Podcast Episode 86: Episode 59: Add a Zero

Description

Join our team in digging into the scaling and growth of Rock as we talking about adding a "0" to everything we do. 

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 for our fifty ninth episode of Rockcast. We're excited that you've joined us again today. We have a lot to share with you as usual. It seems things are just constantly picking up around here and we love this opportunity to tell you a little bit about what we have going on. I'm Emily Forman. We have Jon Edmiston and Nick Iroh here today, and we have some great things to share with you. Nick, why don't you tell us about the status of 87? Sure. Yeah 87 is is in beta, that happened this week. Well the week of the recording the week that you guys hear this it will probably be out. So, 80 got some really great fixes and some, features that I think John's gonna touch on. I would say performance is was one of the main things in eight seven. Right, John? Yeah. No. So that's the transition. That's good. Nice job, guys. Hey. It's early in the morning here. Right. It's it's been two solid weeks of of work. It has. So, anyways, yeah, performance is improvements are in 08/07, and, , that that's one topic to talk about. But I think the bigger topic is performance is is always been a feature to us. We've always said that from the beginning, but it's really, , taken a a front seat majorly in the last probably month or two. We're really just scouring the code base looking for performance improvements, and, , I think we've we've hit a few. One of the things we talk about around here is adding a zero to everything. Everything that we do, because of the growth, we have to add a zero. So the number of churches using Rock, add a zero. The number of employees we'll we'll have, we need to be planning to add a zero. But I also think we need to be planning to add zeros to the capacity of what Rock can do for churches. And this is a a great thing for big churches, but it's also a great thing for small churches because it means that they can be more efficient and effective with their platforms, that their platforms can be, , lightning fast. It also helps us in our RockCloud strategy that it reduces the overall, amount of infrastructure needed to run RockCloud, which, again, helps us to reduce costs to to everyone. So performance, is a big deal to us, and we we found a lot of things actually going way back that weren't performant, and we fixed those. So Yeah. I think one of the interesting things is we we'll see a piece of code that's, , running often, and it's just eating up a little bit of CPU. And for the most part, people don't need that CPU except when you're now paying for it. Right. So once you're paying for it, we can reduce that cost. And and one of the things that we found too is there's a a certain concept within Rock called the, giving leader ID. And so this is a calculated it it was a calculated field, well, still is, I guess, based on how the family is trying to, , group their giving. And it's, , completely configurable, and nothing from a feature set has changed at all. But we changed the way that was happening. That was happening in real time. And, again, you said, Nick, it's it's not that expensive. If you look at it myopically, it's , , what's the big deal? But if you think about how many hundreds of thousands of times that was being performed per day, even in a small church, because every person load was it was happening. And when you start grouping up people in inquiries, it was happening. And when you start trying to do giving analytics, it's, , happening, , all over the place. You see, , woah. This is not good. Even on a small church, there's huge noticeable changes that if we just calculate that when it changes and then recalculate it at night just to make sure, , no one kinda went around the backdoor with SQL and and changed something, It's now instantaneous. I mean, it's there's no there's no overhead to that. And and just to be clear, when John says no, that's actually v nine. We wanted to get that piece into eight seven, but we, , we run into complications with table changes that we have to avoid. So that one got we tried for eight seven, but it's it's definitely an eight nine or nine o. But that's one that we've been looking at and we have fixed. And Yeah. And it it's amazingly different. And we're looking for others that. , we have some tools that we're looking at to look at look through what's happening in our system. We're thinking about other strategies of of putting these tools onto a few maybe client customers that we can look at. Because, , our our production environment that we run is is a really good example of a lot of piece a lot of ways to use Rock, but we don't use everything. We don't use check-in in our office. So it would be great to have it running on a few other clients so we could get that telemetry data and and look through it. There are also check-in performance changes that we we looked at. Again, noticeable changes, that will , if you have, , telemetry today, you will notice the difference, on your graphs and charts, as soon as you install, eight seven and then some additional ones in nine o. Great. So do we wanna talk about the SQL the end of SQL '20 '12 support? yeah. Touch on that real quick. I mean, you have plenty of time, but we we always wanna be communicating ahead of time because we know with some of these infrastructure pieces, they are have a cost associated that and there's more so than the cost, there's just an effort associated with it. So we will be sunsetting support for SQL Server 02/2012 in January of twenty twenty. You have plenty of time, and SQL Server 