Podcast Episode 53: Episode 27: Rock Experience 2017 Recap

Description

Catch the RX2017 highlight recap and some news about the upcoming v7 release. 

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. We are very excited today to share with you a little bit about the conference, a recap on some of the things that happened and a little update on some of the stats that we've seen and shared with you at the conference. So if you missed it, you will have a chance to hear some of the announcements everyone else got to hear. And if you were there, I have a few interesting updates for you on our statistics. So let's start with those updates. We had this year 02/1995 registered attendees and that is a big difference from last year's conference at one forty six. Now Harvey had different plans for us. And so when he rolled into Houston, we did have around 20 people that weren't able to make it out. But we are gonna have, with Bema's help, a fun little mini conference for them here at the end of the month, in the next week or two. So we're still considering them as as part of the crowd. They definitely wanted to be there and I don't think hurricane Harvey was a a better option, just one they couldn't avoid. Yeah. We also had 16 sponsors this year which was a nice full crowd, in the sponsor area. It seemed really busy, a lot of fun there. And, we shared in our presentations a few things, about how what our size was, at the conference and we've even seen a little growth since then. So I thought that would be kind of fun to share today. The number of registered organizations, so those are ones that have shown interest in Rock and actually downloaded it. It does not mean that's everyone using it, but we track that and show those numbers from time to time with you because it does track interest. And at the conference, we let that it was 2,983 downloads and as of yesterday, it was actually at 3,148. Awesome. So that shows you the kind of growth rate that we're on and it's picking up speed which was kind of one of the themes we talked about at the conference. We also talked about the number of churches using Rock and by using Rock we define that really as they're running on it right now or they're really close to running on it. They're working really hard on their implementation. So you kind of group those two, groups together. And again, these are ones that have told us because we're open source. We they don't have to tell us, but these are ones that are usually a little more plugged into the community and want us to know. At the conference, we, announced that that number was 230, And as of yesterday, that number was 238. Wow. So people are moving quickly. Slack, our slack community has also seen a lot of growth. We had 977 members on the general channel and that broke 1,000 during the conference, which is really fun. I think that was day two and now we're at 1,043. Wow. Mhmm. That really jumped. Yes. And if you are not on the Slack channel, you are really missing out because there's a lot of good stuff happening and actually a lot of channels inside, Rock Slack where you can have very specific conversations whether you're looking for, information on migrating from another system or whether you're looking at some customization things or wondering about how to configure check-in or why check-in isn't working all of a sudden. There's a lot of great information in there. And then finally, Capterra reviews are a great source of discovery for people looking for a new system and, we have been very blessed to have some incredible reviews. In fact, I think they're all five star right now, which is just mind blowing. Yeah. And we had 39 at the conference, and encouraged people to continue doing that. We're up to 43 today, and that is a huge help to the community. So if you have not left a review on Capterra yet, you're using it and Rock is making a big difference at your church, please hop on over to Capterra and leave a review for Rock because that makes a big difference for the community and you're really kind of paying that forward as far as discoverability goes. Oh, also I should probably tell you if you want a Slack invite that would be on our website and then go to slash Slack, which is kind of hard to say but not hard to type. You can get your invite there. So that's the update. We also had a lot of great announcements, for the community at the conference. So I thought it would be really fun if we just kind of break those down today. You did a really good job on that update. Maybe you should do that part at the next conference. Oh, thanks. I think I'll skip that. You're good at that, David, or John. David, do you wanna tell us about the pre alpha server and pre alpha release notes? That was a really cool announcement. Sure. So we've always Well, haven't always, but for quite a time Quite a while we've had a demo server that people can go to to see the latest production version of Rock and play with it. But we had a lot of people ask for a server that they can see the latest bits that we've been developing. So we announced that we have that now. It's a Pre Alpha server. It's at prealpha.rockrms.com and that is updated every week with the latest code from development. So when we update our Spark server and the Rock server every week, we're also updating that and reimaging that database for people to look at and just see the latest features of Rock and to play with them and actually help test them too. And along with that, we have a page that has the release notes for each of those. So that's updated every week also. That's from the Rock's website slash prealpha release. And there you can go to see the latest release notes. So we find that very helpful too, to just test and see things. We hope that the community does too. Great. I know a lot of people have been interested in finding out what those things are. And we definitely hope that in addition to just that interest that a lot more testing and interacting picks up there. That's a good step forward. Speaking of release notes. Yes. Speaking of release notes, the team also updated the old release notes notes page as well as the the new one. So if you go to the release notes which is just slash release notes from the main Mhmm. Rock RMS website, you'll see they're now totaled at the top. You can see how many a total count of major releases, minor releases, but it also shows a total count of all the features, improvements, and fixes. So each individual item is now kinda tagged as a improvement of a feature or an added feature or a bug fix. And and then they're all broken out by categories. So if you're really just concerned with the CMS features that are changing in the current release, it's so super simple to see that now. And I think that was mostly John, was that you that did all that? Yeah. Maybe. I think you're right. We had I had some of the development was we had one of our Helpers? Community members help with some of that. Yeah. Cool. So you really took our meager, , simple Release Notes page and and super revamped it. Well, you don't if you don't know that a new feature is there, then why did we even code it, ? Exactly. It's a waste of time. And