Podcast Episode 82: Podcast Episode 55: 2019 and what lies ahead

Description

Happy Birthday Emily! Join us for the first episode of 2019 as we talk about the latest updates to Rock, remind you of some of the new toys Chip gave us for Christmas, and give you a peek at the future of the Core Team and Rock itself.

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 this episode of Rockcast, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes with Spark Development Network, where you get an update on what's new and fresh and what's coming soon. I'm Emily Forman. We have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo. And beyond that, we have a huge list of things to talk about. 2019 has just started, but it does not mean we're getting off to a slow start. There is a lot going on. This is a special podcast too because this is the Emily birthday podcast. So, I mean, random things could happen. Happy birthday. Thanks, everyone. That's great. Thanks. That's exactly how I wanted to kick this podcast off. Nick's gonna close out with a solo happy birthday, so be prepared. We'll see about that. Feel free to opt out of that one, Nick. Truly, happy birthday. Thanks so much. All right, let's get down to the actual business that people wanna listen to and hear about, which is not my birthday. I don't know about that. Okay. So let's talk first about the new commitment process for 2019. So we closed the year out pretty strong. I know the last update we gave you on pledges was looking a little bit shaky. We still didn't quite hit the pledged number, but we did come in in the upper 90 percentile of people who made good on their pledges, and we still have a couple checks that are on their way. So a big thank you to everyone who went above and beyond. Sometimes a dropped credit card payment happens mid year or something. So it's good to know that people will circle back and make good on that. We have a pretty great community in that regard. But our system for twenty nineteen is a little bit different. So rather than having what we call a pledge, we're talking about an annual commitment. And that can run on any giving cycle. So it doesn't have to be the 2019 calendar year. If your church's giving cycle, if financial cycle is on a June to June, then that's no problem as well. What you're basically telling us is in any twelve month period, this is what we're committing to, and this is the way we're gonna break the payments out, if it's monthly or quarterly or whatever makes sense for you. It's a little bit easier to understand based on what we've been told. So that is available on your profile on the Rock page. You can log in there you have administrative rights and set your commitment for 2019. If you don't have one there, we'll probably be checking in with you if you're running live on Rock, because knowing your plans makes a huge difference in our ability to grow, expand, and commit resources to projects. And as you'll hear here in a few minutes, there are a lot of projects that need resource commitment, and we have some exciting growth going on too. So do think about as you're planning this year, share your plans with us so that we know what to work on ourselves. That was kind of a long way around that topic, but it's a really important one. And we have a really awesome responsive community. So I just wanted to make sure it was clear since we're changing it up a little bit. All right, let's get an update on where we are with our current Rock version and what's coming next. Well, we just kind of pulled the trigger on 8.6, so it just went to Alpha. So our Alpha team has already been informed. They'll be test Testing will be underway by the time this podcast actually comes out, hopefully today. And then we'll have about a two week alpha test cycle and then followed by one or two weeks of beta testing. And then it will go to general release immediately because it's it's mostly bug fixes, but there are a few little gems in there. Mhmm. there's some integration features that help integrate with other systems. I'm not gonna let the cat out of the bag if there are any cats. Not not really cats. I I mean, I think even just having this new API that it helps you export data out of Rock, it's useful for a lot of integrations that people will be doing in in some way we don't even know what people wanna do. So it's really a cool API to do some exports. And, boy, there there's just a whole bunch of bug fixes in that product, six. I don't think I have a list off the top of my head because it's kind of been a while. I think we last did this in the December, but that means we had started 86 early in November. Mhmm. So Yeah. It's gonna be a good update. A good mixture of bug fixes and a few little new features to tide you over. That sounds exciting. Yeah. And coming soon. So, John, tell us a little more about what the core team's working on right now. Wow. That's gonna be a hard topic because we're working a lot. So we just finished up getting ready for the eight six. There's some exciting new features, though, that are going into to nine that people have have come to us and requested and and help fund. A couple of the more exciting ones, although there's a lot, I'm sure I'm gonna miss some. One is called SMS conversations. So to date, if you wanted to have a conversation through Rock on SMS, on texting, you had to go from your phone, and it would go back and forth between their phone and your phone, and Rock kind of proxies that. That's a really cool feature because you can be anywhere at any time and have this conversation, and it looks very natural and fluid to the to the, attendee or or member. But, , with the request was made, hey. We wanna be able to also do that from the Rock website from a block, and so we created this block. It looks a lot , , Apple's messages on on OS 10. And it's really nice because you can have all these conversations