Podcast Episode 55: Episode 29: Rock v6.10 and v7 for Christmas

Description

Get the details on Rock v6.10 and the highly anticipated v, as well as some information about RX2018, upcoming Roadshows, Rock Master Classes and your year-end donations & pledges.

Transcribed Content

This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock partner Triumph Tech, a full service specialist partner. Rock partners provide crucial support for Spark Development Network and important services for the Rock community. Connect with Triumph Tech today at rockrms.com/partners. Welcome to this episode of Rockcast. We're here again today to talk with you about some interesting things that we have going on. As usual, we have, the standard group around the microphone, Jon Edmiston, myself, Emily Forman, David Turner, and Nick Airdo. So I know what everyone is waiting to hear about, and that's our release schedule. We'd better start off with that today. David, can you tell us what's going on with the v six ten? Sure. We packaged that up early this week and released it to Alpha on Tuesday for Alpha testing. So we're giving our Alpha testers a chance to test that and make sure things are working. Normally we have a two week alpha period, but it really kind of depends on how much testing gets done. So if we can get that done, we'd be releasing to beta in probably right after Thanksgiving. Yep. That would be the plan. So if you are on the Alpha testing team and you happen to be listening to this podcast today or tomorrow, we're counting on you. Help us out. And that leads right up to the real question people are having, which John, maybe you can help us out with, v seven. Yes. So v seven is coming along smashingly. We are down to just the last few little polishes and touches. But before we get to that schedule part, let's talk about some of the features. I mean, we've gone through that quite a bit. I don't think there's anything majorly new that we've added except we've taken the communication tools even a level further in terms of their capabilities. And a lot of that's actually thanks to Emily and her advanced usage of our V7 pre alpha release. And so, what we've shown, I think, really is great. I think it's a huge step up, but there's always been this complexity to creating templates. And if you have a good template, things work well. But if you don't really have a template that you , it's really hard to create HTML email. In fact, it's something that you should remove all sharp objects from your desk if you're gonna create an HTML email template. So we really wanted to simplify that. And so we've added a lot of features to really take HTML email templates to next level. So now you can customize things color, background colors, link colors. You can easily place your logo on them. So we're gonna be shipping out of the box with three different templates for the wizard. But those three different templates are actually really, really powerful and you can customize them in lots of different ways. So those three templates actually you can do, you can almost make an infinite number of email types out of them. So between the tools that are in the wizard, the drag drop tools and the new templating tools, it's going to go a long, long ways. Also, we've added some additional capabilities to the BI tools. So when we get to the fit and finish of a lot of this coding, we're actually using it on real data and that's when it gets exciting. And so one of the things we really wanted to do is provide a template for Power BI for people to use out of the box. It's just a starting point. We know it's not going to be what everybody's going to use for their final solution, but it's a starting point. And so we've been working on that. And some of the things you can do in Power BI is just amazing. And now that we have the data sets in Rock for you to pull from, it's just crazy what you can do. And so we've kind of been adding a few features now that we've been using it , Oh, wouldn't it be cool if we've added some of those? We have that template and we've done a lot of training materials on that. So we have a whole guide for Power BI, brand new, a brand new manual just on that. We have a template for you to use and we have training videos for you to use, which, it walks you through actually how to build some of those reports, how we made them, so that you can kind of use that as a starting point. So I think a lot of people are going to get a lot of power out of BI without having to become geniuses in programming or anything that. Sometimes it's just watching someone make one report. And I think I mentioned in one of the videos, the most intimidating thing about Power BI is a blank canvas. Once you start going, once you get rolling a little bit, it actually goes pretty fast and it's pretty fun. But when you're staring at that blank canvas, you're not quite sure what to do yet, that's really hard and that's intimidating. And I think we've removed that from the equation. So, and there's just a lot of other, I would say, features that have been added. There's so much to V7. It's almost a whole new product in a lot of ways. So, but we have to put the wraps on it. We know we can't keep playing with this. I've had a lot of fun suggesting new things. Yes. And you're quite good at that. So, but we are putting the wraps on it. There are a few things, Oh, it wouldn't be great, but we're gonna have to postpone those till Dot releases or to eight. And so Mike's been really working hard on bringing this to completion. So he and I have been kind of doing that fit and finish polish work. And I think, I don't want be held to this, but I think we