Podcast Episode 49: Episode 23: Merry Christmas, v6 is here!

Description

Just in time for Christmas, get ready to unwrap all the new powerful Lava 2.0 features in Rock v6 and hear the latest on the 2017 pledge drive.

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 Rockcast. We are excited to be here with you on our last podcast of 2016, which feels kind of momentous to say. Yeah. See you on the flip side, I guess. Long year. We'll leave this. It has been. Mhmm. A lot of great things have happened this year. We've moved many things forward at different paces. And I guess at the beginning of the year, as we projected some things, we've seen it. Some of them have come to pass we thought. Some have been a little bit different, and I guess it's kinda time to wrap up where we're at right now. So let's talk about the versions of Rock and what we're looking at right now and what we're looking at coming up. So, I'll just touch on v six. By the time you're listening to this, it is now out. I understand it was a long, kinda release schedule since we talked about it at the RX, event, But it's it's that big of a of a feature, and we just wanted to make sure that it had a long beta process. So I said, by the time you listen to this, v six and v six dot one, which has a few bug fixes, fixes, will be out. So Merry Christmas for that. That's a great gift. Yeah. I hope. We hope. Wow. Where do you go from there? I know. V 7. But touching on what Nix said too, that when the V six ships or now is ships, that will un kinda unwind the ability for us to release some new plug ins to the store. There's been a couple that we've actually written from a minecart perspective that has just been kinda sitting on the shelf until v six came out. So definitely go out there, check out the Rock Shop, not only for what's new, but for what's already there. I I've been talking to a lot of people, and they asked me about, certain features. Will Rock have this? Will Rock have that? And it's actually a lot of the answers have been, oh, yeah. There's a plug in in the Rock Shop for that. So and and they're pleasantly surprised by that. So that just tells me that, , we need to do more talking about the Rock shop and people need to be going in there more often just to see what's new in there. That's a really great point. I think that we probably have a lot more there than the last time most people visited and that's an area we've had a huge amount of growth in this year and I expect that will continue increasingly next year too. And something else too, you update to v six, make sure you check this Rock Shop for any updates plug ins you're already using because there are some that will need to be updated. Yeah, and it's on our goals and we've already working on some ideas about how to provide more messaging around the Rock Shop and how do we communicate what's in there without over communicating or overselling it but just making sure everybody at least knows and has awareness of what's in there. But that said, we don't want to really turn it into a huge in your face all the time, the same stuff. So we're kind of working on that right now. Yep. But that does roll into to v seven. We do have a final list of features for v seven. We're gonna be doing a whiteboard video, hopefully later today, on that. Some of the hesitation about, , talking about upcoming releases and upcoming feature lists is that puts a lot of pressure on us to make sure that once we once we unveil that, people now have the expectation of when. That's the next question. And a lot of these features, they're quite complex and there's a lot to them and what we're trying to achieve. So sometimes it's for us, we don't really wanna talk about them until we have an understanding of exactly how we're gonna solve that issue. For instance, how we're gonna do a new email editor. I mean, we all know what a good email editor looks because we've all used something Campaign Monitor or Mailchimp. These are companies that have literally hundreds and hundreds of developers on staff to make those types of interfaces. So there's a lot of, , I think stress on our part to make sure that we can provide something on par with that. And we don't really want to announce those types of features until we kind of have figured out at least the most complex parts and having a good understanding where we're going. That said, when it comes back to the timeline, a lot of that is dependent upon our pledge level. It's hard to commit to something that you don't know how much time you're going to have to work on it. Picture your supervisor coming to you and saying, Hey, want to have this feature ready. When's it going to be ready? And then he says, I'm not sure how many hours during the day you're going be able to work on that. You're probably going be a little hesitant giving the exact date. you're going to get done. you're going to you you have a passion for that. We're still trying to figure out in 2017 how many hours we're going to be able to be able to put towards core through the pledge process, which we'll be talking about and getting an update on a little bit later. So that's a little bit of hesitancy about, , releases and roadmaps. We know that that's not as probably transparent as you would , but I just hope that you see from our perspective what the hesitancy sometimes is. It's not that we want to keep things secret, but once it's out of the bag, then expectations get ratcheted way up, which is natural. I I'd be the same way. And when we don't have the knowledge of how much time we can spend or how we're gonna solve these issues