so having that kind of discoverability of new features is really important. Yeah. It's also clues to, hey, what should you train your staff on? Yeah. , what's and and now you get a heads up seeing them on the pre pre alpha server. what's coming, so you can get a game plan going. I think it goes into a larger vision too, where we want people obviously, everybody's doing a good job reporting issues. And the community is also doing a really good job now helping test those, make sure they really are issues, and helping us really understand what's the severity of it, is it repeatable? But really the next phase is after the issue has been fixed, either by us or by the community, we want people to also be able to test those fixes. And if we didn't have a pre office server or pre office notes, , we'd have to wait six, eight months sometimes to test those fixes and that's just not going to happen. So now with these rapid tools, you can also help us test that. And so we're all responsible for quality. So I have a question. Is it still generating, pulling release notes from commit messages that are kind of flagged? We're doing that manually every week. So every week we look at those commit messages Okay. And update the release notes. Cool. Alright, good. We had another big announcement, and big is, referring really to the quantity of work that went in to pull this one off. But also, I think it's related to the impact that this is gonna have on the community. It's one that I'm really excited about, and we just carved out a huge chunk of time this summer, specifically, John. So why don't you tell us about what you worked with on this? So one of our core values is accessibility. And that's really what drove us to create Rock was we just didn't feel that churches had accessibility to the technology that they needed. Or if they did, it was all behind a paywall that a lot of churches just couldn't afford. So small churches didn't have the same access to technology as maybe larger churches. So that's what really was the genesis for Starting Rock. But accessibility to the actual technology is one thing, but actually understanding how to use it is another. And so we really felt that we needed to provide better training materials. We have great documentation. We're going to continue to invest in that. We really feel that is an important piece because you get so much detail there. But we also wanted to provide videos for that. So as Emily mentioned, over the summer we filmed 110 short videos on how to use Rock. It's about every piece of Rock. And so a lot of editing, lot of shooting. I mean, you're a part of all that too, Emily, shooting all that. And the community. And the community for testing those I'm not sure if I shared it at the conference, but my kids actually did a lot of the editing, forced labor. And so we really needed someone to actually go through and watch them and make sure that everything was right. Because that's a ton and ton of content. So Jim Michael volunteered to watch 110 videos of me talking about Rock, which sounds torture to me. And so he gave us some feedback on that. I think it's really going have a huge impact on staff. Some of the feedback from other people who saw kind of a preview of it was how much are you going to charge for that? How much is the subscription to get access to that content? And we talked about that. And while we still need funding, we really felt that that was not something that we could charge for. Again, that's accessibility to something that's required and needed to be successful in Rock. And again, we didn't want to give an unfair advantage to maybe churches who could afford it versus those who don't. Because sometimes it's a smaller church that actually needs that content more. So it's free. You can go out to our website and go to rockyou. Or you can go into the Learn section and there's a link there too. But there's 110 videos for you to learn, to share with your staff. We'll be continuing to add to that. We'll be continuing to update those. And we want to provide some more tools to eventually allow you to bring those videos right into your instance of Rock. And then you can pick which ones you want to share with different segments of your staff. So what you're seeing is really the beginning. And most things, we're not satisfied with anything. The user experience on the Rock U is acceptable but not nearly what we want it to be. Give us a little bit of grace with that. But the content is a good first stab. Definitely interested into your feedback but real happy that it's there. We are happy that it's there. And we're also really happy to be just working daily with an organization that models generosity this. That it feels really good to be able to say, hey, this kind of training, this quality, which is unbelievable, is absolutely free to people. And we're already hearing stories back, from community members who say, this is just what I need. I can point my staff to the right direction. It saves me time. It's so clear. It's helping my staff. I actually heard from a partner yesterday who was helping, someone and pointing that person to the videos. And so that's, , that represents, accessibility to the churches, it represents cost savings and it's just a good tool that is being used across the ecosystems. We're already hearing about impact from that. That's great. Also on the training piece, this year, we introduced the new concept of Master Classes, which you may have seen some promotions for or heard about. We have now held four master classes, which are three day intensive deep dive into, all of the parts of Rock, from an administration perspective. And after these four classes, we now have 67 graduates that are out in the Rock world. And you've seen many of them. We've watched quite a few of them kind of come up through the ranks in the community, especially in Slack. And they're not just taking the information they've learned and using it to make what their job is easier or make things better for their staff, but they're now going right back into the community and helping answer questions and point people in the right directions and they have just become, , real cornerstones in the community for helping elevate the conversations and the training advice and we've seen a huge impact in our community and what it's doing to help people, which is really fun and exciting to see because the four of us around the mic right now can only answer so many questions an hour and we have a few other things to do besides that. So this really helps keep the conversations going and keep some of those, entry level support type questions handled with high, high quality. So a big thank you to the people who've participated in that class and have made that investment and then are in turn investing back into the community. Isn't that how God's church should run? I mean, we're all helping each other. Some people go to the training classes, they come back, they give that. I mean, it's so cool to see that it's not just expected that some guy you paid has to come answer your questions and he doesn't even work for a church or she doesn't work for a church and has no idea how these