Podcast Episode 97: Episode 70: The One With Interesting Nuggets

Description

In this episode of Rockcast, we'll talk about v9 and how much we appreciate our testers, and we'll share a few interesting nuggets including some data about Rock community instance stats. We're getting so excited for the RX2019 Conference and the Master Class! We can't wait to see you there.

Transcribed Content

This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock partner Triumph Tech, a full service specialist partner. Rock partners provide crucial support for Spark Development Network and important services for the Rock community. Connect with Triumph Tech today at rockrms.com/partners. Welcome to this episode of Rockcast. I'm Emily Forman. We have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo here today, and we're going to talk about what's going on with Spark Development Network and with RockRMS here in the final few weeks before the Rock Conference. Nick, can you give us an update on where we are with our current version releases? Sure. We just released version nine dot one. And so at the time of this publishing, it'd probably be out for about three weeks, and it's been pretty quiet. So there weren't many issues that were found during nine point zero, a handful, so we fixed those in 09/2001. And if all goes well, we won't have a 9.2, and we'll just keep moving forward. Wow, sounds good. And we have a great team of testers, right? Alpha, beta? Yeah, we do. We have a good team. We're always looking for more people. You think you wanna get involved, especially with beta testing, just contact me and I'll make sure that you've got what it takes, and I'm sure you do. But yeah, we'd love to have more testers. I always find it interesting too that we're not really saying, Hey, all you developers, come test things. We're saying, Hey, everybody who uses Rock, come use it in the way you would use it and help us know if you run into anything that could be a problem in your typical use patterns. Yeah. In fact, they make better testers because they do things that developers don't think of. So I always call them normal people. We need normal people as testers. We all need to be surrounded by some normal people. I too that because Rock has so many configuration options that sometimes the way we think something's going to be used isn't the way it's actually being used at churches, and there are so many correct or right ways to use something that that really helps when we have a wide variety of testers. Yeah, that's really important. We do frequently run into not frequently, we have occasionally run into issues where someone is using a feature in such a way that we just never expected it to be combined with something else. We tend to think through a lot of that stuff, but every once in while that happens, then we have to step back and say, okay, well, that, do we wanna support that? Is that a bug? Is it a feature? So I think that happened this morning. Oh, that's pretty cool. So another really good example of how diversity of people and churches and perspectives really helps make the unification of everything stronger. Absolutely. Better together. Oh, hey, that's a great catchphrase. We should put that on something. So John, we've been working on some interesting things. You had begun collecting some data. Tell us what that looks , kind of what your plans are for that. Gosh, I don't know what the plans are for it. So the backup, were looking still at the hosting, and that's so much more complex than I would have ever thought. But we're trying to look at SQL Server licensing, especially because that can get quite pricey. And trying to get an idea of how big of a database should Church need, right? So I thought, well, who better to ask than the people who are already using Rock? So a couple weeks ago, I put out a couple SQL statements into chat and asked people just to run them and give us back the return set. And I wish I could write up a huge blog post about it, but there's really not time. But there's some interesting things that I thought we could just kind of talk about and go through. And my initial bit of information that I wanted was how big is a database for a certain size of church? So if we think about I I was kinda going for the metric of gigabytes per thousand active weekly attend weekly attendance. Because everybody knows their weekly weekly attendance pretty well. So if a church came to us and said, Hey, we're running about 2,000, I want to know, Well, on average, that should be about this many gigabytes that you're going need. The interesting thing is you cannot use that. That is not a good metric because the initial response coming back in was about, you need about a gigabyte and a half per thousand. I'm , oh, this is great. This will work really well. We can maybe even use SQL Server Express. You get 10 gigabytes databases there. And we could totally do that for a lot of churches. But then more data came back and some of y'all have 21 gigabytes per 1,000, which is crazy. I mean, the difference there is different. And it's a little bit all over the map. I'd say that the average, if I looked at the median value there was 6.9 gigs per thousand, and the average was 7.8. And do we know where that data is coming from? Is it Yes, we do. Oh, okay. Now, when you go on a fishing trip, you're looking for a specific fish. But I thought, well, while I'm fishing, I might as well throw some other lures in. But then when you're done, you wish you had asked for 10 more things. So it's kind of trying to predict what other stuff you might want to know. But those queries had some other information in it too. So I guess the first insight is if someone asks you how big, how many gigabytes they need for their database, it's really hard to answer