Podcast Episode 75: Episode 48: New Horizons

Description

v8, v9, updates, events, programs, and a fun new milestone to share!

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 another episode of Rockcast. I'm Emily Forman. We have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo here as usual, to answer your questions and tell you what we've been up to. You may not have heard from us lately, but we have been hard at work. I will not make a reference back to the duck on fire, but there has been a lot of paddling. A lot of singed feathers. That's right. Okay. Let's start with the current version release. Where are we? What's going on? And what's coming up? Sure. So we have been at work on the 8.4 release. It's been in alpha and beta testing really up until, well, yesterday as of the day of this recording, maybe earlier for you guys. 8.4 is now in release. So it's been out the door for about twenty four hours. Not quite twenty four hours. And now we're, we've been working on 8.5 actually for several weeks as a product goes into alpha testing, we just keep working and keep fixing things and have done a lot of work in 8.5. So there will be an 8.5 with additional fixes and really, I think one feature that we don't normally put features into these branches, but it's kind of a feature that won't really impact anything else, so we sneak these in. And maybe John can touch on that Yeah, it's interesting that we always say that we don't put features in dot releases, but then every Dot release has a lot of features. And it's because of the nature of our community and the speed that things are going. And just the funding model that we have right now is that if someone needs something and we can help with that and it needs to be in core, we'll do it. And we need to get that out to them then quicker. But it's nice because everybody gets a little treat of some new features. One of the things too, before we jump into some of the new features, is that I'm always surprised as the community gets bigger, some of these bugs that we're working on have actually been there for quite a while. There's just so many more people pulling Rock in so many different stretching it in different ways and finding these things. So it's kind of encouraging, but it is sometimes surprising too. It's , Wow, that's actually been there for a while. And actually, too, I'm really happy with some of the refactoring that's been going on in eight point A lot of stuff's been cleaned up, but as you clean up some of that stuff, you did impact some stuff. So we're kind of putting things back in order, but it all makes for a better product. Yeah. There's been a lot of work in the filtering areas and grid filters, and those things are just getting better and better and better. Yeah. So it's it's sometimes discouraging to see that, well, those these issues are coming in, , maybe even faster than normal, but it speaks to the size of our community, and it speaks to Rock being used in in lots of cool new ways. And it also speaks to, , the product maturing and and that the pace some products would get some success and go in almost a maintenance mode, and that's not us. We're still trying to refactor this. The community's submitting cool stuff too. In some ways, it's really exciting. But to with some of the stuff that's gonna be in 8.5 that's new, we've been working with a customer who really wanted to have the ability to add and edit families within the check-in screens. And so, , I guess I always kind of pictured when we got to that, it would be a separate app because that's usually what we've done in the past. It'd be a separate app that kind of managed that. But some of what they were talking about and wanting, it actually kind of made sense. It's , Oh yeah, why does it have to be a separate app? , you could do this right inside of the check-in. And if you want to, you could just make that a separate app, but you can keep it separate if you'd . But by doing it this way, you have a choice. You can either have it separate or you can have it part of the check-in experience, or you could just have it just plain old check-in it's always been. So I thought that was kind of unique and that kind of changed our thinking, or at least my thinking, in a positive way. So you will be able to manage the families, and you can edit an existing family, add a child. You could add a whole new family. I think the user experience is meant to be volunteer driven, not self-service driven. I think it would be a little I mean, you could do that, but I think it would be a little different for a new family to walk in and have to self-service themselves through that But it's meant to be more of a volunteer driven type experience. So very positive. The UI looks real nice. They even actually helped with some UI ideas, and it was really nice. Pretty excited about that. So I think it's going to be a very positive addition. It was something that we kind of hadn't had on our roadmap plan for the eight dot series, but the timing was right, and it's a feature I think everybody's going to love. So I'm really excited that it's in there. And chances are it's going be an 8.5, but there's a possibility it could land an 8.6. It really depends on the timing of when 8.5 goes out the door. Yeah. Mean, anything's possible. I mean, but it's It's slated for eight five. I would be extremely surprised if it wasn't an 8.5. So you'll see some new settings if you're looking at your check-in types. There's a couple of new areas where And we'll put it in the user guide so you'll understand what that's all about, but it'll be in the eight point user guide for a And you'll probably even see it in there soon, even before 8.5 comes out. We just need to get it in there. But super exciting. I mean, that's a feature we were not really It's a feature we always knew we needed to get to, but it wasn't in the roadmap for