could have this to Alpha a day or two after the Thanksgiving break, unless we find something crazy bad. But, and we're trying to sneak in a few things that we need for dot release future things, because we can't really make model changes, on a dot release. So we're trying to sneak in a few little things that we're going to build off of, in the, in the dot releases for seven. So, we can go to Alpha soon, but this is not going to be a two week Alpha. This is going to be a longer Alpha. We need people to really kind of be kicking the tires on this. Of course, we have the holidays, which is going take a lot of time from people. And we want to be careful when we redo releases. So it's probably our goal is to have a beta the January. We just don't think putting out a beta right before or after Christmas is a good idea. Right. And this release, version seven, will be available to the, what's the term, early adopters only? Yeah. We'll have more information on that. We have a video coming out next week on on the new, early adopter program. Well, hopefully I didn't steal the thunder too much there. No. Nope. That's good. So do look for that. But I will say that the flexibility that I've seen in some of the tool sets that have been created between BI and, the email updates is huge. So I'm excited about the tools that will help you see how to do some examples and where to start on those because, once you get going, you'll just have so many great ideas. But you mentioned, it can be a little intimidating knowing where to start. So I'm really you'll love these templates that are coming out. I think John sacrificed maybe some of his sanity toward the, HTML email templates that are coming out. So do appreciate them. But they're exciting. I've had a lot of fun playing around with those. So if you've seen a difference in the quality of email that has come out lately and some of the things we've been promoting, that's due entirely to those tools. And it's been fun to work through those and and find options or suggestions as those go and and probably that's led to a little sanity loss. So I'm I'm just gonna publicly apologize, John, for for that. But you really put them through the paces. I mean, made some pretty complex emails with that drag drop wizard. It was easy to do. That's what's so exciting about it because I would not be building anything in HTML, especially emails. And so having the drag drop options is easy and fun and you can do a lot with it. Yeah, we mentioned that there is a new BI book, but there's also gonna be a new book just on writing HTML email templates. So we're really investing heavily into helping you with that. It is hard, but we're trying to make the tools available for you. What if someone looks at the templates that are there and even all the options to reconfigure them and says, have a totally different idea in mind. I don't want to use any of these templates. Creating a new template, you can follow this guide. Yeah. The guide doesn't really tell you everything you need to know about HTML email because that would be, , impossible. Mind numbing. We do link out to some great resources that are already on the internet, but what we really do is talk to you how do you use the advanced features within Rock? How do you make your template be color changing and logo swapping? So hopefully, you'll knock it out of the park on your own and then share those with folks. Because I really think within twelve months we'll have hopefully a sharing environment of these HTML emails. We're not satisfied. There's some other things that we're talking about doing to make HTML emails even easier, in V eight. So, we won't be done there. And we have another book, brand new book on universal search. So V7 comes with three brand new books and a lot of videos. And I'm excited about that too because Amy is now doing the videos for Rock U. So we're going to continue to invest in that already. the amount of views on Rock U videos breaking the bank yet, breaking their budget. It is costing us more money in WYSTY than we planned, but that's a good problem. That's a good problem to have. Cool. Am I up next? I talk about our favorite time of the year? No. It's not Christmas. It's contribution statements time. It's the time when your finance team is in panic mode. And so this is your heads up community to make sure you've tested your contribution statements. If if this is your first time or first year in Rock and you haven't played with that piece of the puzzle yet, it'd be wise to start kicking the tires on that. Make sure that you're comfortable with it. You'll have time to go onto the Slack channel and ask questions to other people that have been through it. And it's just something you don't wanna wait till January to to look at. I would say do it now while it's quiet. Yes. Great plan. It's never something you wanna spring on someone at the last minute. Exactly. Make it smooth. And then we are actually we have just barely wrapped up the conference for 2017. Feels to me. I know we're a little bit further, but this year's flying by. And we're already kind of knee deep in planning the next conference. So again, we took all of your feedback and we are reinventing Rx for 2018. So we have just a few insights for you that we can share today. Yeah. And truly we have been spending hours on on Rx 2018. We've talked a lot about it. We have some really exciting ideas to expand it. So a few of those things we want to talk about today just because we want you guys to be thinking about it and getting ready for that. So we want to add several additional tracks in terms of a communication track, maybe a first impressions track. We're