that. But if you went around the seven and a half, you're probably going to be somewhat safe, although I'd be careful with that. We also gathered information their average weekend attendance, obviously we needed that, their database size, how much space was in their database that wasn't allocated. So just kind of saying, okay, your database was this big, but you have a lot of unallocated space in there, so you can adjust that. I thought we might want that in the future. We might be able to have a feature where we could help you push a button and it would adjust it for you. The total active records that you have in your database and the total records you have in your database, which brings us to another interesting insight. A comparison between how many total records you have in your database and how many active records you have in your database. So in a sense, that should tell you a little bit about your data integrity metrics. So for instance, some folks at the bottom So I created a metric called percent inactive. Wouldn't it be interesting to know what percent of the records in your database are inactive? So some people have 2.2%, five point six, two point five, one point eight % inactive. So that's super low. And then some people have 82%, sixty nine %, seventy one %. So huge disparities on So that could mean one of a couple things. That could mean that those people with the very, very low percentages are very, very new to Rock and maybe brought in their data, or maybe didn't bring in their data, maybe they just went straight to Rock and they didn't have a lot of legacy data. Perhaps some of those with higher numbers have been on Rock longer and have good data integrity. The average or median around there was probably about 35.5. But I would say those with the lower numbers definitely There's something going on there. And it's hard to attribute one thing to that. You can't say, well, don't have good data integrity processes, because it could be something else. It could be new, they could have a very different ministry. But in general, I think if you're lower than 35%, I would probably guess that your data integrity could probably use some work. In fact, here's somebody with 1.3% inactive. Oh, wow. Although that's a very small new church, so that's probably But there's one church here, and of course we're not giving out names, who's over 10,000 and has a very low number. So I would kind of want to know more about that in terms of are you guys inactivating records? Because you we should. I mean, everybody's who has a database of a couple years should be in way way into the the forties probably. I mean, come and go and so I thought that was interesting. We also looked at how big certain tables in the database were, so we know binary files, that's obviously one of the biggest in the database where you put all your checks and photos and stuff. That was kind of an interesting one. Attribute values is another table where we store all the values for the attributes that you guys make. Interactions, it was kind of interesting to see, trying to see who's using interactions and how many they have. That was kind of interesting. And then history. There's a table inside Rock that kind of keeps history on people and trying to see how big that was interesting. Everybody was a little bit all over the map on that. Another interesting one that I think that we could actually talk a little bit about was communications. So there's a lot of communications, obviously, in these databases. And then what I did is I did a size per communication and a recipient's per communication. So some people had, on average, five to one person had one. So obviously, they're not using the communication tool as a bulk tool. But then there's others that had an average of 68, thirties, a lot of thirties. The median on that was 13, but that's kind of thrown off a bit by one or two that obviously aren't using it as a communication tool. So that kind of tells you, who's really using and reaching out and doing mass communications through through Rock. And then the size was interesting because it's , well, how how big are the how how much content is in your emails? So a lot of good data here. I mean, is one of those things that we can't really give out the data because we didn't really get permission from these folks to pass on their data. Even in aggregate, I'm afraid that because our data set's not huge, it's not big enough that you could probably tell who some of them are. But it kind of goes into another area, which is when we see this, I think there's a lot of good tools here that if we could maybe someday, and this is the stuff that I hate to talk about because we don't really have time on the roadmap and in our projects today to work on some of this, but if we could make a block that would submit this data back to us, we could aggregate it and then send it back to you, and then you could see, for example, your percent inactive, we could show you a bell curve of where everybody else is and then where you are on that bell curve. Then that could tell you, well, maybe my data integrity is not Or maybe there's another reason that you would have. I think there's a lot of things in here that we could, by looking at the aggregate data and giving it back to you, you could kind of compare yourself. And you could say, oh, I guess we're not really using communications as well as some of the other people. Mean, we'd love to do that because I think the insights would be very interesting to each church. I think you're right. That would be fascinating. I think that some of that you could almost do yourself with what someone has shared right here. So if somebody says, Hey, I'm interested in my active versus inactive. If you've never looked at it, you probably should do that. See