Podcast Episode 89: Episode 62: The Elves are Working

Description

In this episode, we learn the elves at Rock have been hard at work, and it's not even Christmas. 

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 back to Rockcast, the podcast where you come behind the scenes with the Spark Development Network team to learn what we've been up to and what's coming along next. I'm Emily Forman. We have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo. And as usual, we are going to start the podcast out today talking about the latest version and what's going on there. I guess that's my cue. So we have just hot off the press. We're going to make 88 a reality. So we weren't sure at one point if we were gonna have an 88, we were just gonna wait till nine. But there's a couple of pesky little bugs that are an 87. So 88 is probably going to go alpha next week. So the week after this recording and it'll probably have a normal two week alpha, two week beta. It could be compressed depending how things go. Great. Okay. Well, that's good to know that reality is coming along. I'm sure people were suspenseful wondering which would hit first. But, John, why don't you tell us a little bit about the progress on v nine and what we should expect from that? Yeah. I think that's kind of what the tension of would we have of an a eight is because v nine is coming along so so well. , as you go through a project, the the major release project life cycle, you kinda hit, , little parts where you you go fast, you slow down a little bit, you hit, , a little sticky point that you have to kinda go through, and I think we just got through a a little bit of a sticky point. And, so now we're on the downhill on the development side, so that's really great news. So a few more final touches to put on assessments and and volunteer scheduling, but we're very, very close to being those being done on development. Then we need to spend some time, especially with volunteer scheduling, making sure that we do all the integration testing to make sure that all the moving parts are aligned and that the feature as it is designed makes sense. I mean, as it's written, it's written to how it's designed, but this is a very complex, , feature set. So we now actually have to use it ourselves in some mock, , week scheduling to make sure that everything kind of aligns and makes sense. So I I I imagine that there'll be some realignment there as we start using it. It's nothing your mouse actually using the feature that you you now completely understand what's working and what's not quite working and needs a little polish. So we'll go through that, but we're on the downhill of that, and so that's that's really exciting. Again, all of our major releases, there's a lot more features than anticipated in nine, so I can't wait for everybody to get access to them. And it's, again, at this part of the of the release that where we've been using some of these features for so long, you go back to using, , the beta site, and you're , oh my gosh. It doesn't have this. It doesn't have this. It have this. And eight o starts to look , , really kinda, oh my gosh. This is really old, and and so we can't wait till everybody's using nine. It's exciting. It feels we're talking about Christmas coming. Yeah. In some ways, the elves are working. The elves are working. That's a good way to put it. And the volunteer scheduling is such a complex feature set. I mean, we had a lot of input from a lot of churches on what they needed because the concept of what each church needed was so widely different in many cases that it's been it must be larger than we thought when we first Oh, yeah. Anticipated it. Right? Yeah. It's probably 20 times bigger than what we our initial thought. Well, let's just do this. And then we get the, , the the use cases, and they're good use cases. And it's , oh, no. No. No. This really means it needs to be much, much bigger. And this will be a one o, , release of this feature. So we'll all we're by no means are we done with volunteer scheduling, but we want a, , powerful tool out of the box. But everybody has a different slant on how this specific tool should work. It's it's been a little bit challenging just because I there's just so many different edge cases and weird and unique ways that people wanna use it. And they all make sense, but they're all different. So for all of our Rock star LEGO experts, there will be, sounds , some some room behind the scenes to see what's possible. Yeah. And sometimes when you hit features this, it almost becomes, okay. Well, that's black magic. , how do you make it do that and that and that and that and that and also do this? And, oh, by the way, has to be super performant and Wow. And customizable. So they these are the features that kinda get you a little, , not nervous, but a little on edge. , how are we gonna get this just right so everybody likes it? So but, , we're close. So that black magic is what we've been smelling coming from the developer area. , it No. What's that been? I'm just kidding. Burnt toast? Yeah. Oh, maybe it was the burnt toast. I didn't know. Maybe that's the air conditioning kicking on for the first time this year. Yeah. I don't know. Well, I wanted to bring up one interesting thing. Okay. So we we keep growing around here. The Rock community is well over 450 churches now, a lot of exciting things needed. And as the community grows, our staffing needs do as well. So we do have more open positions that we've been posting lately, and we're continuing to work on recruiting. And I wanted to share this with the community for a couple of reasons. One, stay where you are and do the good things you're doing in your church. You are absolutely crucial and key to the success of Rock right where you're planted. So continue blooming there, you're doing a great job. But you probably can resonate with what we're dealing with here, which is that it's really hard to find highly technically skilled