that, but I'm really excited that it's in there. And it's another example of another church stepping up, helping fund a feature that everybody gets to use. And again, working with the churches in the Rock community, none of them are trying to push their own agenda. That's what I love. There's so many ways that they could say, Well, it has to do X, Y, and Z, and that would be the only reason people would ever use it. And it's just encouraging that churches are working together, and they always ask, Make sure if there's something that's very unique to us, you tell us, and we don't want to be that church. Yeah, that's cool. But moving on from 8.5, talking about some other stuff that we've been working on. Nine point is really being worked on. We're really making good progress. The asset tracking is asset manager is nearly complete, just putting the final UI touches on that. Actually, I've already been through revision of that, adding some more features to it, so that's pretty cool. Content components, pretty much done. Scored you some documentation on that. Spiritual gifts. Spiritual gifts is kinda done. This is in the UI polish now. I think the thing that we need to work on there is just saying, okay. We know how to make it look just disc and operate just disc, but with all the other assessments coming, we need to figure out a way that allows the staff to figure out which assessments they wanna send out and how they kinda manage that whole true identity concept. , doing the assessments, , kind of cookie cutter, but how do we put that new experience on it? So we just need to figure that And really happy to say that as of yesterday, volunteer scheduling is being actively developed. So that was kind of one of the last things we're looking to start, and that is being started, we're already at that phase where work's being done and Running into minor hurdles that have to be figured out. And yep, it's good stuff. That's exciting news, though. Yeah. Yep. It also marks kind of the probably last big feature that's going to be in nine. Yeah. We still have to do digital signatures, but that one obviously wouldn't be as big as volunteer scheduling. Mhmm. Do we have a date for version nine? No. I mean November I mean, a good example of why dates are hard is Yeah. , one developer on our team, a good part of one full time equivalent was used in the last four weeks to do this project that we weren't really slated for, but it's a good project. So that's why dates are hard to give, is that we don't know what's coming. Things change. I mean, that's the bottom line. There's constant change. Right. But we just got eight point out the door and nine point zero is, we're more than 50% there. Oh yeah, I think the pace is incredible. I mean, that's the kind of feedback I hear from the community side that people are really happy with it. And they love finding those little nuggets of features that come out in our Dot releases, even though we do say constantly, Oh no, we're not going to hide anything in there. Then we do. So it's kind of fun. So and then we've the holidays coming up and that slows us down a little bit, but it also slows down the community. I mean, the whole community is obviously, you guys are busy doing the services and planning for stuff that, so that slows down a little bit too. But going back to the dot releases and bugs and stuff, we were talking with someone the other day, and I kind of shared, well, sometimes it gets a little scourging when you see the issues come in after a major release. And their response was kind of funny that they said, Well, you shouldn't be too worried about issues. I mean, at least you fix yours. The previous system, they didn't fix theirs across multiple major releases. It just wasn't done. And, again, their comment was, if everybody else was as bad as you, we would be in a good plot good place. So that was kind of encouraging to kinda be reminded that, yeah, these things come up, and then it's in every system, but at least we take it, we take everyone as if it's really important. And maybe you don't see that in GitHub because we're not actively commenting internally. We're looking at them, we're stressed by them. Absolutely. We're trying to figure out what's the source cause of that. How can we keep mistakes that from happening again? And not every issue is a bug or a mistake. Some of it is just , Oh, that's not intended to work that way, but let's see how what we can do to make it work that way. And a lot of them are feature requests in there right now too. You mentioned the encouraging information that we get from customers and partners. And yeah, we take that as encouraging, but we really don't settle for the issues that we're talking about. So we're perfectionists to a large degree, and we are bothered by things that. So you hear us say we're encouraged when somebody tells us a story of how they're happy with the rate of our bug fixes, but we're just know behind the scenes, we're not happy. We want it to be even better. Yep. Well, on another note, we have our final master class of the year coming up pretty soon, November, and we still have a little bit of space in that class. So the class is definitely on. We have enough people to hold it. It's moving forward, but we do have enough space for a few people to join us. So if you are realizing you still have some room in your budget, here that you won't use by the end of the year, this would be an excellent way to kill two birds with one stone. Make sure you use that in a really high stewardship, manner, but also helping to train your staff. So if you have been to a master class already, which I know a lot of people in our podcast audience have, start looking at the members, of your staff who would also benefit from that knowledge. Because I can tell you the deeper that training goes on your staff, the more successful your staff can be. It people