features really work. But we're all helping each other. I think it's really cool. I I love going into Slack and just watching the interactions and and just seeing and cheerleading for that. It is really exciting to watch. And so if somebody wants to sign up for a upcoming master If someone would to sign up for an upcoming master class, there is a link on our front page, to do that, or you can go to slash master class. Why do I get all the hard URLs? And you can go there as well to see what's coming up. I think we have one registration that's open right now. It's going to be in Houston at the November. So that's a good one to sign up for. And I know there's, there are some other ones that we're being we're talking about right now. So those will be coming up soon as well. And I don't know, it's just there are a couple of different formats. You can read about it online and find out what works for you, but there are a lot of, of options there and coming up. Okay. So we've also been doing quite a few things. As we're talking about, we know training is an issue for accessibility. And at first we looked at an accessible product from a price standpoint. Then we moved to the concept of accessibility through training and understanding. And then we've kind of moved to the next step based on the feedback we're constantly getting from the community, which is good. That some people still are having, accessibility issues because of hosting and we don't have this managed solution. And there's still a lot of DIY when it comes to what are my needs and how do I get Rock going at my church, which has become a bit of an accessibility hurdle for some churches. So we've kind of begun to look into that as well and we made an announcement about that at the conference. Yeah, so we have a new joint service, guess the best way to call it, called Portal. So Portal is a turnkey Rock hosting. So it's not just Rock hosting, you also get everything you need to go along with with Rock. So you'll get Mailgun, the Smargy Streets, of course, but pretty much all those add on services that you would need come with it. And it really is sign up and then you get that that full managed turnkey Rock hosting right there. Now it's a kind of a strategic partnership between Spark and another hosting company called Saxum Solutions. And so that is, run by Clint Chapman. And he has a lot of experience doing hosting companies. He actually owned one at a point and now he's starting up this one. And so we're kind of helping him get the technology understood and we're providing some tools to help hosting, it a little easier. So I would recommend going out there. We're just getting started now. So we are trying to manage expectations. We're just trying to get this thing launching. But if you or a church is interested in that, you can definitely sign up right now online. Yes, it is a little bit hidden on our website right now, kind of on purpose, because John said, we're in the middle of introducing this new service and signing up our first few customers and things. So we have not, advertised it everywhere yet, but you can find it on our website, and it's slash portal. You got another good one. See how I just got that for Yeah, that's nice. Saw it coming. So that's P O R T A L, which is the name of the service Portal. Right. And I think it's important too that a lot of people who probably listen to the podcast are probably fairly technical and probably are hosting this themselves. And so sometimes they're , well, this is a good way to get started and eventually you can maybe move into things Azure. And Azure is great, but honestly, a vast majority of churches cannot figure that out. That's just not where they're at. And that's why services this are so needed. I would say too, and we said it at the conference, if you have hosting experience and you've learned a few lessons learned about hosting Rock, we would love to hear those, to share those with Clint. I don't think anybody knows everything there is to know about hosting Rock, including us, even though we host quite a few of our own. So if you have little tidbits, share those. I think that's what this community is all about, is sharing and sharing is caring. Mhmm. And as you are in Slack answering questions for people, remember that this solution does exist. So you are able to mention that also in solutions. Just do that with, , just a little bit of a backstory right now that it's new, we're rolling it out. But you can feel free to begin pointing people in that direction. So can I introduce the next item? I know John's really excited about this next item. Yes. Yes. So, yeah, this is, maybe one of the coolest things that's not quite technology related, but it's promotion. So John, what did you get to announce finally? Well, I'm glad you think it's cool. Because sometimes I wonder if it's really cool or if I'm just weird. But so Can it be both? It probably is both. Okay. Yeah. Sorry. My whole life I've been told that. So there's a new version of Font Awesome coming out, Font Awesome five. That's super exciting. This has tons more icons. And what's really exciting about it well, two things are really exciting about it. First of all, they have for the first time a pro pack. So if you buy this pro pack, it's $35.40 bucks. You literally get thousands of extra icons. And who would doesn't want that? , Font Awesome's awesome, but, , we could all use a few more icons. Sometimes you have to get pretty clever on your icon selection. But that's actually kind of part of the fun, I think. But for an extra $35.40 bucks, you can get access to literally thousands of more icons. So definitely go do that. Go to the Font Awesome website and purchase that because it's gonna get more expensive. Right now it's in this presale state. They did a Kickstarter and they actually raised over a million dollars to create that, which kind of makes you wonder how can people pay so much for icons? And we have a whole church management system. Anyways. That's a story for another podcast. Right. But everybody uses it. It just shows that everybody in the world uses Font Awesome. , you can't go to a website and not see Font Awesome. So we are going to be baking that Font Awesome five Pro technology into the core. You'll have to pay for it. So there's it's not free. Course, there still is a free version. We'll get now come out of the box. But we're gonna find a way to get you access to easily to those pro things when you buy them. On top of that, they as part of the Kickstarter had a fundraising thing where you could pay to have your brand icon added. And so, , it's a reasonable amount of money. But we had a generous donation from Minecart Studio to get the Rock logo into that. Yeah. So now the Rock logo will be among the top brands that are out there. And honestly, there's really not that many brands in Fawn Awesome. I can't understand why everybody didn't put their brand icon in. Thankfully, they didn't because it really makes ours stand out a little more. Exactly. It's not saturated. But Rock will be there. I think it's important to note that no donation money went for that. I mean, we we kind of felt , well, that's kind of on the