what your story is, right? It might be unique. On that one, try to get above 35%. But I think even to a bigger piece of it, the stuff that I work on, one of my biggest frustrations is this type of problem. It's , Oh, we found this interesting nugget. I would really love to unpack this and get this out in a blog post, but at the end of the day, there's not time for all of this. The tension inside me on that kills me. It's I really, really want and this is just one example. There's a million different things. Even this week, there's so many things I want to tell people about that I don't have time to synthesize into something coherent. It is kind of fun to share one with the community that comes up because we do have a lot of things that come up and we talk about them and nobody ever hears about them and we're thinking, Oh, there are so many good things we could do. This, you said, is just one example. Yeah. But it's it's kind of fun to give everybody an ear to some of the conversations that we have. Right. And if only there was three other queries I had sent over it. , in hindsight now, having this, I was going literally just to get one piece of data. That's all I wanted. But then, in a whim, I just threw a few other queries in there. And I'm glad I did because I never would have seen some of this insight that we had. Do you mind sharing what your, the number of churches that replied? That would be interesting to know, just to have a Yeah, let me do a quick count. Nothing putting somebody on the spot, right? Yeah, and then I wanna know how many were asked so I can get the percentage. Oh, it's been a long time since I had my statistics class. I'm reaching back to somewhere in high school, but this is pretty interesting. So there's 27. But I asked him in Rocket Chat. The cool thing is 27, that's a good number. That is I got that number back within twelve hours. Those active people in that channel at that time. Yeah, and they're very responsive. Now, did coerce them with two chat points if Oh, that's funny. Which is well worth it. Mean But, yeah, how fast we got it back was really it's really cool. That's the great thing about the community, right? We we can quickly request information. We can quickly send something out to a subset of people and see what a reaction is and how we might need to adjust things. I mean, there's just It's pretty cool to have a community that's this responsive. Yeah, I thought it was interesting. And again, wish there was more time to unpack it and to show the data. And again, maybe someday we build a block that can do that. It submits your data in aggregate, not all your data. But you opt in and you press a button. Yeah. And again, we're not looking for names and addresses. We're just looking for counts. Mhmm. So that seems very safe. Sure. That's good. Well, speaking of the community, it's almost time for a big community event of the year, the Rock Conference. If you haven't been to a Rock experience, you really don't know Rock all that well. Even if you think you do as an administrator or someone who works with the product alone, it is not even the beginning of Rock. So this conference is really exciting. It's the one time a year we get together, and this is the one time that we get to do it at NewSpring. And NewSpring, as a lot of our listeners probably know, has been working arm in arm with us on this big project called Rock for many years, since way back in the beginning. And we are really excited to be able to have a hosted conference experience on their campus. It feels a little bit a homecoming. Yeah, and I'm excited too for people to be able to see and experience NewSpring in their campus and their I mean, it's off the chart, and that's a big piece of the Rock experience too, is just seeing that and seeing an innovative church that's been with Rock from the very beginning. And you get to see some of that too. Some people might think it's off the beaten path, but it's really not. It's just down the street from Atlanta. And you can fly into Greenville if you'd to, but Atlanta is I've done that drive. We've done that It's an easy drive. It is. And so fast. So I would say come for that too. Definitely. And interestingly, we had a conversation with the event planning team at NewSpring this week, and they started doing just a general count of their volunteers who want to come help out at the Rock conference, be on-site, help out with moving people, living signage kinds of things, help out with snack tables, and just all kinds of things that it takes to run and administrate a conference this. They have so many volunteers that want to help. I mean, we are looking at a volunteer pool completely unlike one that's ever been at a Rock conference in the past from a church. They're just really doing everything they can to make this event pretty incredible. Yeah, their event team is amazing. Top notch. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Was talking to Frank this week, and he was saying that they're even looking for more things they can do to help us. And Erin specifically was saying that, to Frank, that she's gotten so much out of Rock over the years through the camp support and everything that she just really wants to try to do something back. It's so great. I mean, that church is That's not just one person at that church. That church is That's just the way everybody there is. It's their DNA. It is, it's their culture. And when you say Erin, you mean Erin Reid. I think we should give her a shout out. She's been absolutely incredible in working to Every event has things that would work very well at a location and might not work so well there for their location, and there's a lot of just stuff to work through. Well, this is what we'd to do. Oh, well, this is how we do it here. And that's