get busy. Staff, gets busy at every church, especially this time of year. And if there's only one person who can deal with, staff training or, problems that come up when someone doesn't know how to use something correctly, or if there's one person who can run data views and reports on your staff, that's a great recipe for, problems and challenges, especially during the busy holiday season. So, do look over your staff and think strategically who would be a great fit for this class and how can you help move that forward so that your job can be a little bit more collaborative and a little bit easier rather than being the one point or hit person at your organization during the holiday season because that could be an uncomfortable position. And I think masterclass is is definitely about the education, but more and more I'm starting to see it's also about the connection and the community. It's a mini little community that gets formed, and then it lives on. Every Masterclass, we never say it, but they always ask, Can I get the contact list for this class? We never even have to say it. As long as everybody's fine with it, we do that. But I think it's funny that that question always comes up without us having to say anything. And it is so cool to see them all going out to lunch every day, and the community that's built there, it's pretty cool. You're right. It's a tight graduating class and they do stick together. And you see the groups of classes that interact together then on Slack and they're pouring their knowledge back in and they're interacting with each other there. And they've built up a great community in that small class group as well to help walk through and work through things. That reminds me, are we gonna talk about the user group that just happened? Because it's all about the community. Well, the community does have some areas where there are a lot a high concentration of Rock churches. And in a few of those areas, some have started to get together, and we they usually come talk to us before they set that up, and we just try and help. What we what we wanna prevent in that case is siloed information. Mhmm. But we do have some where there's a high concentration of churches and they're getting together, , maybe once or twice a year or so. And there was just a group that got together in the South Carolina area, and they sent a really encouraging picture and note that they had a great time getting together. They never would have been together in that position, learning and sharing all the things they can do to help reach people if they hadn't been part of the Rock community. So that's really encouraging to our team and fun to hear back from them. And it's just really cool to see the spontaneous growth of relationship and camaraderie that's happening in all the corners of our community. Yeah, because products don't get people together randomly on their own to do that, communities do. Right, Right. And and it's not being artificially fed. I mean, is just springing up in the corners, and and it's really exciting to watch happen because that's the real deal. And speaking of events, the next one the next big one we have coming up will be next year's conference. And there has been a little bit of conversation on Slack that we've seen about budgeting for that conference and where is it located. I just wanna let that we are working very hard on getting that location nailed down, and we're getting pretty close. We will release that information as soon as we can. I would probably advise for budgeting purposes just to plan on if I had to go to the furthest part of the states from where I am right now, what would that cost be? Just kinda bake that into your budget, and you may be pleasantly surprised. But that's probably just a good if you need to put a budget number in before we're able to release a location, that's probably just a good best practice on that. Hopefully, we'll have that coming out here before too long. We have another trip coming up though before then. John, can you tell us about this? We've hinted at it a little bit, but it's coming to reality now. Yeah. So at the conference, we talked about how we wanted to knock down barriers in the Rock community, and one of those barriers that we see inside the church but also for us is just bringing in new talent. As technology needs grow in churches and even within Spark, how do we find people to help fill those needs? And so obviously it's a multi pronged approach. One is we need to bring in seasoned professionals, but another one is we need to grow a new set, a new generation of technical leaders. Honestly, some of the people coming out of college nowadays are seasoned, more so than even people maybe in the workplace. And so we've been working diligently trying to build relationships with Christian universities where we can get embedded in there to help them understand Rock and then recruit, not only for ourselves, but also mainly for churches. So one of the universities that we started with is Liberty. They have an excellent IT program, and they also have strong Christian values. So we feel a majority of their grads would be good candidates to work for a church. So we are flying out to Liberty to speak at a few sessions, at one of their tech clubs, And then there's a classroom that we're a class we'll be speaking at, but then some other classes are being combined to come to that too. So that's kind of fun. And then there'll be a recruiting session afterwards. We have already been working with some of the students. We're working on a capstone project with them. Emily and I have been on those calls with the students, and we're really impressed. They're asking questions I hadn't even thought of, and they're really diligently working on that. The project we gave them, it's kind of interesting. It's facial recognition within check-in. So do a pilot, go out, look at