edge of is that a good investment or not? We think it is. We we're so excited, but we went out and found a donation for that, twisted some arms. And so that is now there. What I love about it though is it kind of fulfills a vision that we had again from the very beginning that the Church should be known for good technology. Hundreds of years ago it was, and all sources of science really kind of came through the Church and we kind of lost that. So we really want to have that exposure to the secular world that they can see that there is great technology in churches and hopefully we can start pulling in some of those maybe people who have secular jobs and want to get in their free time involved with something more ministry minded. And this will give us that great exposure. So consider we've planted a flag Yeah. For this initiative. Right. And I think it's good for that to kind of bait to lead them into , what is this? What about the community? Because I've done that. I've seen fun, awesome logos for brands I wasn't aware of. And I've gone out and researched, oh, what is this? What does it do? And I'm sure that's gonna be happening. It already is. I've already seen a few hints on social media about, that's cool that people had found it themselves. It's still in a beta state. So right now you have to have bought the Pro Pack to even get to the beta state. But they're very close to releasing the free version. And then the Pro version will be coming out in stages after that. I mean, they have they have a lot of work to do. And the Rock logo is in the free version. Yep. Every Oh, good point. Time someone loads Font Awesome. I mean, think about that for a minute too. How many billions of times a day does a Font Awesome Library get Put on a server and a website? And and downloaded through a browser session. So the fingerprint of Rock is now in will be in more and more other websites. Right. If we could just get the the the headline on the view source in everyone's server too. Yeah. That would be cool. So it did spawn us too also to go out and get our logo officially trademarked just in case someone were to do weird stuff with it. So we I think we've got that pretty much nailed down too. Yeah. And that was not the only exciting announcement from Minecart, which has been modeling generosity in the community for a long time, in the ecosystem. So David, why don't you tell us about the other really cool announcement that came out of the conference? Sure. As Mycart, we developed a plugin, text to workflow, that has become very popular and very powerful. And a lot of churches are using that. And we just felt that it was too much of a benefit to kinda hold behind that in the Rock shop. So we're actually pulling that made the decision to pull that functionality into Core. So with version seven, that's gonna be included in Core. And right at the conference we just change that to be a free plugin and until people can get v seven. And that plugin just allows what it allows people to do is text, to your number and then just kick off workflows. We used we used that during the conference for our takeaway system, which a lot of people were, , used to get more information about the conference and just churches are using that in really creative ways. So we just felt that it was too too valuable to keep in the Rock shop and it's now in core for V seven. It's That's so cool. It's a simple little Lego brick in the brick of blocks, but it's so useful. You can do so many different things with it. Yeah. I mean, was I I was surprised that it was so well received when we put it out there. But already, since we made it free, we've actually doubled the amount of people who are actually using it now. So it's And that says a lot because that was the top selling plug in. Yeah. It's our best one. Yeah. In fact, some churches have called other churches crazy for not using it. They have. I think, from the stage, in Yes. We'll talk about that in a second. But now we've lowered the bar to accessibility to that. Yes. Always wanting to lower that bar. Of accessibility. Yes. Of accessibility. Not not of standards. Great point. Alright. Well, let's take a break for a minute for a message from our sponsors. This Rockcast episode is also brought to you by Rock partner, Fishhook. Partnering with churches to maximize Rock RMS with custom website design and programming, Fishhook is a communications team that is passionate about Jesus and called to collaborate with churches. For fourteen years, Fishhook has helped churches catch more through branding, website design and programming, video storytelling, and so much more. Also brought to you by SubSplash. Realize an increase in donations, app downloads, and impressions when you use the church app platform by SubSplash. This award winning engagement platform is helping churches connect with their communities through mobile apps, web tools, and digital giving. Privately owned and committed to serving the church, SubSplash serves over 4,000 churches and 25,000,000 users. Just imagine what they can do for you. Check out Fishhook and SubSplash today on our partner's page. Alright. Welcome back. We have, been hearing some constant questions about the one major topic that everyone wants to know about and has wanted to know about for quite a while. And we also addressed this at the conference. So let's, John, why don't you tell us a little bit about what's the status on v seven and, when people can expect to have access to it? Great question. So, and we hear that question almost daily. V seven, we've been working on that for a long time. Something interesting about v seven is if you look at in terms of scope, v six, I forget the number off offhand, I had it in the slides. I think there are about 90 release note points for six. Already for v seven, I think we're above two seventy. So that just shows you that the scope of v seven has just ballooned. Wow. Now we're getting pretty close to nearing the end of the major features. So communications, we're actively working on that right now, and we're just putting the final touches on it. That said, every time we say that, then another feature gets added to it. That's true. And they're all good, actually they're all great. I mean, this last week since the conference, the Village Church sponsored adding another feature to the communications, is adding support for MMS. So you can put attachments in the SMS. Oh, cool. We had planned to do that in eight. But again, the conference really showed, we used that. I wrote a little Windows app that did it, hacked it together. But it had such a good response and everybody really wanted it that someone said, hey, the builders say, well, I wanna fund that. And that's great. I'm so glad that it's gonna be in 7.8 because that is a great feature. But that kind of pushes the scope out a little bit. And that has been constantly happening in good ways. Ways that some people are funding through consulting and not everybody gets to use it in v seven. On top of that, V7, I would say, I would describe it as it's not our day job. It's not our full time day job. Yet. Right. We're doing a ton of consulting that we have to do. And on those