with a very limited resource, fuck it. It's a little bit something that we try to keep a bit under wraps just from protecting our commitments. We always to under commit and over deliver, and right now that's really, really hard to do. So that's a little bit on V7, but more details are coming up Yep. And a whiteboard video coming soon. Good. Alright. We have another exciting concept we rolled out that was really kinda brought to light at the last Rock Conference this year. We realized that the community was growing faster than we had known. We just been in our little corners working, heads down, getting stuff done. Came to the conference and realized about half of the people attending were looking for very basic, brand new to Rock information and realized that we haven't done a great job of getting that out there. And in many cases, people have some questions they want answered in a face to face format. While there's excellent documentation online, and we have an amazing vibrant community that will answer questions as well, sometimes nothing can replace getting your initial questions answered in a live setting and, really being able to dialogue with people who have deep knowledge of the product. So, in light of that, we rolled out, a kind of a prototype of a live, new to Rock show earlier this year, and that was held in Greenville, South Carolina. It went very well, and we've decided to roll that out further in first quarter of next year. We're very excited to announce that we have three locations right now with, registrations open, and they are free, live, new to Rock shows. They will be about two hours long. You can show up. You can hear a presentation that will answer many of the basic questions and give you a lot of that background information you're looking for, and then have a q and a. Get to to dialogue face to face with other Rock churches in your area, and kinda see what's going on there. So, we have three registrations open now. You can expect to see a total of about 10 in the first quarter, So you might wanna bookmark that page and see as things roll out what becomes available. We will post those as we're able. And that is on the website at yes. And the intent of those is that we run them? Oh, great question. No. We did the first one, the prototype one, and we may be involved in a few of them. But really the goal is with this incredible community that we have, that we empower them to be kind of the messengers of Rock and to share their best practices. We find that we learn best even from the people that are implementing and using Rock every day. And so we know that that's what will be most beneficial to you as well. So when you show up there, you're gonna find some of our community superheroes that are leading things and, will be a great local connection for you because these are the people that are based right by you. So show up on our website, rockrms.com/roadshows. You'll find some open registrations there and bookmark that page to come back and see what else becomes available. Okay. Oh, let's do a pledge update. So as John was mentioning, we are hoping to have better planning for 2017, and we're hoping to be more transparent with where we're at. We haven't done a great job of communicating what our financial needs are, and, so we realized we need to make a little bit better space for that. And to that end, we put a pledge campaign in place at the August, And we, in the course of the probably three and a half months that it's been running, have been blessed with 36 pledges from organizations and people pledging to support the development of Rock in 2017, which has taken us to about 49% of our needed budget for income next year. And that's a very basic budget to meet very basic needs. And so as John was mentioning earlier, the effect that has on our team is that we have to focus effort in other ways that we can bring money in. So we can't necessarily devote all the time that we would love to into developing the core product. That is our goal. We know that's your goal for us as well. So let's work together to help make that possible in 2017. Just ask that if you're not that person at your organization that can commit to a pledge for next year, that you make sure and get that in front of the person that is, especially this time of year as we're talking about what budgets look and kind of projecting things for the next year. Remember that we, suggest a donation of a dollar 50 per average attendee per year. So if you have a thousand people that attend on an average weekend, that would be $1,500 a year. You can divide that into monthly payments, quarterly, whatever makes sense to your organization, and we have an invoice tool, online that you can generate for your accounting department if that helps as well. Any questions about that, just send me an email, emily@sparkdevnetwork.org, and I'll be happy to answer those. But do please join us shoulder to shoulder in making this happen. It It all goes back to the concept of no such thing as a free lunch. So we want to give you Rock and we want to do it generously and we've devoted hours and hours of donated time to making that happen. But we want to bring it to you at the pace that that you'd it to be there. We know you're using it. We know it's making a difference at many organizations because we hear your feedback. So join us in this mission of providing enterprise level technology to ministries that would never be able to afford it otherwise. It's a pretty incredible model in this industry, and, it's very well timed. So thanks for your support on that. As far as 2016 goes, if