this, survey the landscape. We're kind of interested in really looking at the Azure platform for that because they have some pretty cool facial recognition that I think would be a good point because churches can get a discount on it with the Azure credits. But don't limit yourself to that. But also, it's more than just the technology. They're looking at it from the psychology of it. They're doing some surveys with churchgoers to see how likely would they be in using a system that. They're looking at it from legal perspectives. They're researching laws in Texas and Illinois and in New York about what kind of legal signouts we'd have to have. It's just really, really cool. And that's a lot of legwork. Will that be a feature in Rock? I don't know. But they're doing all that legwork. They're figuring all that out. They're prototyping it, and they're just excellent students. I was really surprised. So we're investing heavily into that, not for us, but for you guys. And so I would say if you are interested, if you do need some more people to come into your church staffs, let us know. We wanna know about that so we can be keeping our eyes out. The cool thing that we're gonna tell these students when we're there is , okay, don't think you have to come to Phoenix for this. Wherever you wanna be in the country, I bet within 100 miles is a church in our community who would love to have you. So that's it's kinda cool. And but if you if you are interested, let us know maybe through the our our main infosparkdevnetwork dot org email address. Go ahead, just let us know what your needs are. We're probably looking at May is when these students would be ready. There could be maybe some coming in December. So if you have a more urgent need to just send it in, let us know. But I think more of them would probably be in the May timeframe. This is a significant investment, though. We're really putting a lot of time and effort into this, so we're hoping it's going to net out for all of us. Right, that's a great point. We really have come to this by the realization internally that we need to grow students into Rock professionals. But many, many churches have contacted us over time and that seems to be increasing as well, saying help us find really qualified people to do this work in Rock for our church. So we know that there's a need out there. It is a good reminder, send us the information of what you need for sure. Yeah. So be thinking about what your needs are within the church. And then also, , I don't think this, what I'm about to say, is unique to maybe finding the students, but I mean, also be thinking about what's the pay scales for technology within the church. We know we can't necessarily compete with the secular world, but some of these students are probably going be willing to take a cut to work in ministry. Mean, they have a ministry heart, but at the same time, it's going to be hard to get somebody to recruit some of these students if it's 30% of what they can make coming out of college. I would look at them not as students, but as IT professionals. So because they're younger, you can probably get them cheaper than the twenty year vet in IT, but I wouldn't think, Oh, they're students, I can get them super cheap. They're technology. They a skillset that's highly needed in the corporate world. So be thinking about that. I think all churches really need to be thinking through that and saying, if you want these people with skills, yes, they will make a sacrifice for the church. But it can't be what it was when I started, where you had to basically give up more than half. Don't view them through the lens of a student intern. That's not what we're bringing to the table. And that's not what will benefit the church in the long run, because they be able to afford to stick around for that. So let's don't put them in that position. I think that's a perfect summary. Don't think of them , Oh, I can get this person really cheap because they're young. They're young, but they have a very high demand skillset. Right, because we will not be bringing people to the table through this recruiting program that wouldn't be someone that would be a major benefit to your church. If that's the case, then that's not someone that we would be putting forward as a viable candidate. Right. I mean, it's an investment that you need to think about. And I find it interesting that, , one of the first writers of the Gospels was a doctor. , God didn't just send some only a Timothy, there was also a doctor in there, Luke. What would we have if we didn't have the book of Acts? Yeah, and then it's funny because these presentations I have to give, I don't have canned presentations on these topics, so I'm having to go back. And one of the presentations that the professors were asking about is , can you tell our students have no idea that there's technology in ministry, so can you talk about that? , what are the needs? And in doing that, what I want to start with was , hey, the church for hundreds and hundreds of years was the primary sponsor of science. And if you look in the Middle Ages, from the year July to the year about 1700, the church was a major benefactor of all science. And if you look at the facts of it, it's amazing. The church has started all the universities. There's little conflict between religion and science. The only one that we think and we keep going on back to is Galileo. That really wasn't a scientific dispute. It was a political one, one in which the church wasn't showing its best. But we always think that when we're told and we're actually kind of lied to, there was all a conflict in all this, and it wasn't. The Jesuits were one of the scientific pioneers of the Middle Ages, and we just need to take some of that back. So it's been fun in some ways. It's taken a lot of time too, but it's fun to kind of prepare some of this content and try to motivate