right there. So I think that's gonna be a huge one. Also, just put some new enhancements into the registrations so that you can have attributes on the registration. To date, it's been on the registrant, which is, , typically what you want. But it's also nice to be able to collect things for just the specific registration, so that's really nice. Also have conditional fields on on the registrants. So for say, if you if they pick if they answer a question a certain way, you can then show two other questions below it. That is awesome. It it's really neat. It's gonna add a lot of capabilities to registration, and we'll eventually be rolling that capability into other places where we use attributes. Right now, we had to kinda hard code it for registrations because it's really unique there, the way it works. I won't go into all the details, but, we'll eventually be adding that in other places, and we're excited about that. And some of the work that we did for this will allow us to make those changes even easier, in upcoming releases. Also, good progress has been made on volunteer scheduling, which is a hot one. And so I feel really good about we're actually making good, good progress on that. We still have a ways to go. I'd say we're probably halfway done, but I think we got one of the hard blocks done in in in the rearview mirror. So, that's great. Starting some work on digital signatures. That's probably the last feature that we've committed to on the road map that we need to get done for nine. And so we have some at least the thoughts are going in time to that and preparing that for development. Also, a lot of issues. We've been closing a lot of issues. We've been busy. -huh. Definitely been busy. And it sounds really cool that all the added stuff that you're talking about right there is really going to increase flexibility. So a lot of things about Rock are great in regard that you don't have to do it according to whatever structure or standard we had thought up as we were building the product. It is inherently flexible, and this sounds something that will add even more to that. So the options are pretty wide open. Yeah. I mean, that's kinda thing about the other day too is, , the SMS conversation piece is a really cool feature. It's , wow. That's really nice. And, , some side , there there's a couple of product products out there that have something similar. But I think what makes Rock unique is it has so many of these things that there's I don't know of another product that has so many things wizard based communication tool that looks just almost mail a Mailgun or Mailchimp, The SMS conversations, the workflows, the connections, the, , all of these things put together in one. It's kind of unique that the product would have so much of this interactions around your website. Right. All of these feature sets are robust. It's not just a nod in the direction of that feature while we specialize in only one or two of the above. Right. And we'll continue to make each one of them better and better. Right. And we've shown that, especially coming to mind with the email wizard. Our first iteration of how you send email communications was functional and it got the job done, but we weren't satisfied with it. We came back and we made a lot of big updates. So I think our community kinda sees that that's how how it works. Right. And the new tool that we rolled out for the twelve days of Christmas on the ideas has been pretty huge too. So we've been watching those ideas. We've actually implemented some of those ideas already. Some of them were already in kind of the road map, but we've moved them ahead. And so we are paying attention. And and I and the votes count. , we're starting at the top of the list, and it's not we can go sequentially in order because some are a little bit harder or require a little bit more care and thought, but we are looking at that ideas list. But that's pretty cool. Now just a quick update on that. If someone hadn't tuned in, somehow they missed that gift over Christmas from Chip, can you give just enough background that they would catch up to what's going on? Sure. We've always had if you if you had a new idea, we've always had the black book. You could submit it, and then but that was not public because we just we couldn't scale to the the onslaught of all those ideas and the communication that would spawn from them. But now we have rolled out a tool. You can get to it at rockrms.com/community/ideas. And, basically, you can submit your idea, and then organizations can vote up your idea. Every organization gets 20 votes every 30 days. And so you can push up the ideas to prioritize them. And, , it's interesting. And, know, one example of an idea that's that's interesting is it's making Rock more friendly for for churches with one campus. , that's not the first time we've thought of that, but the but the amount of votes it's getting is telling us that's an important one that, honestly, probably would not have gotten any attention in the next two to three major releases, but now it is gonna get attention. It's not gonna be a nine, to be clear, but it's one of those. It's , yeah, that's that's good. We need to focus on that, but it is gonna be pretty hard. I mean, we need to really think through what the ramifications are gonna be, and, , we will work on it, but it's not one we can just jump easily on. But I think that's a good it's it's good to show that these churches can can flex their desires by by voting. And by seeing that, it's already changed the road map Mhmm. In lots of ways, but that's that's one of them. I would say, though, if I could plug it, the better you can describe your idea, the more votes you're gonna get and the more likely it is that we're gonna understand it and go forward. So a picture's worth a thousand words, a couple pictures worth a couple thousand words, and really explain, , the