Dialing that in correctly can mean huge differences in page load time and that translates into how many pages your server can host and process. So understand that. Get that dialed in. That was one major finding from last week. Another major finding was legacy lava. Nick, do you want to maybe cover a little bit what legacy lava is and the importance of that? Sure. I mean, it's an option under your global settings and we've been recommending for a while that people turn that off. So it's, I think, set to no legacy, but we haven't forcefully pushed it to that. So that basically requires that you would make that change manually. However, before you do that, you'd probably want to curate through your exception log and make sure that you're not seeing any legacy lava warnings. And that's just basically, a way to reference a property on a thing in lava. If you do the dot notation, it's gonna trigger a legacy lava warning in your exception log. But if you use the attribute filter, you won't. That's the way around it. That's the fix for it. So I'm not sure. We probably have some guidance under attributes in the lava docks? Maybe. Think one version, correct me if I'm wrong, Nick, and I should know this, but it's something I've been wanting to look up all week. At a certain version. Didn't we say it's we set it to , not do legacy Lava if you installed if you installed recently? Yes, if you're a brand new install, you probably don't even have it enabled. But if you've been around since the early days version six thirty four, etc, we it was an option and yeah. Yeah, and jump in the community ask about it if you're confused. Obviously, we at Spark Spark Ability can help with that reach out to a partner to help with that. You can get up to easily, I mean, this is easily a 60% speed improvement on the processing of your pages by flipping one switch. Nick said, you have to go through and make sure you're not using any legacy Lava before you do that. That's written into the exception log, as he mentioned. Or just change it and then go look at the exception log after. You should always look at the exception log after anyhow. Yeah, if do that though, you could have workflows that don't work the way they used to. So just be careful. It's kind of a pain point that we have to clean up, but you need to do that. As you're seeing, the digital platforms that you're using are more and more important. And we've got to get some time and some effort into getting them to scale. And if you need help with that again, we can help with that. It's an exciting time because we always knew that what we worked on was important, but now it's mission critical. That's true. And working on performance is one of the things that our professional services has been focusing on a lot in the last two weeks. In addition to installing prayer features for people, we did a couple of setting people's external pages up to help them maximize their messaging and their content and so we know that that's very important all of these and it seems it's kind of every week there's a bit of a focus on another area where churches are starting to dial in and I think you mentioned prayer requests is the most important thing coming up so get ahead of that, get that going right now And the other one is, is your system performing? Can it handle the new traffic load that you're probably having on your site? Yep. This is our time to shine, which means we should give it our best work, put in the extra effort to make sure that now that the spotlight is a little bit on the digital folks within churches, let's make sure that it's our best work, our best effort. And also too, just sounds a weird thing to say, but let's make sure we remain humble through this. Sometimes when the spotlight comes on, sometimes there's a tendency or a human nature to want to just shine in that light, and that's good, but make sure we remain humble because how we show and lead through this will depend and set us forward as things get better. Are we kept in a little bit of a light or are we pushed back into a corner? That decision's gonna be made on our response, right? So now's the time to show good humility, good leadership, good poise through that. That's a great point. Think long term here. Lots of stuff still coming up though, Emily. What else do we have coming up in the next couple weeks? Oh, we have some really exciting things. In addition to extra great content that's coming out that everybody needs, we have a very exciting opportunity coming up next Wednesday with what we're calling the lead through it live panel. And on that panel, we're going to be having a live Q and A with several leading Rock community churches that are doing some really interesting things in ways that are different from each other and finding a lot of success with that. So that should be up and available to preview the information on our homepage here very shortly and that is going to feature Tyler Vance with Life Church, Frank Grand with NewSpring, Adam Hahn with LCBC and Chris Nelson with Traders Point Christian. And John and I will be a part of that as well. And from the churches that we've been speaking with, there are some really unique strategies that these four churches are bringing out and this is gonna be an excellent time for churches to ask questions about what kind of tools are bringing success, what kind of strategies are bringing success, and to collaborate a little bit more in live panel format, which we're very excited about. Yeah, it's gonna be a great time to hear what they're doing and they are doing some amazing