them to say, Hey, come help us take this back. And just from the few students that we've interacted with and the department chair there, there has been a lot of interest in in what's out there. And just it seems a an unknown concept kind of inside the Christian university, which is a little bit surprising and a lot a lot exciting because there's a huge opportunity to help form this connection that doesn't really exist in an easy way today. Right. And some of these students are programmers. Some of them are more infrastructure. Some of them are security. But some of the things I'm seeing that I hadn't really considered before was that some of them are really good project managers. They understand the technology. They're technical. They have done some development within their class studies. But there's a couple of guys on our team. I look at them, and I go, wow. That would make a really a person in a church who's understanding all these ministry ideas and then implementing and making it happen within Rock through workflows, through reporting, through dashboards, through BI tools. They're probably not they could do the C sharp, but that's probably not what their interest is, but I think a lot of churches don't need that. They need someone who can hear all those ministry ideas and say, I know how to implement this. I'm going put a project plan in place. I'm gonna work on these dashboards. I might even be able to bring in a partner if if I need some of that. Excellent communication skills. Excellent thought problem solving. And I I guess I was going in thinking, oh, we're gonna get some developers and some web designers, and that's there too. But I think there is this really kind of a ministry analyst. Very professional. Right. Blown away by that. I mean, I was kind of thinking, Wow, this is going to be high school two point zero with It's really, I mean, they show up to the video calls professionally dressed, and it's pretty cool. I also wanted to say a big thank you to some of the churches that have responded from our last podcast. We brought up the need again to do our planning for end of year here and our projecting forward and just shared the growth statistics of the community, which by all counts are 50 to a % in across the board in every area, and about how we're trying to keep up because we have a deep desire to not only keep up with the community, but to really outpace the community in terms of innovation. But it's it's hard to keep up with that level of growth when we are a nonprofit, and our planning depends on the planning of those organizations that contribute. So we mentioned all of that last time, and I've heard from a few churches that said, I'm not sure if I've shared with you or not, but we definitely plan to donate, and this is the time frame we're looking at. So do keep that information coming in because as we're planning right now, our plans are capped by what we hear from you. So that is also what we don't hear from you. If we don't hear, we don't know, and we can't plan. And and there is, as , on your end, a lead time needed when you from planning to implementation, especially as it relates to increasing staff. So we know we need to increase our staff to keep up with the community demands, but there is a a huge amount of time involved in sourcing candidates and finding good people. And if we wait to find out that the money has is coming in now, which is great from donors, but we didn't know about it in order to plan for it, That just does set us back a little bit further on timeline as well. So it's budget time of year. Do be looking at how you can plan to contribute. That dollar 50 per average attendee per year is a great baseline as a suggested donation. Would you please take the initiative to review your current attendance and your current donation to Rock and make sure it fits inside those guidelines? If it is not, then that is also one of the issues that holds us back in our growth as well. If you're a small ministry, you can't afford to donate now, you're the reason we set up this difficult structure that we operate under, and we are blessed to have you in the community. Most of the churches though that use Rock come from another system they paid for. And if that's the case at your church and you're not donating or you're not donating at the suggested level, please take a minute to revisit that and look at how you can be both a giver and a receiver in the Rock community because truly the community only survives and thrives when we all look at ways that we can be in both, the giver and receiver situation. So I did wanna say thank you to those churches we've heard from, encourage everyone else to just let us know what's going on for next year and your planning. We were excited to see that this month for the first time, we have capped we've reached past the 50% mark. So we do measure the number of churches that are running live on Rock and are donating. And previously, we've never gotten over 50% of churches running on Rock and donating. And this last month, we hit 52%. So that was exciting. It does show we're trending in the right direction. It's still a sobering number that just over half have decided that although they're finding success with Rock that they wanna help contribute to it. It's a little sobering for our team, but it is definitely moving in the right direction, and we're thankful for the churches that support us. September was one of the highest months this year where we saw new donors coming online, so we appreciate that. That is our little funding update, and we definitely appreciate the communication we have with all those churches who are so open with their planning. That helps us out a lot. So a big thank you from our team to yours, and until next time. Today's show is 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. 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