the why, and not that we we just wanna understand it. , if you just put two sentences, you're probably not gonna get a lot of votes, and we're not gonna understand it. There's a couple in there that are real done really well, and it's it's just so nice to read it when it's done well. That's great. And this wasn't on our topic list today, but Right. It brings up also the the recipes gift that came in. Yep. So if someone hasn't discovered that yet, you'll wanna go check that out. And that's also at rockrms.com/community/recipes. Right? Right. So share your things there. Don't just put the ideas in. Both were really exciting things that came out in December, we didn't give a lot of attention or noise to them because there was just so much going on. So make sure you check both of those out. And those still fall under the guise of, that's just one o on those features too. , we're gonna be adding more features to the ideas. , we're not happy with it. So, it's good and it's great, but we're gonna continue building out those those tools for you guys. If you're a long term podcast listener, we're not happy with anything. That's true. Well, that's a good lead into my topic. The check Yes, great. , we knew that the check scanner had to get done quickly when we first launched Rock, but it wasn't, I'd say up to John's and our standards, we want it to look better. So with the next release, you'll be able to download. And this is, again, this is the windows app that you get under the power tools area. But it's gotten a total UI overhaul, it looks beautiful. And it's got a couple little new features in there that'll let you do a little bit more on the check scanning side. So you can, for example, set some control amounts. Meaning if you're entering, you're gonna transcribe the totals from the check on screen and you wanna get them in their account fields. It can keep track and make sure that when you get to the end, you haven't gotten a typo. So that's a cool new feature. And I think you'll still need to do, I mean, you will need to still do the check matching component, but we've just added a few more features onto the check scanning side for small operations that kinda wanna do that right then and there. Yeah. And actually, some of the larger ones too are saying they want a little bit more capability in the check scanning. And so great. And and it's cool too because we added some features, and and by adding those features, we're also actually be able to go back into that and make it look better. Right. Much better. And on the topic of things that we're improving and changing, we launched Rock with the DiSC assessment built in, right in the person profile, really easy to send those out, no cost at all involved, and that's been a big hit. And if you were at the conferences last year, you heard us mention that we've partnered with healthy growing leaders to write a series of five assessments that will all be available also for free, also easy to send out, easy to record and view results on, all aimed at helping make ministry better, more personal, and more interactive. So an update on that, these are all being built for V9. And so we're kind of going through them one at a time. There's the revamped DiSC, which we have, and we're working on now. There's a spiritual gifts assessment, which a lot of people have been asking for probably since V1. And we have that, we're working on that. That's going to be a great addition. And then we just recently have been going through the beta testing for the conflict profile assessment, which is really interesting. And those aren't the those the first two are going to be a nine, but are the rest of them also gonna be a nine? The goal is, yeah, that they would be a nine. I mean, again, we're gonna have to consistently iterate over how we apply these throughout the product, but to take the assessment, we hope to have that in nine. Yes. So that's the goal. I mean, is always a goal, right? And things change, but that is what we're shooting for. So the conflict profile assessment is pretty interesting because it talks about how you naturally approach conflict in one of five ways, and what mixture kind of makes up the way that you uniquely do that. And if you look at that as a team, you've got some really great interactive insights there. We're also getting ready, I think next week at the time of recording, to begin beta testing the EQ assessment. And we're very excited about that when a lot of the EQ assessments that are out there are kind of subpar. Almost if you score high on EQ on the assessment, you don't have much EQ. Right. And and no humility either. Well, right. So we're really hoping this is a a much better assessment and measurement tool, and it and we've been approaching that with Greg and Dave at Healthy Growing Leaders in a totally different way. So this should be a really great measurement tool. And then, the final one will be a motivations assessment. So we don't have an update on that one yet, but that is gonna be also a very unique assessment and one that will be really handy in team building. Right. And just to plug healthy growing leaders, if if your church is interested in even the ones we have today, the DISC and the spiritual gifts coming, you really need to get in touch with them and and bring them in to help unpack it for your organization and help apply it uniquely to your organization. Every time we're on the video call with with those two, it's it's an amazing experience. And I learned so much about personalities, about our even our own personalities. And I think the conflict profile was one too that we went to him with some questions trying to figure out , what does this mean? How do we read this? So that we can make it right in in the product. And just hearing them talk about it, it was really eye opening. I think It was. Don't take it at the surface level, go a little deeper