2,012 has been out for a long time. It says 2012, but it's actually out, , before 2012. So Microsoft just ended life of in 02/2008. And then when I say end of life, they, that's the part where they put it in the grave. It's been already said, don't run this. And but they they they extend their support for a few years, but they already said no more after, I think it's in a month or two. You you can't call Microsoft on on SQL Server 2,008. And so we're just trying to help you get one step ahead. We we never wanna be that far in the past. Plus, if we can if we can ramp it up to say we the minimum level is $20.14, there's a few extra features we could probably start using. And some of the newer features that are coming out, , in 2019 are really exciting. It's not so exciting that we won't be able to get to use them for probably another four or five years, but, , you can always look to what's new and and, and look forward to it because four years will be here before we know it. Yeah. So if you're moving off of 2012, , you can look at moving to 2019 because by the time you move off, it it will probably have been released. Yeah. And you might , if you're if you if you are in 2012, you might be thinking proactively, , how do I wait till twenty nineteen's out and just move once? Because then you'll be good for Long time. Yeah. Probably eight years. Great. I would to give a few updates on some of the community events that we have going on. We are well, this week, we just wrapped up a master class and had, I think, the largest class that we've had so far. It was a great class. Yeah. Michael did a great job. He did an awesome job. It's been really fun for us to continue honing our process around this. In fact, right after this recording, we're going to meet as a group to determine how we can tweak our processes and change things again to continue making it a really excellent experience. But we interacted with churches there that were in every kind of stage of relationship with Rock, whether that's a considering stage, and they really wanted to know exactly what working with Rock would look and what the feature set is in-depth. They wanted to connect with a core team, all the way to a church that's been running on Rock for a couple of years. And actually we had a great conversation as we wrapped up yesterday with a guy who has, he's not the main Rock contact at his church, he's a guy in IT on that team, and the church had already sent two people a year ago to MasterClass, they were MasterClass trained, They were responsible for internal training and support on Rock at their organization. And they said, well, he should just come too. We need a little bit more depth of support. So he showed up to learn a little bit more about Rock and why and how and had a great time, came away and said it was a really, really good opportunity and he's so glad he did it. So it seems a very successful training event for a wide range of position types and a wide range of sort of that implementation status. And if you've been, I'd encourage you to look around your organization and see who else might be a really good fit for that class, who else the information would benefit in their role, and who else it would be beneficial from an organizational perspective to have trained in that as well. You shouldn't probably be the only person that knows how things run-in Rock at your organization. You might wanna vacation someday. So I do encourage you to continue looking at who might be a good fit for masterclass and send them this way, we'll be happy to meet them. And we always tell our students here, we know you're coming in with some key things you want to learn. So make sure that's what you take away and if it isn't connect with us before you go and we'll help you get the answers you need before you go home. So it's a really great opportunity. Yeah I think that's one of my favorite parts of the masterclass is when on the first evening there's a dinner and people are talking with you guys or talking with me or whoever from our core team is there and it's just so cool that we can drill in and answer very specific questions about their situation And , it could be a half an hour or an hour long discussion if, if they choose. And then there's a usually a hotel thing going on with slightly less people from the core team, I to go to that and, , we do demos and show people things and answer more questions. It's just I love that. Yeah. I I actually learned a lot at those dinners about, , what feature sets people are using. And and then I I mean, we're always talking about, , resources that we're reading, , , what books are you reading that you're learning from. I mean, there's just so much to learn from each other, and that's what I love about our community. It's it's it's so, , rich and by we're all, , bidirectionally sharing things. Very true. Another event that we have in full swing right now is our roadshow season. So that is the opportunity that many community members take to host a roadshow, which means opening their church campus, bringing in churches that don't know about Rock yet, taking a presentation that we send, delivering the presentation and then doing an open Q and A with those churches. That's a huge help to our team. Presents the important community aspect of Rock right from the beginning, which is our secret sauce. And the secret sauce is you, our listeners, you guys are it. And so I just really wanted to say thank you. I know many of you are hosting and leading roadshows and that's a time commitment for you. And you probably have to figure out how to sort your work week to accommodate that. And we're really appreciative of that. So a big shout out to