jobs, we give, know, most cases it's a fixed bid, here's the date. And we hit those dates. , we don't miss our dates. But when you have this other big huge thing called V7, it's a little hard to be able to give certain dates on consulting, which you never know month to month how many hours you're going to have, how many hours you have to do. And then turn around and give a solid on B7, which has a moving scope, and we never know how many hours on a month that we can apply to it. So it's really hard for us to give a date. I would say it's very, very close in terms of being done. But I would say we're looking at probably near the end of the year to have an alpha version. And then we are gonna need so much help from the community to alpha test this and beta test this because there's so many changes. I would say too, don't wait. Get onto that pre alpha release server, start kicking those tires. We're very close too to having the beta docs up. So the documentation, Amy, our new documentation person has been working so hard on that. There's still quite a bit more to go, but we'll probably put that out before all of the documentation is done just so you guys can get a start on it. So that's coming and that's another big reason for that pre office server. I think we always say it, but it never quite happens, , don't wait. Don't wait till the alpha to start kicking the tires. Don't wait till the final release to start. Do it now. You're helping us. You're helping yourselves. The more bugs and issues we can find in this pre alpha stage It happens here, everyone will be. Right. And it's there. We refresh it generally once month. Oh, I'm sorry, once a week. That pre alpha site gets updated. So don't wait. We're getting close. Scope's still kind of increasing. In fact, I think scope might be increasing a little smidgen today. No. Yeah. It's all good stuff, but I think in the future, two things. We want to have smaller releases. We don't want to have this massive v7 release. I thought v six was a massive release. V7 is much Yeah, three times bigger. So we need to start carving those down in the smaller release. And number two is just imagine if we could just focus on core. If the funding was 100% there, man, we'd be flying through features. Our trajectory would be much steeper. So I think that just goes to show that the funding is really important. And I think if that was our if we're full time funded, we would give much harder deadlines on releases. Having said all that, we, at some point, started cherry picking important things out of v seven and we did point releases, didn't we? Yeah, that's true. I mean, that's a really good point. We've met we made it at the conference is that because of this, there are there have been a lot of nice and sometimes even big features in v six point releases. So I think six point three had fundraising, which is a big feature. We just simply couldn't wait. People had consulted us to put that in the core, which is an amazing thing. Now everybody has access to that great feature. And it was in 6.3. On top of that, they're already using it. We've actually already made improvements to fundraising. We had pull requests come in from several churches to add some features. We've polished a few little points ourselves. So, I mean, just shows our model is completely different and it's amazing. And it's about responsiveness to community needs. So you can see on the fly we're constantly, taking the input that we get and adjusting what we're doing so that we can be really responsive. It does go both ways though. We we need the community to be responsive to our needs as well. So do think we have to just throw that in there. You're hearing a lot about what makes our model different and about how we're not fully funded, about how we can't work on this full time and we really want to. It will be possible. I mean, we're moving the right direction but the funding is not moving as fast as the community needs. So it's really hard for us to continue with that flexibility when we don't have the flexibility on our end. And we don't have grants, we don't have ties to denominations or particular churches. We are completely funded by, the churches that use Rock. So if we're not receiving the support from those churches, we don't invoice anyone, but we do have suggested donation amounts and we rely on that. That's what we use to build V7. So we do have a donate page and you can get all the information there. But if you're using Rock and you're loving it and it's changing your life, please consider, continuing to make that possible and we'll be happy to continue to be responsive and to put out as much as we can, as fast as we can. We to keep a quick clip. And I think the keyword you said is rely. Mean, think maybe what people don't see, because we don't talk about it a lot, is how much we rely on on you guys as a community. , the to the point that this is our paycheck. And sometimes we make decisions , we charge for Rock U? And we're , no. We're just gonna rely that that this is gonna come through. We don't already have that money necessarily, , ready to go. We're just , we're gonna rely that's gonna come in. Or we take our top grossing plug in and give it away for free. It's , we're just gonna rely that this is all gonna work out. I think there's a daily trust that this is all just gonna work out. And Yep. I feel sometimes it is jumping off off a limb as a bird and just saying, I I think my wings are gonna work this week. But, , it's it's increasing our faith. , I think we've learned, , we can do that. And it's it kinda goes back to Proverbs eleven twenty five, the refresh cash motto. He who refreshes others will himself be refreshed. It's a promise right there in Proverbs. And it's Always come through. Right? Yeah. Exactly. But it is. It It's hard to plan. It's really hard to plan. So we're looking ahead, and that's why we're saying we can't tell you when v seven's gonna come out. Because Well, we hate saying that too. Right? Yeah. We hate saying that. Yeah. None of us sitting here has that as our favorite thing to talk about. But we also realized early on because none of us really enjoyed talking about that, we didn't. And then you didn't know. the community had no idea that this was the situation we were finding ourselves on in. So when we started talking about it, many many of the churches in the community rallied around us and said, oh my goodness, why didn't you let us know? Yeah. Of course, we'll fund you. We didn't fully understand the model. So we just need to make sure that continues. Community growth is awesome and it's exactly what we want. But there are a lot of things that go along with that that are kind of a resource drain at that point And we want to be able to meet those needs, but it's very hard to do that at the growth pace that we're experiencing when we can't rely on on an equally paced growth in funding. Speaking of funding, just to rewind a few minutes ago, when John was talking about the fundraising feature, if you were under a Rock when that all happened I was, you can find that documented actually in the group's manual. So we updated the older documentation to include