you find you have a little extra money in your budget, this is a great time for a year end gift as well. We are about $10,000 short of our 2016 budget. So if you find that you're able to help us eliminate that budget shortfall before the end of the year, we would be very grateful. Again, that helps move the ministry forward, helps move the Rock product and ecosystem forward, and we really rely on you. We want to power your church, but we need your power as well to make that happen here. So thank you very much community. Just know we continue to rely on you and we're very thankful for you. I think that's one of the things we learned this year too is that for 2017, if we know it's the money's coming in on a pledge, it allows us to plan. There was some time this year in 2016 that we had no idea anything was gonna come in. And looking back in hindsight, there there could have been a few more hours put towards core if we had an understanding and the planning of when the money was gonna come in and and that it was gonna come. Right. So Because some of those come in in recurring transactions, are helpful to us when you set them up, but others don't. And while they're wonderful surprises, it does not help us in the planning department. Right. And I'll just jump in real quick here because I I feel sort of passionate about this. We had kinda set a goal of 65% of pledges. We were hoping that we would hit 65% of the 02/2017 goal for pledges by January 1. John's pretty certain that's not gonna happen. I'm holding out. There's there's two more weeks, and we're at 50%. So it's actually not that I mean, it's it's a it's a fair amount of money, but it's very doable. If we had a few more organizations that haven't pledged to pledge, we'd hit that goal. So That's right. It it's you're actually right, Nick. We have if we've looked at it, if the churches that are using Rock and that are in the financial position to do so contribute at that suggested donation amount, we would more than blow away that entire pledge amount before the beginning of the year, the whole thing. So we know that the possibility is out there, and we are really appreciative of our generous community. And so again, if you haven't pledged, we're not asking for the money right now, we just need to know, as John was saying, for planning purposes, help us hit that 65% goal. Okay. This is really starting to into a PBS pledge by here. Okay. Oh, I have truth We'll send you a canvas bag. You need that phone ringing in the background. Right? No. No. That's not We can add that post production, can't we? Okay. No. Oh, I hear them now. What's the next topic? I got a veto. Oh, yes. So what else are we doing? We have some other interesting additions to Rock or side projects to Rock that can have impact on what's going on and know that you wanna hear about that too. So David, why don't you tell us about one in particular? Sure. One that we've been working on is the care center for Willow Creek. In fact John and I just got an opportunity to go up there a couple weeks ago. It was my first time. Just blown away by what Willow is doing for their community. They have a whole care center that has a complete food pantry, a clothing store, an auto mechanic shop where they can service multiple cars at a time, dental and vision facility, they do legal counseling. A model of generosity. It's just amazing everything that they're doing and just the amount of people that are coming through there. So it's just really neat to be able to help them kind of redo a system using Rock to kind of manage all those people coming in and making sure they're getting the best service that they can. So we got to do that and our plan is to roll out some changes for them beginning next year. And know a lot of that's custom but a lot of that work that we're doing for them is going into core too. So there's some new workflow features, some person profile changes. So there's a little bit of stuff that they need that we're changing for core too. But it's just a neat project to be working on and just kinda seeing what a cool model that is for churches. It's a fun time of year to think about that too. Yeah. What a great way to take our generosity minded focus during the Christmas season and apply that ongoing. I love that project. Some other things that other churches are working on, Essentials working on that facility tracking system. Nick, do you have a update on that? Right. So, yeah, Taylor has been running a a pilot with some beta churches. And if you haven't heard from Taylor, if you if you did wanna get on that beta and you hadn't yet heard from him, just go ahead and contact him at taylor dot cavaletto. Or just Slack message him. That'll probably be Yeah. Easier. He will send you the zip file. I think just a zip file because there isn't quite a way yet to do an install from the Rock Shop while something's in a beta phase. We don't really have that feature yet. So he'll send you the zip file with some instructions. And, yeah, I think we're hoping to have that done and rolled out early in 02/2017. So hopefully January, that's a good target. It's awesome. Great. Yep. That's a good one that everybody likes to keep tabs on. So Yeah. There's a lot of Interest. Interest Yes. In that plug in. That's right. So Well, that's kind of a wrap for us for this year, and we just wanna wish you all a Merry Christmas, and thanks for being our community. We really take a lot of encouragement from you. So have a blessed Christmas season. Are you gonna sing us out? I'm not, but feel free. 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.