the kind of conversation you have anytime you bring an event to a location. And they have just absolutely bent over backwards to make as many accommodations as possible. And she's just been a real joy to work with. So shout out to Erin Reid. Frank, make sure you pass this along to her. We're so thankful to be working with her at the NewSpring team, and really looking forward to the event. I think a few years ago you brought up a book from Adam Grant, Give and Take. And he's talking, I think personally, how much do you give, how much do you take? And givers always win. And I think organizations are the same. There's some organizations that are just give, give, give, and there's some that are , take, take, take, and everybody's basically on the continuum somewhere in between, right? Right. But Newspring is very far on the side of give, give, give, and that's cool. It's such a blessing to be able to work with them. I mean, have a meeting with Frank once a week because of all the work that we do, and it's one of the highlights of the week. It makes a great partnership. Yeah, it's never one of those things, oh, now I have this meeting. It's , the newsprint meeting, cool. Okay, so let's talk about some of the specifics of this particular conference because we've never run this particular event, RX twenty nineteen, before, and we never will again. So make sure you don't miss this. We're going to have over 60 speakers. We are going to have four tracks plus a vendor track this year. In fact, we had so many people who came to us and said, I have something I need to share with the community that we had to open two simultaneous best practices tracks. So that's really exciting. We've been overwhelmed with content this year, and it's all good stuff. That's some tension of , which one do I go to? That's what I was gonna say. Good luck to you in figuring out which session you're gonna go to. We also have a half track for innovation and a half track for developers. They will each occupy one day, same room. And then we will have a kind of new and light training track for churches that are a little bit newer that may not be quite as deep into best practices yet if this is their first year or if they're still thinking about Rock. So a lot of options. And then of course, the vendors. So one of the main reasons a lot of churches come is to connect with Rock partners and sponsors, and they're going be able to go listen directly to what it is that they're doing in the Rock community, hear about some of those things, make sure they make those connections so when they go back home, they're supercharged from best practices to vendor connections to all the information that they could possibly need. But don't just come alone. So if you're signed up right now, you're the only person at your organization who's coming, just realize the tension of looking at the schedule and saying, which room am I going to next is gonna be hard. So bring somebody else if you can. If you really are not able to do that because of the size of your organization, pair up with somebody. We have the Rx2019 channel open in chat. Pair up with someone else who's a one person church and see if you can share content there. But I highly encourage you, if you can, bring a team of at least two or three people to make sure that you can cover what you need to. And there's gonna be a few surprises I hear. Yes, you hear correctly, but we won't be really saying anything else about And I heard this is the first one I don't have to present it? No. No. That's not true. John will be presenting. We're very much looking forward to your presentation. Yeah. Well Presentations. , it's always surprising how long it takes to even make the slides for those presentations. You are masterful with the slides. I don't know if I'm masterful, but it takes a long time. It does take a while. In PowerPoint. I'm always surprised what you can do in PowerPoint. People just PowerPoint. Does some pretty cool stuff. It's pretty great. It is funny how much time all of the little details take, from building those presentations to just coordinating the meals, because we bring our meals into the conference, to all of these little things. There are a lot of T shirts? T shirts. Yeah. Yeah, that's been interesting to Just got a message yesterday that our t shirts didn't get printed very well. So luckily they're taking care of it, but that was a lot of back and forth. Mhmm. Yep. And some surprises we ordered. So on Sunday night, we are having we're opening up the sponsor location, bringing in some food, having a little party, inviting the community to come join us. Know, we'd to know you're coming so we can make sure we have enough food. A headcount is good. RSVP, let us know if you're able to make it. But we're gonna be giving out some goodies, some special swag to the first seventy five people who arrive that nobody else is getting. I hope I get one. I know. Now you won't. Is that just breaking news, or has that been announced somewhere else? We've been kind of talking about it lately, but I think this is pretty exciting. So make sure on Sunday night that you are coming to the conference location. We will have food. We will have all the vendors. We will have a lot of fun. And if you're there early, you might be one of the lucky 75. Is it is it true that the b fifty twos might be showing up to seeing Rock Lobster at that event? They're on tour right now. They are on tour. I just saw them, , last week. I tried to get backstage to ask them if they would sign his chip sticker, but Sign a chip sticker? I don't know. That would have been perfect. I know. I was thinking if only I had a backstage pass. That would have been pretty awesome. Yeah. They are You said yes, they are coming. And I said nothing about that. Said, okay, yes was