that. So if you already read it, don't think you've read it all. You gotta go back and reread that doc. That's a good point. And maybe we'll add a link to the in the financial document. Yeah. , was actually gonna say that because we debated, , which document does it go in? Because fundraising really are the fundraising groups, but it really is financial. I was thinking financial when I was looking for it. Was thinking the other day makes sense. I wonder if we should just move it and then put a link from the group's document. Either way, you'll be able to find it from either. Yeah. Cool. These are the things we spend way too much time talking about, trying to figure out the right thing, and then there really is not a guess that we spent that much time talking about it because of the output that comes out of this team. You guys are constantly amazing me. So let me touch on some of the things from Rx two thousand seventeen. One of the things that you can do is sorry, point toward the mic. Is you can purchase the sessions if you really wanted to go and wanted to get that. Think is it $1.99 now? Yes, it is. And you can get that by going to slash is it r x? R x content. Okay. Or there's a link on the front page as well. Oh, excellent. So if you were , my church, we couldn't send enough people. We just bought it. And now everyone from my church, once they sign up on the Rock site and are tied to our organization, can now watch that. And do you have to pay per user? No. So you just pay once for your organization and that's pretty awesome. And Derek has actually been listening through all those. I think the content came out really well. I mean, the quality of the captures that we got from the Willow staff were were really nice. And we did kind of a little bit of a different format this this year in how we placed the content. We stole it from the Node conference. So, but it came out nice. I really the idea that that they had done and I think last year's was great, but this year's was even a step up. And you can get a preview of that content. There are a few that are free to watch whether you have a subscription or not. Good point. On that same page, slash rx content. You can watch, two or three that are on Zoom or think this is yeah. And that doesn't require a subscription. So you can see the quality of the content that you'll get there. However, in some of the other ones, you'll definitely want to go back and watch them because churches got up and talked about Yes. How they're doing things with Rock in their church. And there are just so many good ideas from there. It's it definitely gave me some brainstorms to think through when we got back. So we're in the process of implementing some of those ideas. And so I I heavily recommend people get that content. Yeah. And that content is a subscription because there is a significant tangible cost to getting those captures and getting that Oh, yes. That I mean that Oh, there were of dollars probably spent already. That. Well, and and just even the, , the what we have to pay to get it captured. It takes people and resources to run cameras and to to run the capture equipment. So, that's why that is. We , I haven't run the numbers from last year but, , we kind of hope to break even on that. And there's it's not we're we're not charging a lot for what is actually what you're getting. You're getting a ton of information. And honestly, the one of the best things about the conference is the ability to connect with churches using Rock and learn from how they're doing it. So their showcase, sessions are are highly highly valuable. And if you're not able to make it, that you're not able to have those face to face interactions necessarily, which is a big benefit. This is the second best thing, if you can get access to that content because it will help inspire you. It will give you some ideas. Maybe everyone doesn't have to reinvent the same wheel And you'll find out who to connect with. And it it can drive some of those, online connections as well, familiarize you with the with the community. Right. If only we could bottle up the energy of the and the and the relationships. I mean, I remember at one point, I think it had heavy, heavy rain in the late afternoon and it delayed our meal showing up by I think almost an hour. An hour, yeah. I don't think anybody noticed because everybody was just talking and networking and it was the same thing last year to the year before. We had a point where we had to wait for the food trucks and I don't think anybody cared. They were just talking and socializing and networking. And that's what you can't get through the content subscription. And I don't think people understand that who have never been to a No. That's right. The amount of energy and the amount of relationships. And then you see it in Slack that for the next few weeks, you're watching people who connected at the conference. Now they're new best buds and and those are lifetime relationships. It's true. I heard from someone at the conference, that I'd emailed with beforehand and she came up to me and said, , we were talking about some vastly different subject and you just randomly said, you have to go to the conference and sent me a link and she goes, that's why I came and she said, I had no idea what Rock was really about until I came here. I'm so glad you sent me that link. So remember that as you're talking with people for them to get the full concept of what Rock is. They can't just read the docs, they can't just interact on Slack, They can't just they can get the content subscription, but that's just a piece of actually understanding Rock. You get to the to the 5PM mark. But it doesn't end at 5PM. There's dinner and conversations through dinner. And then after dinner, gosh, we several groups of people, large groups were still sitting there at 10:00 when they were show shutting the building down. You'll just never understand unless you go to a conference and partake of that part of the event. That's one of my favorite things is the evening sessions. And I feel the core team learns as much Oh, yeah. During that as anyone. Mean, we come away every year. We do a survey after the conference at the end of it to get people's feedback and we just completely break the event down and rebuild it for the next year. Again, trying to meet the needs of the community and and we'll be doing that again for next year. But one of the things we hear from everyone, on the survey is more connection time, more connection time and I'm not sure if you gave them three days of connection time with nothing else in there, , if they would still say that because it's so so powerful. Yeah. And you can't even the core team, we are surprised every year when we show up and see, Rock has moved forward so much more than we even realize sitting in our office because of this powerful community. And it's really incredible. And we say that all the time that Rock is not a product, it's a community. And the conference is where the community comes together once a year to celebrate, but also challenge and connect. Yeah. I would to see user groups start springing up. And so at the next Rock Conference, I would to