things and hopefully be able to ask some questions too if you have questions about what they're doing. But I would maybe think if you have a little bit of time before the panel, go out to each of their sites, get a little bit familiar about how they've changed. I know for example, Newspring has changed their homepage quite a bit to make their digital services presented in a different way than normal and I think it's pretty cool. And they're doing some really cool things with their services. So definitely watch the service. You can't watch the whole thing, just skip around a bit. They've definitely innovated in a great way. I think there's a lot of lessons learned there. So if somebody wants to find out more about this upcoming live panel, where do they go? RockRMS.com. It'll be on the homepage very soon. It's not there yet. What is it is there, but it's hidden right now. But we're rapidly moving to push that page forward. We have a our web team is pushing on that right as we speak. It is likely that it will be available when the podcast is or very shortly thereafter. We hope. So working on a few little details about how we're gonna host that podcast, we have a couple options and a couple things we're looking at. I think that's the only thing holding up the page at this point is just a little bit of details. But the event itself is going to be on Wednesday and that will be at nine Pacific, twelve Eastern. So mark your calendars for that. And in the page that you'll get to from our homepage, we'll have all the details and you'll be able to get where you need to go from there. So make sure you join us for that. Start blocking your calendar now. This is a very critical Rock community event that you don't wanna miss. Yeah. I think being there live is gonna be incredible because you can get the information right as it comes. You'll have the ability to ask questions, but we do intend to record and have it available for on demand also. That's our intention. Things are moving quickly, but that is our intention. That's a good point. We have one other upcoming event that we mention and that is that we have been planning on a masterclass in April and we are continuing to plan on that same class, but we are going to take it digital. So this will be an online only masterclass, which our intention is not to have that be the case for every future masterclass, but this one it is because we're hearing from churches that they need the expertise to be working and growing inside their Rock instance right now. So make sure this is one that you sign up for. The timing is very good. We're all learning that we need to know a little more about what we need to know more about. So this is the class you want to be a part of. There won't be travel costs associated with this one because it's online. So we know that some budgets have been kind of trying to figure out how to react in the current circumstances. If you were thinking about training at all this year, this is gonna be a good one to go to because you don't have the travel costs associated with it. Same content, same instructors, it'll be as close to the live environment as you can do in a digital format. We're really looking forward to it. We think this is gonna be a very unique opportunity for churches. So if you are planning to attend a master class or if you weren't planning to, this might still be the one you want to get on your calendar and you can find that on our master class page. Definitely. As a lot of us are working a lot of extra time, just realize there are some people maybe on your staff who this might be the perfect time for them step into a class to get some deeper knowledge. And there's lots of things that people maybe who were focused maybe on on-site ministries can now do other things while we go through this stay at home season, things merging duplicates. Be creative. Now's the time to actually get your database kind of cleaned up too if we have some resources that are available because their other job duties are no longer temporarily needed. Great. Well, that's a lot. Well, that's a lot. That's what we've been up to and that's what we've been hearing you've been up to. So just a little encouragement, keep doing what you're doing and keep sharing it. The impact coming from this community is really incredible. Yeah, and just keep in mind, these are the times that we're gonna be talking about for the rest of our lives, really. Mean, we're always going be talking about remember when that happened and remember all the while it seems it's hard, it seems it's tiring. I think these are the days that we'll look back and have good memories of what we accomplished. Yeah, now is not the time to rest. , we can rest when we're buried. Right. I've seen a few people online who are , not related to the Rock community, just in my social circle, they were saying , Oh, I wish I had more time to binge watch everything everybody else is doing. And I'm , oh really, that's one way of telling your grandkids what you did during the coronavirus. Grandpa, how did you help during that time? Oh, I binge watched Netflix. Or you can say, no, I leaned into it and we made all these tools to help churches. I mean, is a, get your hands dirty. This is not your typical work week and make the best of it. That's right. It's temporary but we don't know how long it will last so we just highly encourage you to join us in Leading Through It and thanks for joining us today. Do a church that loves the idea of using Rock but hasn't taken that leap yet? 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