my transition. Let's move on from John's pipe dreams to actually we are having an event Sunday night. Make sure you're there. We're gonna have a lot of fun. The whole event is gonna be from Sunday through Tuesday. We're gonna have a lot of surprises, a lot of good times. We're looking forward to connecting with all of our people again. they're from Rome, They're just down the street. Did we just go back again? They're just down the street. Did we circle backwards in topics? In the backyard. We did. That would be cool. Don't get your hopes up, though. Yeah. Folks. I think we're just gonna have to make sure John's exhausted this topic. What else would you to make sure you heard about on this topic? Well, I didn't really go to see them, but anyways. Okay. So I think we're done with the b 50 two's now. They gave us Chip though. I mean, honestly, we wouldn't have Chip if it wasn't for that song. That's true. That's very true. That's very true. Our beloved community, Rock Lobster. Speaking of Chip, we will have a promo shop at the conference. So make sure if you're not up to date on your Chip swag or your Rock swag that you stop by that booth. There Should be some chip stickers at the conference, right? Oh, yeah. Yep. Also, if you haven't signed up for the conference yet and you're thinking, oh, I'll just do it right before we go, please. We're ordering food. We're doing a lot of things. T shirts have been ordered. We really need to know now. So go ahead and get those final registrations in. Or if you're thinking, I might add someone else from my team, go ahead and get that done as soon as possible because we would be very happy not to run out of particular T shirt sizes. Yeah. And I'm sort of still surprised at how many people are still registering the last week, couple weeks. I'd say if you're thinking about that again, just do it because it makes it so much easier on us. Yeah. It really does. Yeah. We don't really ask for help us out too much, but this would be a big help for our team. It's not really RSVPing that you're gonna go to your next small group event. It's a much bigger event than that. It takes a lot more planning and a lot more coordination, so just do it. Alright. One last thing. Don't forget, while you're there, stick around for a master class. If you've been always wanting to do one and have not yet done that, this could take your Rock experience to the next level for the next year. We have limited spots, and they are filling up. I would not anticipate coming to the conference and then deciding to stick around for it. There may not be any openings. So make sure that you sign up on our master class page or go to the conference page, and there's a link from there as well. And to register, is that a Rock registration? Of course it's a Rock registration. No, I say that because I'm so surprised at how many other church management systems use a different tool for event registration. , that's true. It completely boggles my mind. You're missing so much information. You're not able to see so much about your people if you're using a different event registration system. Eat your own dog food. That's our philosophy. So we've always stood by that. It's important. If you're gonna have to eat dog food, you better make it taste good. In fact, we break our system maybe occasionally every couple weeks when we roll out the latest stuff internally, and that's important that we find those things before you guys do. Absolutely. But we have a checklist. We test it ourselves first. Right. But it's nice that we roll it out to ourselves first. So if there is any small thing that's gonna come through, we're gonna experience it. We're gonna fix it before it ever gets to the person. But let me just reframe this whole conversation because this sounds , oh, we have to use our own tools. Guys, this event registration is so powerful. It's really I love this event registration. I would not want to use something else. So this is not us saying we have to use it. This is us saying, hey. We love this so much. We get to pick any tool we want, and we're using this one. So That's what I'm saying. When I see them link out to a different tool, I'm , why are you doing that? , we run our whole organization off of Rock. I mean, literally, we are all in Rock all day. That's right. I don't know if people really realize that. I don't think we've talked about that lately in years. Well, whole community site is off of Rock. Mhmm. The documentation is all inside of Rock. Mhmm. I mean, it's so maybe we should do a it's one of those things if we ever had time. I mean, show how it works behind the scenes because it's actually quite sophisticated behind the scenes for documentation. Good RX presentation. That'd be pretty interesting. The power of Rock. But with tracking organizations, giving, communications. Right. I mean, I am literally in that tool. Our Rock is red at the top for spark colors. I'm in there all the time. Mhmm. I think if you could walk through our offices and just see what's up on everybody's monitors, If they're not building Rock, they're using Rock. So it's pretty cool. Yeah. Mhmm. Alright. Well, thanks for joining us for another Rockcast. We are looking forward to seeing you live and in person in just a few short weeks. Do a church that loves the idea of using Rock but hasn't taken that leap yet? With managed hosting, churches of any size can get access to Rock's amazing technology, hassle free. With just one click, Rock's managed hosting removes the roadblocks that might stop a church from switching to Rock by making the process simple. Churches get the ease of a SaaS church management system without losing any of Rock's powerful features. Are you ready to take the next step or share with another local church? Visit rockrms.com/hosting today.