still working out what those tracks are going to be. But the key is we want to increase the audience for RX twenty eighteen. Our first conference maybe had, it was more technical. Our second and third were less technical and we want to keep that trend. Yes, we will still have some technical content, but we really want to be focusing on best practices, on ministry, best practices and ideas. And so we're going to be and we're already working on and we're already talking to speakers who can come in and who are experts in the areas of church communication or leadership strategy. So we really want you guys as The Rock administrators, we want to provide you great content. That's easy. We were pretty good at that. But we also want to bring in more and more content so you can bring more of your ministry leaders and pastors with you so that you guys can come and you can have content for all of you. Then all this content will have a tie into Rock. So for instance, if we have a industry person come and talk about maybe communications and they're talking about social media, we're going to back that up by, and here are some things you can do to Rock to implement the best practices that they talk about. So, we're heavily planning for Rx 2018 now, and we want you to know that so that you can already be talking to them, but also so that you can be planning for your budget for next year. Obviously if we sprung this on you two months before, you've probably didn't budget to bring that many people. We want to tell you that now. So A, you can budget for it and B, we will be putting up the pre registration soon. And so that allows you to actually, if you have any budget this year, you can actually spend some of that budget this year. And then you can kind of register maybe some more people next year with 2018 budget. So we will be putting up a pre registration soon. We just need to lock in the location and date and we're super close on that, but we just can't probably publicize it quite yet because there's a 3% chance something comes up that we're not expecting. And so we're not quite ready for that. But a matter of a week or two? Yeah, I hope so. I think that'll be the case. And again, we're re envisioning all of this because at the end of the day, Rock is not a database. Rock is a relationship management system. So we've done a great job with all the database tools, but what we definitely want to do is continue moving in the direction of how do we facilitate relationships so that people can be led closer to Christ, and that's what ministry is all about, and that's what we want to provide a location for and a time for because you really need to clear some time and space with your ministers and with your technology leaders to really craft together. Here are the tools. Here are the plans. Let's go put this in action. So I think this is gonna be a really exciting time in 2018. Yeah. Every time we bring and have a meeting on it and talk about it, it just gets super exciting. It's almost , can't wait till 2018 until the week before. And then I'm always , why are we doing this? But if you guys have any ideas on speakers, we would love to hear them. Oh, yes, Absolutely. And we will still, want to feature churches and the things that they're doing and what they've moved forward in Rock. And those showcases are, an essential part of our conference, and we're definitely keeping that. So also this year, if you happen to be a church that's working on Rock now or during this year, start cataloging those recipes and those tips, package them up so you can share them with other people, and get in touch with us soon so we can build a space into the conference for you to share, because your tips and tricks will save someone else time and energy and be super helpful, then they can focus on other areas where they can be, innovating. So what you're doing is important to the whole community. Don't forget to take those few extra steps to package it up, connect with us, and let us know so we can help you share that. Right. In fact, that's one of the topics we discussed is how do we increase that showcase? How do we make that showcase even more, efficient and get more content through, subscription system we had in 2017, where if you wanted to know more information about something, you could, text a keyword and then get more information later in your in your personal subscription, and we definitely wanna keep more of that. So as you're putting your things together, think about is there a white paper involved in this? Is there a recipe card involved in this? What is it that I could put together to share? Because churches love that and so do we. And we are working on more technology for 2018. Yeah. Know. I'm not gonna talk. We want it to be kind of an expo of some of these technologies that, and recipes and best practices that you can do. So we want you to actually experience, that usage too. So we're already working on that. We learned from last year, don't wait till three months out. That's true. So why don't we take another quick break here to hear from some more of our partners and we appreciate them so much because they help make everything we do possible. This episode of Rockcast is also brought to you by Boxcast and DevObel, two more of our Rock partners. Livestream your video content flawlessly with Boxcast's easy to use solution that combines hardware, software, and back end services. Work with the only streaming company that has built its entire infrastructure from beginning to end, and you'll have access to compression, cloud transcoding, archiving, video on demand, pay per view settings, and a scalable delivery