with them. Right. And they they did mention, as we said, well, how does explain some more of this angle or that angle related to conflict profile. And they said, this is one slice of who you are and how you are. If you really want to get into that, you need to be layering these assessments and looking at your whole team altogether, which of course is a service that they offer, and they would do a fantastic job at that. So if you're building your team right now, or if you have a long term team and you're trying to figure out how do we work better, how do we do ministry better, I would definitely consider engaging with Greg and Dave at Healthy Growing Leaders to figure out how they can help assist you with that. And then you can take what you've learned there and use the assessments that are coming in V9 to extend that out to your congregation, to your volunteers, to your small groups, and you'll really have an in-depth understanding of how to use what comes back to make ministry more effective. Right. And I mean, just Greg has a gift. He not only can he make these assessments and have the academic and intellectual capacity to do that, but he also has a gift of communication and explaining them in a way that's understandable, humorous. I think his sessions at the last year's conference were two of my highlights. I just learned so much. Even though I came from an organization that was highly invested in disc, I felt I learned so much more from him too. I mean, I would just continue to to plug them. And there's not just to be clear, there's not we don't get anything from that. No. We just want you guys to be maximizing these tools, and they're an amazing resource for us. In fact, we thought it was so important that we actually invested into these assessments to make sure that they're done really well and to make sure that they're perpetually free. Right. So that's not because we're getting anything back. We just believe so strongly in this that we want to make sure that everyone understands the value of what's being given here. A lot of times in our society, value is highly tied into what you pay for something, and the value of these assessments that are coming that have no cost is unbelievable. It's a massive gift. And I think you probably agree that when we talk with all these people who want to have something into the Rock community, it's rare to find someone who has the same heart as the organization of Rock and Spark, they have that same heart, and that's why we have a special affinity, I think, with Definitely. And we joke with them, it's kind of funny, we're always taking these assessments as we try and understand them through the beta process, and then as we try to figure out how to describe them and how to talk about them. And I keep joking with Greg and Dave, Hey, you guys know us better than anyone out there. Thanks for still liking us. That's so true. That's pretty scary stuff in there. So definitely something we'd encourage everyone to engage with. We also have some updates on some of the other things we've been talking about. John, why don't you tell us a little bit about Avalanche? Yeah. So we know high community interest in Avalanche, and we have high interest in that too. Quick update. January, Southeast will be out in our offices, and we're gonna be doing a kickoff to bring that into core, , get it fully integrated, probably build out a few more features, get it so that it's a little bit quicker and easier to get up to speed on. Although, I would say that there , some of the stuff they've already done in terms of documentation has been super helpful for me. So we're gonna be launching that out to bring that into core to make that, , a piece of Rock. Right. That's very exciting. And if you are tuning in for the first time, we're talking about a mobile app that's integrated to Rock. Yeah. That's a great way. Should've started that. Right. Good good job. And then how about the RockCloud update? First of all, what's RockCloud? That's funny because you think I would have learned off that last one, but I was about to just jump in. So, yes. So RockCloud is our web hosted managed version of Rock. Rock will always be available for you to run anywhere, anytime. But if you would to have us host it for you in a fully managed environment, that's what we're working on. And it and it's not just that we're just gonna install Rock for you and then here it goes. You're we're gonna set it up and configure it. You'll have SSL. You'll have we're gonna be paying for the the Google Maps API, so you don't have to set that up. , it's not expensive to set it up. In fact, most churches can get away with it for free, but it's a it's a pain for most churches even to go through the process of of configuring that. I every time I had to go into the Google API little back end, they've changed everything. I feel I'm clicking around in there for, , five, ten minutes just to figure out what I'm trying to do. And then once I get it, then they change it, , a month later. So we're gonna take care of all that for you. It's gonna be hosted just right to the best practices. You would think that that wouldn't be that hard, but it is really hard. We've been all over the place. I think we've talked to almost every major and I know we talked to every major cloud provider asking copious questions, looking at licensing, under trying to understand the Microsoft licensing in terms of SQL Server, which, again, you would think would be very easy, but it's actually not. The more you drill into it, the more grayness there is in there, and we want to bring clarity and integrity to our licensing. So we've done that. Now we're trying to figure out there's, , a hundred different ways to do things in these cloud providers, which is amazing. It's cool, but sometimes I was telling the one of our guys yesterday is it's just be less options might be better here. So