people who have a big heart for the kingdom and want to move that forward. So I would ask those of you who are listening and who love Rock and want to see that continued growth and success, look inside your technical volunteer teams, look inside the people at your church, and see if there might be some people that would fit the bill and be a good fit for that. We have positions posted on our website rockrms.com/jobs. We also have a little disclaimer there. We're not looking to take staff out of current staff roles at Rock churches, but you have great connections whether you realize it or not. So we're encouraging you to look into your connections and see if there might be somebody that's a good fit for this that can help contribute to the kingdom, not on the side, but as their day job and and be paid well for doing it and be interested in, , contributing to the kingdom day in and day out with our team. We would we'd love to have the benefit of some of those connections. So if some people, toss a job description their way, and we would be immensely grateful for that. Do remember that your connections could be a big benefit to this ongoing success of the Rock team. So I did wanna share that little tidbit. And then I wanted to mention also when it comes to conference planning, we are in full swing for 2019. RX '20 '19 is gonna be a fantastic event. We consider a 50% growth rate conference over conference year over year to be kind of the baseline of what we've seen at a minimum. This year will probably be the same. It's mid September at New Spring Church in South Carolina. Great opportunity to connect with the Rock team, the core team, connect with the vendors and partners in the Rock space, and also to see NewSpring. So if you have never been there and you'd to, , it's a great time to take in a service on Sunday, the day before the conference starts. That would be September 22, I think the twenty third and twenty fourth are the conference. So some things to keep in mind if you have not booked your ticket yet, remember the price goes up the closer we get. We're right now in the middle of doing contract negotiations for all the things we'll need for the conference. So the ticket prices can be a little lower. Later, we'll have to make adjustments if you sign up. So we'd prefer you sign up now. And the pricing is better definitely if you do that now. The speakers are rolling in, we're getting speakers lined up, a lot of great things coming. So make sure you come, bring your whole Rock team. This is the time, it's once a year, you can connect with the other Rock churches. We're gonna build in more time this year than we had last year for connecting with other churches. And we think you'll really, really enjoy what we're doing with the conference this year. We also for the first time, which I'm really excited about, are putting some energy into the RX twenty twenty conference. So 2019 is going to be incredible. 2020 is going to be off the hook. We are going to be completely revamping the whole experience again for that. And we, I can't give any details now, so don't push on it, but I can say this, we hope to have everything, announceable live and and ready to talk about at the Rx twenty nineteen. We will be talking about 2020. So a lot of good things moving that direction, and and it's nice to be able to be planning that far out right now. And we're really trying to amplify what's going well with the conference. So Mhmm. By big ways, just really amplifying, magnifying the community feel Definitely. And just what's best about Rock Experience RX, making it even more of an experience. Right. And what is it you always say the the community is the secret sauce of Rock, and so we recognize that, and we want to build in plenty of goodness for that. Yep. Good. Alright. Speaking of goodness, there's so much goodness going on right now with with what's happening with Rock and Spark. Can you just share some of the a brief rundown of some of those updates, John? Yeah. I mean, I think it's easy for us to to always be pushing on the things day to day, but sometimes you need to kinda stick your head up and just kinda see the big picture and, , all the good things that are are going on. And so just threw together a quick list. I'm sure I missed more than half of it, but some really interesting things. , we've been doing a lot of work improving as we keep talking about no features ever done. So some really great improvements to the check scanning application. Not only is it getting a facelift, it now looks , , our new styling and branding, but it also has a lot of new features. And those features, come to thanks to, , Life Church and some of the, things that they've been wanting to to put out. We've also been working on some new features for, the SMS. We're calling it the SMS pipeline. So there's certain, features that today we have SMS for, , text to give and for conversations, but we wanna add more extensibility right there. So we're adding a whole pipeline. I'm not sure where this feature set's gonna land, but it's really, really exciting. Also, I mean, just celebrating some of the new people who joined the team. , we've had some, really great hires that are offloading a lot of of of of our plates. Also, we're finishing up some projects. We're doing a website for for Hillside, which is awesome. It's been a great project. It's amazing looking site. Some really good, interesting ways of maximizing the tool sets within Rock. Finishing out helping lots of churches get migrated to Rock, which has been great. Multiple new code projects have been coming in, things that these are the things that go into the feature sets that we didn't plan but are great, and we're working with those. Let me see. There's lots of new churches who have just come on fully. , we can announce this in the last few weeks. Northpointe is is now running on Rock. The implementation is is hit that milestone. Also, LCBC, very excited that they're now running