our roadshow hosts and presenters. Thank you very much. What you do makes a big difference. In fact, a couple of the roadshows last year resulted in multiple numbers of churches in those two regions who are now either running live on Rock or working on their implementation, and that's directly out of those roadshows that were put on last year. So a major thank you to the community members in our listening audience who help out with that and who just have a heart for sharing how to improve ministry. And it's the big C church mentality. And what I love about it is it gets everyone off to the right start. They are now sharing and demonstrating to the next churches that come on board how to share. That's right. One other and our major community event that's coming up is our conference in September. So we did move it, if you haven't heard that yet, from August, which we've had the last couple of years to September to better accommodate the schedules of our attendees. It will be September at New Spring Church in Anderson, South Carolina. We're very excited about that. We're hard at work on the details of that conference. That'll be a larger crowd this year. It will be a whole lot of great best practices. Two things, registration is open. Make sure you get your registration in. The prices do continue to go up the closer we get to the event. So this is a great time to get that booked. Additionally, if you have some topics to share, we have our speaker call open right now. Don't think about, have I been on stage before? Is that my favorite thing to do? Think about this. Have I learned something that would put someone else's ministry in a better position that will move them forward with connecting with people? This is not an event for professional speakers. This is an event for community members who have a heart to share. And we're really thankful because this community in Rock is very sharing, very generous, and this is one event that really showcases that. So two things, get yourself and your team registered, and send over those speaker ideas to me, and we will be in touch soon about next steps and details on that. I also to give a quick update on the number of churches that are running on Rock. I would love to give you an actual factual number of the number of churches running on Rock, but again, we don't really invoice, and so we require churches to tell us when they have made the move. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. It's probably not the first thing a church thinks about when they're in the middle of an implementation. There are probably a couple other things on their minds and schedules. So sometimes we just frankly don't have that information and we find out later. But of the churches that self report, we have about four forty churches running on Rock right now, which is great. We're seeing that number moving up, but we know it's a very hyper conservative number and there are actually quite a few more organizations running on Rock than that. And that's great. We love the openness of that. All we use that number for is an indicator of growth. And so we can kind of watch the percentages change, which is really cool. But you might check your implementation status, which you can do on your Rock login, just make sure it's accurate if you're listening and wondering. And it's a pretty exciting number to track. Yeah, we do target some communications and resources based on that implementation status. Getting it correct will get you more relevant data That's right. More relevant information. Yes. And we also have an exciting new website coming. John, can you tell us a little about that? Yeah. We actually have two websites. That's right. In fact, by the time you're listening to this, they should be released. If not, it'll be within a day of of that. Sometimes we don't to release things on Fridays because it kinda tears into your weekend as you go around dusting off the little pieces that need to be finely tuned. But, yeah, we have two sites. So we've always had a Rock website. You guys have all seen that. We're trying to split that into two pieces. So we'll have what we call, , the marketing site, which is I'm new to Rock. What is Rock? How do I get on Rock? That's the audience for that site. And then we wanna have a community site, whereas I'm already on Rock, and I don't necessarily need to see that all the time, all those other questions. I just wanna get the resources I need to do my job day to day. And so we've really split those into two different sites, so we can hit those two different missions, with excellence. And, those so those are are done. We'll probably be polishing up because there's so many pages and and links that we've had over the years that we're we're still working on. But it's really exciting. I think the split of those two things is gonna be, , a ginormous improvement of what we do. So and now that I've been working with them, and Garrett has been doing an amazing job, getting those sites ready, as you work through those websites and you go back to the old one, you just kinda wanna be , oh, man. It almost feels v seven versus v eight again. ? Right. Every time I see a v seven site, I'm , oh, which is cool because I'll feel the same way probably about v eight, , in a year. So Right. Because we're always improving things, and and that's the nature of our community. So that's really exciting, , having these two sites, and it's really gonna be a platform for us to, , go to the next level. We we couldn't add a zero, with our current site. Right. Yeah. It was it was, difficult to find some things, which is the next thing I wanted to talk about. We're adding some new tools into that new community