we're getting there, but what we're also learning, which is interesting, is, , obviously, on this has to be the forefront of our of our consideration. And as we go through that, , we've built out some security architecture inside the hosted environment, but we're also finding is, well, we need to administrate this. And if our internal network to our to our office is not super secure, that's actually gonna put a pretty big hole into this infrastructure that we're trying to manage in the cloud. So now we're trying to figure out, , security upgrades even for our office here to make sure that everything is, , very secure. So this is kinda one of those projects that you look at, , oh, this is not gonna be easy. But the more you get into it, the deeper and deeper and deeper it gets, and the root system just goes down. And, so it's taken a while. I think we're really close, though. We're piloting some stuff. And and plus, there's a lot of automation that has to be built, and we have most of that done. But we're learning new things. , for instance, we now we're told we have to calculate sales tax for what we do. That sounds maybe easy until you get the word that, no, you need to calculate sales tax for the person's state, city, and and possibly even piece of the city where they're at. So now we have to integrate with APIs to to tell us what that sales tax would be. We have to do integrations to provide services with services to help us pay those taxes. Right. There are different thresholds for all those municipalities on what's considered taxable and what isn't. Some things have exemptions, and every single one is unique. Right. This is a great example of how regulation really stymies innovation. Yeah. But we will do it. And, of course, we want everything to be of high integrity, but it's just really hard. I mean, it's not that anybody has a let's say a problem with, , paying for shared things, but it's just the complexity is just off the chart. It would be nice to just push a button and say okay I can hear what what do you need? What's the fair and reasonable tax on this? Great I'll pay you but it's not Right. That at all. Right. What would you say to someone who's out there with a burning passion to run a hosting system and they wanna get involved? Go back and reassess their life. Yeah. We're all losing some brain cells over here on this one. So I would say they're crazy if they're gonna start a web hosting. Yeah. But let us know because if you're wanting to get involved, there's we may have roles here for for that. Well, I don't know. I would actually say the level of complex to get it to get someone up to speed on the level of complexity and all the paths we've been down, I think would hold us back more than help us. Okay. Well, maybe I was thinking somebody who has done it before Yeah. Who's somehow listening to this podcast. There's so many of these different, , nuances that we've been and I think we're about to come out the other side. Yeah. So still a lot of work to do, but There definitely is a lot of work to do, but it's a it's been a big challenge. Right. I would to thank IT OneSource. They've they obviously, they do hardware and software sales, but they also do cloud services, and they've been really helpful to us. They've worked with us a lot, and they really know all the cloud providers. So they've been very helpful in in helping us kinda guide us through this. But at the end of the day, I mean, sometimes the best answer is , well, there's there's three answers. Yeah. And, , they can't tell us which one it is because they're all three good for different reasons, and now it's up to us to ferret out all the different, , reasons why we might go with choice a versus choice c. Mhmm. So but they definitely have been very helpful. And if if you're considering, , needing that kind of stuff, you you may be moving your stuff to the cloud, you should definitely reach out to them because they've got great expertise. Yep. They've been very helpful in this crazy process that we're going through right now. Yep. So we've had some other changes going on as well. And if you follow us on social media, you've probably seen that our team's been growing a little bit in some ways that are kind of maturing our organization, and we're really excited about that. In January, we had a few, well it is still January, early January, we had a few people join us in various roles that we just haven't had before. And it isn't that we haven't needed them, it is that we haven't had the funding for them, and that we just haven't been big enough to maybe need someone full time in that role yet. So we've all been wearing a lot of different hats, but we're really excited to welcome Grace Hansen, who is joining our team as a project manager for the CORE team. And she has a really incredible background, but we will get into that in a separate special edition podcast. We'll actually bring her on to kind of share her background and how she came to be with our team and what her expertise areas are. But I do want to mention that Grace is now going to be overseeing our alpha and beta process. So we do have 86 moving through that process right now, and she's helping oversee that for the first time. She's doing a great job. Yep, very Good point. I should have mentioned that earlier that the emails that everyone's getting now will say Grace Hansen. Right. So we're really excited about that because that gives us the opportunity for people who should be focusing more on developing something or testing something to take off the hat of project management, which Grace does so well and is so capable and experienced at and be able to really focus. That helps increase the capacity of our core development team. We've also welcomed Jay Martinez into a role that we haven't had before, which is a testing and DevOps role. Now that is not a role that takes the place of, for instance, our alpha and beta testing community groups, it can't even touch that. So we definitely need to still rely on those groups very heavily. But in any organization, as you grow up and as we have more developers working on our core team, we definitely need someone whose whole point of view and focus is on that perspective. And Jay will do things build the packages. In fact, Jay watched this 86 package get built because he'll be doing the next one. Which gives our developers more time to do development. Right. It's very exciting. It's very exciting. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that we've been talking about for years. It's happening. I know. This is an exciting year. And it seems , well, wow. All of sudden, boom. But it nothing's ever as easy as it looks. I mean, you spent, Emily, months and months and months looking for these, , people to bring on and we just haven't found them and then all a sudden, boom. They kinda It's funny how it goes in cycles or waves that sometimes. But the number of resumes you've looked at, the number of phone screens you've done, the number of people you've brought in for in office interviews is staggering. It has been a huge chunk of my time for probably the last six months. Yeah. So it's just kudos for doing all that. And almost everything in Rockwood looks a straight line from point a to b Right. Behind the scenes is a winding road of of effort and confusion and frustration sometimes. That's true. It's also one of those areas where it could be confusing from the outside to look in and say, oh, wow. This organization must be really well funded. Yes. Right? Because look, they're getting these grown up positions, everybody's adulting over there at Spark Development Network. And, , I'd say we do rely heavily on our community funding, but that, , it still is a concern for us. The community is growing and demanding so much faster than we can that in some of these ways we've just had to step up and trust and say we need to do this. , the Rock deserves to have these positions in place and we manage finances very conservatively, but we need our community not to get complacent and assume that everything's great. Do keep us in mind, have a heart for funding the thing that is making your church run. So consider that this year as you're setting that commitment up that we talked about earlier. That $1.5 per attendee per year minimum suggested donation, if you're not there, I'd really do a heart check. Why am I not funding at the rate that I need to be funding in order to make this happen? , if you're a very small church, if you have had an unexpected budgetary situation, then that totally makes sense. And we're not here to stand in judgment of that. But if you're an organization that, , has the ability to fund any other system out there and you just haven't stepped up, then I would really question why it is that you're using Rock. It's an open community and we share each other's burdens. So make sure that you are stepping into that role. And if you've been funding at that level, we have a lot of churches that have committed to funding above that, $2 per attendee per year. And that's a huge blessing to our team. None of that money goes to anyone that's on a microphone here right now or anyone else. All it does is go back into the accounts to be able to bring on the new positions. And I will tell you, there are a lot of people who are still working way too many hours to try and cover multiple positions. So it's not as we talk about bringing new people in, just know that the tension is still there. I think that's probably the biggest thing I got wrong in my thinking of how Rock would grow would be that, well, once we can fund our small team of three people, we'll never need more people. And I got that wrong, which okay, that's pretty stupid to think. But I continually get it wrong because then I think, well, as soon as we get these people in, life can get back to some balance. And it's not because I think what you're describing is the community keeps growing, which we know, but we don't we feel the under we're underestimating the impact that has on even us. Right. We're being hit from all sides on good stuff. It's just all good stuff, and we wanna meet those needs. We wanna we wanna fix those issues. And when we talk about issues, sometimes, , it's not that the that feature's broken. It's that all these churches wanna use it in different ways. Right. And so it looks maybe a bug to someone is an extreme edge case that the tool was never meant to do, but we still wanna be responsive to that. So I guess I continually am finding myself not learning that as the community grows, the impact on our team is gonna continue to grow equally. Right. And for our listeners who have been supporting us generously and sacrificially for a long time, we have a huge thank you because none of this would be possible. Where we are today, the growth would not be possible without these people and organizations who have just really had our back for years. And we're extremely grateful for that. And to those listeners, would say use your megaphone to help spread the message of why churches should support Rock and engage people in that conversation. It might seem a little bit awkward at first, I can tell you I'm the queen of awkward conversations related to funding, and I've gotten some feedback why are you still talking about that? But we have to. And if we believe in what's going on here, that's not a conversation we can abandon to comfort. So if you are one of those sacrificial and generous supporters, use your megaphone to talk to the community and engage them in the topic of, hey, are you supporting Rock at the level that you should be? Let's do your part. And that, I think, is really the next wave of making funding of Rock possible. It has to go out through our Rock stars, through our faithful