on Rock. And there's lots and lots more that we just , the list is too long. But we're basically, we're seeing growth everywhere in in everything that we're doing. you mentioned, we're looking for we still need more help, but we have so many people already, , signed up to come join us in in the summer time frame, but we're looking for lots more. Everywhere we're going and everything we're looking at, it's just there's so much growth, and I think you can see it inside the community, and you can feel it there. Mhmm. I think sometimes, from a product perspective, it kinda goes in these fits and spurts, And so the major release, , we've been eight o has been out for a little bit. So our pace is is increasing on how fast we roll out major releases, but we're about to have another one. So, there's just so much good stuff going on, and I think it's good to just take a step back and realize that. Definitely. Well, thanks for sharing that. That is a huge encouragement to our team, an encouragement to the community, and I think it just goes to show that keeping the focus on building the kingdom and helping churches is exactly what we need to be doing. That's the reason we exist, and we will continue to pursue that with a single-minded focus and determination, and it's really paying off. So thanks for sharing that. Yeah, and again, going back to what you just said, it's not growth for growth's sake. , we grow and we do these things because we wanna provide the best service and the best innovation to churches. And when we celebrate it, we don't celebrate necessarily the items that we discuss. We celebrate the fact that we have these solutions that can empower churches to empower their ministry because it's gonna help and change people's eternal destination. Right. And the core values, which happen to be hanging right over your head, are not something that we just tack on the wall and say, hey, that's great and then not look at them again. We literally run our decision making process and our focus through the filters of our core values. I don't think we've shared those in a while. I'll just briefly outline those. Obviously, we started for accessibility and we have a model that allows small and new churches to use excellent technology to reach people without having to have the budget that necessarily goes along with that in, , in another industry or with other church management providers. That's a very big deal. Accessibility is key to what we're doing and it will remain so. It is assisted by the churches that do have a budget that are able to contribute to what we're doing. The fact that they're able to contribute helps make this ministry component of what we're doing function and is the reason we're a nonprofit. Our second core value after accessibility is community. And we're continuing to invest in that. The community section of our new website, the focuses that we're adding into our upcoming two conferences, really key and drivers to what we're doing. Craftsmanship, some of the reason we'd love to put our new releases out even faster than we do. But part of the reason that we take the time that we do is because we're consulting with multiple churches. We're trying to make sure we have the extensibility, the flexibility and the craftsmanship, the detail and quality that go along with that without compromising the ability to continue to flex as needed. And then innovation is definitely key for us. And we're always looking at how to continue to innovate in this space. And now that we've brought a lot of the feature parody to Rock that we've talked about for years, that innovation continues to be the inspiration behind what we're doing and pursuing. So I think it's important to mention those core values again, that they really drive what we do. And they're the reason for, I think, the the success of the model is because they aren't just keywords that are searchable. They're really they really drive what we do. Yeah. And you said something when you're talking through those that that really resonated too that that kinda is what makes some of the features kinda click, and that is that interaction that we have daily with churches either through community or through some of the professional services things that we do, or some of things that we're involved with. Recently got the chance to go out to a big data conference, and so you're hearing these ideas, and as ideas are great, but but what makes it the secret sauce is, , we're working with all these churches, and all the ideas, when they get thrown into the same container, they start to to create really a recipe that, by itself isn't clear and and and you can't see. But when you start working with all these churches, all of a sudden, , these really great ideas come out of it because of all the multiple interactions, and I think that's so important. And so in a in a sense, the professional services really does help the core product, not only with funding, but also with the salt and the and the seasoning for for what we're thinking about and what we're working on. Right. And I love that you're calling it a recipe because what we see a lot is, , all of these ingredients being tossed in a bowl together and stirred up and what comes out, , is related to the original ingredients, but never could have existed without the input of of all the ones that were involved. Right. Well, thank you so much for joining us again for another podcast. We always look forward to being able to share with you on the ROTCast what we're up to and what's coming next. And we definitely appreciate having you as listener. Have a great day. Today's show was produced by Emily Forman. Nick was our recording engineer who turned the dials and pushed the buttons. Jim Michael handled all the audio post production mixing. There are amazing show notes, which you can find at rockrms.com/connect, were transcribed and written up by Michael Garrison. 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.