platform. Also brought to you by DevOble. Full service specialist DevOble has a highly experienced team of developers and project managers to smooth your transition to Rock. You can count on them to dive into your company needs and structure, develop a tailored plan, and deliver a transparent, high touch implementation process. With dedicated server technicians, designers, webmasters, coders, and a full time help desk department, you'll find that DevOble can meet your needs from custom development projects to support. Check out BoxCast and DevOble today on our partners page. Alright. Welcome back. That was good to hear from some of our Rock partners. They're a huge supporter of ours, and, we appreciate everything they do for our community and for the churches and for the Spark team. Now that we've been let's see. We've touched on contribution statements already, but kind of tied into that would be year end donations. So this time of year, you are reviewing your budget. You're saying, hey. We've we've hit these numbers. Other areas, we haven't. Just wanted to remind you that if you have any year end budget that you're going to lose at the end of the year, could you please earmark some of that and send it over to the Spark team to help us with our planning? This is the time of year where we look at pledges that came in versus donations that came in, and there's always a couple of areas where those don't line up exactly right. So if you're able to help with the donation of funds that you would otherwise lose, this is the right time of year to do that, and we would be very grateful if you were able to make a year end donation to support what we're doing, because we are definitely wanting to give back to you as well, and we have big plans. We'll be planning in the next year to kind of package up our releases into, smaller releases and to give you more more frequently. So that's one thing that you can help us with in your funding is so that we can allocate the resources to that. Another, topic that's closely related is pledges for 2018. So if you have not yet had an opportunity to put in your pledge for next year, that is a huge tool in helping us plan. And we are right now, just you are, planning for next year and planning on how to allocate our resources. We're pretty far into first quarter planning. We're looking at second quarter. And, even if you're giving right now and you have recurring transaction, that happens every month, just shoot me an email at the the least and say, hey. We're planning to keep this up next year, and then we can run, that into our planning calculations. But if you have not yet put a pledge in, don't delay. Have that conversation with your leadership and let us know because your planning is our planning, and that tells us how much work we can do for you next year. So we're we're still waiting to hear, from some churches on that. Let's see. We've got some great events scheduled for next year too, and some of that funding will help go toward putting these in place. Nick, could you tell us a little bit about the road shows? Yeah. We've got, eight scheduled road shows coming up, and they're sort of spread across The United States, although we're a little underrepresented on the East Coast, I'd say. We are right now. So if you're an East Coast church and you wanna host a roadshow, drop us a line, let us But we do have let me just kinda rattle through some dates real quick just to peak the ears. So in January 17 at Emmanuel Church, there's one in February 2 at Fox River Community Church, February seventh, Hillside Christian Church, The Crossing Church, that's at the February, February '20 second. There's also one the next day, February 23 at North Point Community Church. And three more, Shepherd Church on March 1, Cedar Creek Church, May eighteenth, and then last at the moment, June 27 at Hillside Christian Church. Right. And those range all over the country, California, Ohio, Georgia, Texas, Wisconsin, Indiana. My what am I leaving out? What is that? Kentucky, South Carolina? No. We've got one in Atlanta, Georgia. But anyway, they're they're all over, and we still have some. We're communicating with some churches that haven't quite locked in their date yet, but those locations will be coming online, so keep checking back. And if you're a church that could offer that, essentially what we're looking for is a location that can host probably no more than 40 people and a person that can lead that because the core team does not travel to put those on. It's usually someone that's been in the community a little bit. That said, we provide the presentation that you'll give and a little training video link so it's not super complicated. There is a q and a that you'd be responsible for leading at the tail end of that. And it's a great chance to meet other churches in your area that are interested in looking at rocks. It could be the start of your future user group Yes. Local user group. I'd say too, if if you're maybe the roadshow isn't of interest to you because you're already too far along, you're you could probably do the roadshow. Maybe you can't do it quite yet. But the other thing you can do is help people get there. So if you have contacts or if your church has a resource or a mailing list that you could send it out to help publicize this, Because that's one of the challenges that we have. We have a lot of people in our database. Of course, we're going to do that. The host church has some people that maybe they can, a mailing list they can use. But I'm hoping that a lot of other churches have mailing lists that they can help make available to route people to the closest roadshow. And