community members, and those who are currently doing their best where they are, encourage that, let's rise that tide equally across the community. We have one other really exciting position announcement. We've been looking for documentation specialists for seven months, I think, something Again, one of those things that sounds easy to fill. There are a lot of people that do documentation, but we weren't looking for the standard. We typically in our organization don't look for someone who's been doing it the way they've been doing it at a place that's been doing it that way forever. We want something different. And , you've been in our documentation, it needs to be engaging, it needs to be relatable, it needs to have stories and cases that make sense that describe how to do things, but they also describe why. And it's half creative writing, half technical writing, and and someone really has to have a heart for the community and the ministry of what we do in this position. It's so key and crucial to what we do. Anyway, I've been plugging it for seven months. That's where that just came from. I'm really excited to let the community know that we have someone starting in that role on the February 4. So we'll be making some more introductions at that time. I'm sure we'll have a special edition podcast, but this is a really great move for our team. Yeah, really looking forward to that position being filled. Yeah, just in time for V9 because there's a lot of things that have to be documented. Yeah, she'll be very busy. One thing too, when we bring each of these new people to our team, it's hard not to say how much time that takes to get them onboarded, get them plugged in, to understand our culture, our pace, the job roles. Mean, this one, there's a lot to it. There's a lot behind the scenes of how the documentation works and this voice, the style. So it takes weeks of effort to get them up to speed. And we're learning so much as we go too. We're finding out what did we make a mistake on or what did we miscommunicate on? How could we do that better next time? , I was thinking about saying, yeah, we're just in a season of high growth and learning. And then I thought, what am I talking about? We've been on that season since the ride started. I really don't think that's gonna slow down anytime soon, but do know that we're applying all of that. And as we learn more about how to communicate this, we'll be sharing that out. If there are leadership lessons that we learn, if there are things we learn about staffing, all of that is important to us and we love to be transparent. That stuff will come out as well. Kind of on that same topic, we've also added a couple of new developers to our Sparkability group resourcing. And that's really great because we've had a lot of churches coming to us, especially over the last twelve months with things they need built that really need to go into core. And that's kind of what we specialize in, that's what our team needs to do. And so as there's work that needs to be in core, just by the nature of what it is, we really would have to pull core developers off of whatever they're working on in core code for the next version and put them on these other projects, which has not been super efficient. So we've been looking to increase that capacity where we would not have to do that so much. So we'd be able to have developers that could be delegated to working on those needs for churches that are core, and then also the developers that could be working on our current core roadmap. So that's exciting too. Yep, lots of growth. Yep. We also have some new websites. So just some places you can check us out and see what's going on before we wrap up. And that includes our Spark Development Network site. It was sadly neglected for a long time. Yeah, it seems it was mostly for the IRS to validate that we were a five zero one(three). Exactly, and people would stumble on it sometimes and they would say, especially while I was interviewing candidates, Oh, I found your website. And they'd start describing it. I would think, Oh my gosh, I can't believe they saw that website. It was not intended for public consumption. So we have a new sparkdevnetwork.org site, which is great. And we're very proud of that. We've had some help with that from Marcus, who is on our team in a web development role as well. And then we have a new Sparkability website that goes along with our increased capacity to bring in those core projects. So that's sparkabilitygroup.com. Another website we introduced through our Christmas project was realchip.rocks. So if you wonder about Chip's backstory, about all of the Chip promo items that might be out there, what is His wardrobe. His wardrobe, yeah, pretty much. What is real Chip, that's get it the real chip. Rocks. What's real chip versus what's kind of just come up grassroots. You can see all of these little things. It's a real interesting site that we'll be keeping up with as things grow. So check that out. And then coming soon, we're also working on a rockrms.com upgrade. So that site will be changing, and some of the things that we've been sprinkling in for the community will be a very easy navigation system to be able to get to. So keep an eye out for that. It's been a busy last few weeks. Yes, and I think it will maintain its busy pace. But it's a great way to kick off 2019 with all of these really exciting, super high impact things that are going on. So a huge shout out to our community, which has been very instrumental in everything that we've talked about today and will continue to be so. We're really happy to be doing this life journey with you where we're impacting ministry literally around the world. Thanks again for tuning in for the Rockcast podcast. 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. And our amazing show notes, 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.