site. Prior to the launch of this new site it was kind of difficult to help us classify issues that people reported And that was a thing we really wanted the community to help with. tell us if this is a feature request, a bug request, is this issue reproducible? Can you actually make it happen with a set of steps? So we're providing by the time you hear this, you'll, there'll be a tool out there that will let you quickly assess and identify and label, we call it an issue for us. And then that will help it move through the pipeline quicker. Yeah. And we want more and more rockstars, and this is an opportunity really for someone who's not technical, someone who's not a developer to really not only become a Rock star, but really help us, really help the core team and the and the community of developers who are helping us with issues be efficient because you're you're taking a lot of work off our plate by double checking to make sure these are actually issues and helping us classify them. Right. So whereas before you maybe needed to be more of a developer type, you needed a GitHub account. Our intent was to make that easier. You don't need a GitHub account. We're gonna list them out on our website. You can see an issue and just dig in from there. Yeah, we wanna see a rockstar t shirt on you. That's right. We definitely do. This conference. Yep. All right, we have one final update I think for our podcast today. John, tell us about what's been going on with the conversations with the archdiocese in Detroit. Yeah, so we've been talking about that on the podcast, how there's been interest from various Catholic churches and the archdiocese of Detroit, on implementing sacrament features within Rock. And, again, the more we drill into it, what we're really talking about is is steps. And steps has been on our road map for quite a while. We've been wanting to get to it, but we've had all these other, , required features that we had to get to first. So it's really exciting to be able to work with, , a denomination that hasn't traditionally been a part of the community. And at the same time, they're gonna bring and help a major feature that we've always wanted. So this is I'm really excited about the feature of steps, but I think I'm actually more excited about just building a nondenominational truly, a a community that doesn't matter. And I love the fact that we're all gonna be helping each other. I think, especially in in our world, it seems we create these false barriers where we all believe the same core tenants, and then we we go back into our little villages and don't talk. And I hope that the Rock community can be the start of, more conversations back and forth and and sharing of best practices. Because what? Catholics have been doing steps for hundreds of years. Yeah. I looked it up. It was the Council of Trent in the fifteen hundreds where they came up with the sacrament, , list of the of the seven sacraments. And, , we've been talking about how important next steps are and steps, , seems for maybe two to three years. So I think it's cool that that the denomination that's gonna really help us get this feature into our product is also a denomination that has been doing this for consistently. I mean, that's a big another big term. Consistently for hundreds of years. So it is pretty cool. It's a pretty great community where we all have something to share and we all have something to learn. I mean, there's nothing but good that can come from that. Right. And it's actually twice this week, which is kind of ironic. Two different people on two different occasions who are they don't necessarily work at churches, but they're involved with helping churches have come to us and said, hey. We really believe that this is something huge. This this whole Rock experience, this whole Rock community is huge, and it's gonna be a transformative thing for church technology, and it's really gonna flip the the space on its on its ear. And I think they're right. And what I love about it is they say this Rock thing, not this spark thing, because spark is just a piece of this. Right? It's all of us working together in this community is what's flipping it on the ear. Right. And I think, , adding a zero to everything is probably not quite what God has in mind. I think he's probably eventually gonna be saying two may , or maybe even three zeros off of what we're doing. And if we're going to be able to do that, it's because of everybody in our community and everything that we're working on together. That's right. There's a massive amount of effort and interest and just a general love for the church and for the people that have yet to be reached, and that's a pretty incredible thing to be a part of. Right. And it's up to us to not only put our shoulder into it and help where we can, but also to help keep changing the models. I think that's the hardest part of what we've been doing is changing the model of what does it look to participate in a project that's not specific to a church, yet is funded a church. I mean, you guys get it. , we how much communication has to go into that. But that's where the that's we couldn't have done it any other way. Mhmm. It's true. Well, thanks to all of you for joining us in this effort. We appreciate your support. We appreciate your listening and being a part of what's going on. All of your efforts in the community and with improving the product. You guys are pretty great, and we're so thrilled to be connected with you through the Rock Project. Thanks for joining us. Today's show was produced by Emily Forman. Nick was our recording engineer who turned the dials and pushed 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.