see you guys bring your whole user group to the event and kinda sit as a separate conference group and kind of identify yourselves by your user groups. That I think that'll be pretty cool. We also celebrated some stuff at the conference too. Right? I mean, we guys gave out some awards and We did. Yeah. We recognized for the first time what we what we call Rock stars, which was really hard for us. Because we we never wanna say, okay. Well, these people in the community are more valuable than others. But there are certain people who are just go way above and And so not recognizing them would be Yeah. It's almost doing a disservice. Feels wrong. And I think everybody in the community wants to recognize them. That's how we give points on Slack, stuff. But we need to go further than that. So we did create an objective criteria. That's our way of making sure that, , we have it objective and we never wanna be a subjective group. And it's really two levels. Right? We had Rock stars and then this new thing, the Rock hall of Yeah. Right. So we we put the objective criteria and we recognize the Rock stars. But if you spend any time in Slack, that there are a couple people who just go way above and beyond. , they answer almost every question. They in detail, they do pull requests with code. And so we recognized two, what we're calling the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. We've inducted two people into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I'm sorry, the Rock Hall of Fame. We don't need the role. And so, kind of our goal is to have one inducted every year. And it's a lifetime induction. Yes. Right. So the first one was Jim Michael. I mean, who's been in Slack knows that or the q and a. He's still on the q and a. And the things you don't see behind the scenes. Mean, he is constantly helping the decor team. Just that example you gave of watching all the 10 videos. Dude, you watch 10 videos with me and you deserve much more than All of him. And he edits this podcast. Yes, does. Would be right. So we inducted him. And so the trophy for that is a nice orange guitar. Fender. Yes, it was a Fender. With a cool Rock logo on it. Yes. Yep. And but because it was our first year, we we really felt we we just couldn't do one. So we broke the rules. It's nothing establishing rules and then breaking them the first year. And so we inducted another person which is Daniel Hazelbaker. Yes. Yes. Okay, sorry. My brain, I have a huge headache today. I don't think I said that yet. And so we brought him in. And everybody of course sees all the contributions he does in the community. But what you don't see is all the help he personally gives us and especially me. He rewrote the iPad check-in for us so that it met the Apple new 64 bit guides. But he constantly, I think almost on a weekly basis, he's he's helping me personally with stuff that takes stuff off my plate. It's amazing. What you see in the community, I would say, is just the tip of the iceberg of what he does for Rock. And so he also got inducted. But because we want the the Hall of Fame to be important, we want it to have good standards and high a high bar. So sometimes you need to have a pinnacle to look towards. They say when you're driving a high performance race car and you're going around the track, if you ever get in a slide, you always have to pick a place off in the distance and steer towards that. Have a focal point that you can steer towards. And I think that's important that even in the Hall of Fame that we have a reference point to say, well, this is what it means. This is what it means to be in the Hall of Fame. So we decided that we needed to create that. So we picked a person who has been involved with Rock since before Rock existed, who drives over an hour each way once a week to come and work with us. And has for years. For years, not just It's a huge commitment. A new thing. Has done tons of code commits, inspired us, just a good source of community. And so we figured we need to have a role called the commissioner for the Hall of Fame. And so we're calling it the commish, And I don't care that the NFL commercials took our title from us. We had it first. Peyton Manning, come on. Did she get enough trophies already? So we call it the commish. And so we have made Nick Airdo, or he has become that. He's been that role model for us. And, , it was so hard to hear you guys giving me that award because I that's the last thing I really want as an as an award or recognition. I to hide and just do my work quietly. But it's a huge honor too. So, , I just all I can say is I hope I meet all of your expectations and will try to do do better every year. I won't rest on that awesome jacket that I won because it is awesome. You didn't win it. You earned it. That's it. And I will remember probably for the rest of my life as as Emily's talking about all this. I'm looking out across all the people and you're in the back and you're doing something on your phone. Getting rid I was tweeting the the previous awards and then I started hearing him talking about my drive. I'm , that's gotta be me. What is he doing? I was Emily. And then I looked you look up and you have this look on your face. It was classic. I had seared in my mind. I it's I'm sure I turned red. No. You're just , oh, why do you mean red? Shaking, I think. Yeah. I'm not sure why you're not wearing your jacket today. I'm wearing my hoodie. Okay. Do you think it has to do with the it's a hundred plus degrees out today? Yes. Come on. It's a thick, awesome leather jacket, which I can't wait till winter now to wear. Yeah. Let's talk about some other things that you could get at the at the event. Oh, right. That you couldn't get. Got brand new What you're wearing today? Hoodies Yes. With a cool Rock logo. There's a new awesome black or gray and white Rock logo shirt, which I love. This is my favorite. It's really soft. There's some other things as well. Can and can people buy those Yes. There's a hat? I'm not sure if the hat is online or not. The hat's not. You you can send me an email. We'll make it happen. But, you can find the shirts and the hoodies on, on our site. It's slash promoshop. Why do you guys give me all of these URLs? Slash promoshop is where you can go to find, and to buy that the shirts. And we will we'll ship those out to you. What you can't get there though is the exclusive chip sticker from the conference. That's right. Another good reason to come to the That's the the one with the Rock star guitar. Yeah. Is. Celebrating the Rock stars. Yes. And then there was another little weird hiccup that happened at the event. We actually found out just prior to the event. And I from what I remember her saying, Emily nearly fell out of her chair when she heard what was gonna I did. Oh my goodness. It was so unexpected and, really just knocked me over when I got a call from Willow Creek, oh, don't know, a week, a week and a half before the event. And we're nailing down a few final things. We're ready to go. Our stuff shipped out. And you're told, hey, we're not gonna have power on the second day. Yes. We were told that they participate in a voluntary energy reduction program