when that was done last year, we had an amazing success. We did. That's a great point. And in addition to that, if you are a church that's not quite ready to host yet, but you think maybe you're a year away from feeling you could put that on, lead the presentation, and answer questions, if there's a roadshow near you, pop in. The host would love to have another resource with a different angle of experience with Rock. Again, it's a great way to connect, and then it's a great way to train yourself up, to possibly be in later next year. And if I didn't mention this already, all the details are at rockrms.com/roadshows. Great point. But it's also featured on the homepage. So There's a link. Yeah. And it's free. We forgot to mention that. Oh, of course. It's kind of big deal. We would you to register, because it helps the host church plan for the seating and the location, which room inside the church to put it in. So that registration is just a tool for the church that's hosting, but it is totally free. So churches can come and bring a huge amount of their staff. In fact, we have a story from last year of a church that showed up with I I don't even remember how many people, quite a few people from their church. They sat. They asked questions. They'll be moving to Rock this January now after attending that, and now they're looking for ways to dive in and to help out. And they're also let me just lead into the next topic. They're also asking about master classes. So that's another option. So if you are past the roadshow, you don't need that assistance, you've already figured out how to help promote the roadshow, but you're looking for something that's a little bit deeper for your staff, the master class is probably the way to go. So it's an intensive three day class from 08:30 to five and it covers, all the major features. It'll walk you through everything from, the very beginning, here's our person profile, all the way through here's how you create, reports and workflows, here's an introduction to Lava, and all the resources that you need to take that to the next level. And then and it's not only an instructor led class. It's interactive during that time, and there are exercises that you can do right on-site where you apply what you're learning as you're learning it. Because if you're me, you hear, you listen, you go, oh, I totally got that. And then you don't actually do it, and you come back to it a month later and think, now what was that again? So that application, think, is a really good step. Now with the master classes, it's something you would definitely wanna get on your budget for next year. And there are two options. We have an option that's hosted right here in Arizona at our International Spark Development Network headquarters. And we say that jokingly. Oh, we do. Yes. We have a a really small office in a retirement community with cheap rent and and a great conference room. So we'll put on a real nice master class for you. We'd love to have you join us at that. And we offer a limited number of those because frankly, it's a pretty big tap on our core team to be able to pull pull that off. But we know that's exactly what some churches need. So we do have three of those scheduled right now with a link from our homepage. You can find out more information on those. And then we also have a larger format class that travels to different locations. So churches can host that, and then the regional area can access it a little bit easier transportation wise. So that is a relatively new concept. I think the first one of those was right after our conference this year. We just had another one in Houston. And, let us know if you would to either host or if you're looking for a master to come to your area. There's a link to the master class page right on the home page, and it has both of those options listed and it can break down exactly what that means. But do take a look at that if your team can, benefit from what you would learn in a master class, you'll wanna get that in your budget now. It's taken a lot of teams from, a base level of understanding of Rock to really being able to do some powerful things. And honestly, we're seeing how it's creating people in our community that are diving back in and answering questions and really being more, productive inside our community, and and being the people with the answers. We know that this has been a successful class and we're excited to continue graduating people from it. It's been a while since I led one. I'm actually looking forward to it. It's a great way of meeting people. It is. From the first three that we did earlier this year, it's amazing how many new relationships and new people that we were able to connect with. It's always fun to put names and faces together too. Right. And to watch the transformation that they come in and then afterwards they're in the community helping everybody. It's awesome. It is. Well, think that's all we have for you today. We will keep working, keep noting things, and come back with another podcast when we have some more interesting things to share. But I guess end of the day today, plan for the year end and some of your Rock tools can help you do that. Plan for next year. We would love to, be more involved with you in our Rock community, and there are lots of ways to make that happen. Thanks for tuning in. And today's show was produced by Emily Forman. And Nick was our audio engineer and does all the post processing of putting out social media. And Jim Michael does all the editing and the audio. And our amazing show notes are typed up and put together 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.