with the state I think and once a year they're asked to completely reduce their power to zero for a one or two hour time period and it just, as luck would have it was going to fall in the very end of our second day of the conference and there was nothing they could do about it. So I I don't actually remember much about that. I think I blanked it, but I was it was it , just one more thing, to a little problem, a little glitch to solve, but as it turned out, , I think it it may have been a god thing, because there is one space in their facility that they keep powered by a generator just in case and of course if you were setting that up, what would you pick? You would pick your main auditorium. So we ended up finishing the conference on the main stage in the Willow Creek Auditorium with all of our people which we had filled up a room. Were feeling so, , at this huge conference, almost 300 people. Then we move into the Willow Auditorium which seats I think around 7,000 people. And we filled up two sections the first ten rows or something. Very insignificant feeling. It was. I felt it was a gathering of my best friends at that point. And and we could finish there and it was just palpable. The the energy and the vision and the direction. As we've seen this growth, if this growth continues and and it continues to be blessed by God and to follow the direction of building up the church in the way that it has, it's an infinite number of people that can be impacted by Rock and that can be in in turn reaching people which is the whole point. Right? Reaching people and helping to connect them with relationship with Christ and and that's a big deal. So we could fill that place in We could, maybe. Two years. Two years. And it seemed maybe that's what God was maybe saying. , hey, you might this could be the future. Yeah. And that and how do we get to that point? It's not by anybody who's talking around this microphone right now. It's going to be a community. We all have to be stepping up, doing our part. And seeing the energy coming out of the conference, that's happening. I'm so impressed with the way people are stepping up in all different ways. I think it's dangerous to think that this is all about programming, technology, coding. It's really not. That's a piece. That's an important piece, but it's a very small piece. It's all about best practices, training, cooperation, collaboration, innovation that happens. A lot of it's just discussions with senior leadership at the churches, trying to pull from them what are their true needs, and then we code it. That's a piece. But it's for everybody. Everybody needs to step up in some way. And it's encouraging to see those coming out of the conference energized to do that. In fact, I feel we might be holding them back a bit because of our bandwidth. It's true. We'll work on that too. If you guys help us work on that. Yeah. But I think you're right. And I it was cool to me. I came away with, saying, okay. Just a feeling that God had said, so you set your vision during the conference and you thought it was a big vision and then I reset it for you. Right. And it's kinda what he does. Right? Yep. And it's a little scary and it's a lot challenging, but it's also, you said, we came away saying, oh my goodness, this is possible. it's gonna take everyone doing their part and it's starting to happen. And when we say everyone, I mean, I think the other thing God does a lot too is he takes the person who doesn't feel they have much to contribute and shows them that they are going to be the key to success. And sometimes it's the people who feel , well, not necessarily in our community, but in life and in a secular world for sure, the people who think they're the big dogs, they generally don't last. And they generally don't make the impact. It usually comes from, , in the battle of David versus Goliath, David will always win. And our goal and our mission has to be never to become Goliath because we could do that. And so I think a lot of people maybe who are sitting out there, they're going to be the ones who are going to be taking us, helping us go to that 7,200 seat. They're going be one speaking on stage that everybody wants to come to and hear what they have to say. And so we all have to prepare, we all have to be getting uncomfortable on a daily basis, stretching ourselves, pushing ourselves in ways. And so we need to be comfortable being uncomfortable daily. And so if you're listening to this thinking, boy, I'll never I'll never gonna be on stage, let us know because God's probably trying to tell you you're gonna be on stage. That happened to me. Well, then look, you're one of the highlights of the conference. Everybody says But I can attest to the fact that, , when I joined this group back in the day, I thought, well, what on earth can I provide to this? I don't have a technical background. , I guess I can I'll figure something out. But, , it turns out that if you don't have, people connecting and sharing and communicating and, and interacting together, then we're all in silos. And so I found that there is a good role for me in that. And so I just want to encourage people that are in a similar position to mine and attest to the fact that, hey, whatever it is you're doing at your church right now, if it uses Rock at all, your insights are valuable. Or if you're in a leadership role and you're able to set, visions and goals and directions, think about how technology can support that and about how you can support the technology and the sky's the limit. I mean, look at what's going on in the tech in the tech industry in the secular world. There is so much room for growth. Right. And it doesn't require just people who have technical skills. You might be a marketer or a fundraiser at your church and if you can contribute huge Mhmm. Through that avenue. Yeah, either by helping us with our fundraising or to giving us the right ideas and tools and metrics that fundraisers need. Sure. I mean, way, there's so many ways you can Exactly. I mean, it's the Acts two Church. We're trying to model the Acts two Church, and everyone brought everything they had together and shared it. So that's what we're all about. So is there a last thing that we're talking about today? I think that that was a good recap. , I I'm tired. I'm exhausted by this. Yeah. If you didn't make it to the conference, you should not miss out on subscribing to the sessions. If you did make it to the conference, know that your feedback was heard and that we are continuing to break the conference down and rebuild it. We'll do that again next year. It may include some things that, are built specifically for user roles. There are lot of things that we could be doing. So all of that is we're considering it now and will be begin planning for the next year. Beyond that, your role is really important and and could be a key one in the Rock community. So, think about what that means. Don't commit before you consider, , what the cost will be and what you're willing to invest but I promise you, you will reap dividends and so will the community. So dive in. And until next time. 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.