Podcast Episode 46: Episode 20: Community Hero Highlights

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Join the team and guest community hero Arran France as we talk about the recent Rock v5, a few Rock futures, and the status of Spark's donation model.Speech

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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 Rockcast podcast episode. We're hitting number 20 today. Thanks for joining us. And we have quite a few exciting topics to talk about. We've got to start today with an introduction though. We have our favorite resident Brit here with us. Erin France, all the way over from across the pond. And Erin has a very interesting history with Rock. So why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, Erin? Alright. So, yeah, as Emily said, I'm based in The UK, and I started my kind of Rock journey over there with a small church called Hope Church based in Northamptonshire. We were kinda transitioning. We were increasing our members. We needed a way to track everything we were doing, all the groups that we had, and just deal with the scale of things. So we were looking for a solution out there. Rock kinda came along at the same time. It was in beta, and it seemed a really good fit for us. So I started there just trying to implement things, trying to get going. Then there was a few kind of things we need to tackle in terms of international kind of internationalization and integrations that we wanted. So I try started trying to build those, and that's kind of how I got into developing with Rock. You were on a kind of a different track at that point, weren't you? Yeah. In your ministry? Yeah. So I was kind of looking at going into, a kind of seminary, looking at perhaps going to becoming a pastor. But at the same time, I was kind of developing stuff with Rock, and I was kind getting a kind of a passion for that. So at that point, I started looking at perhaps going into software engineering, going to university and studying that. And that's ultimately the kind of decision I made. So what university are you going to right now? So I'm at Royal Holloway in London. I'm in my second year of engineering there. Awesome. Now explain to to us how it is you became a cow Dallas Cowboys fan. Are you serious? Yeah. Well, that's that's natural. So yeah. That was playing Madden in my bedroom with a friend. You're playing oh, Madden. Okay. Yeah. Madden NFL eleven. And you did it why the Cowboys, though? I mean Because they're the only I could win with. , Tony Rommel to Miles Austin Lacrosse, yeah, on a four vertical just every time touchdown. So it's not well, you're saying it's not very accurate video game. Yeah. I don't think Austin plays anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Just kidding. So, Aaron, how long are you here in The States with us? Okay. So yeah. So I'm here for five weeks. This is the end of week one. I've got four to go, including the conference, which I'm very excited for. Cool. And so you get to join us in this 68 square foot office every day. Yeah. That's quite the experience. Yeah. Could you just be a little more descriptive how that's an experience? Well, I don't know how you fit, , all of us in here right now. So there's three of us here, , normally every day, which is a kind of squish anyway. But then, yeah, you've got the Star Wars banter, which is a huge part of Office. Right. Yeah. It's been actually really exciting. It's having the new spring innovation board and just seeing kind of where things are going. That's been fun. And I'm just learning a lot, which is really cool and getting stuff done. Yeah. I don't know where we'd be without that whiteboard. That's probably the best thing that's ever happened to this office space. And about every square inch of it is covered. Yeah. Yeah. With plans and future ideas. Yeah. There's a lot of conference stuff. There's a lot of six o stuff, some seven o stuff. So and our task list for every day for every week, I should say. So, yeah, we'd be hopefully lost without that. And it pretty much takes up one entire wall of our office. Yeah. Yeah. The only free space there is on the office is on the walls. Right? Oh, what else would we do with the wall? Good point. All right. Well, we're very excited to have Aaron here with us for a while. He mentioned being here for the conference, so I would really be remiss if I did not remind you the conference is coming soon. We have thirteen days left of open registration. That's right, you heard it thirteen days. That means August 18 is the last day to get your registration in. Stop procrastinating, go get that signature on your approval form, whatever you need to do to get that travel locked in so you can join us. You really do not want to miss the conference this year. That's gonna be great. It's gonna be great. There's some stuff that you'll hear there that you won't hear anywhere else so you have to be there to join us. The Rock community is gonna be coming together again. We've had some really exciting things come out of last year's collaboration, and you may hear some more about that at the conference this year. You may have the opportunity to start something fresh for next year that you can work starting this fall. You wanna be there. You wanna connect with the community in this way. Meet the core development team if you haven't had a chance to do that, if that's just been a digital thing so far. You don't wanna miss it. So don't forget, go to rockrms.com/rx2016 and get that registration in. You do not have much time left. Yes. Yes. Well let's talk about five point zero. Okay. Oh yeah. Do we have a five point zero release? We do. Five point zero and five point one were released about two weeks ago. There were a lot of updates, family check-in. It took a long time just put the read me enough together. It'll probably take you a long time to read through them. A lot of little things updated. We also just released an update yesterday, a 5.2, which is kind of a critical fix for something that was found. And we're already working on 5.3, which has even some more things that came out since we've released it. We'll probably be releasing that in the next week or two. So if you haven't downloaded, download it, get it installed, take a look at it. Awesome. Mhmm. That's it. What's the next topic? Q and a? Q and a. Alright. Back to you. So, yeah, you guys some of you guys have been absolutely doing exactly what we asked. You're you're on the q and a. You're looking at people's questions. You're helping. You're answering. , we're just gonna call out a name in particular. Jim Michaels has been awesome, and we appreciate that. So everybody strive to to be that answering as many questions as possible. And I we do wanna kinda hint that we're gonna have some integration soon between the q and a and Slack so that when a new message or a question gets posted to the q and a, it'll notify somewhere in Slack. So that's coming. And, we'll talk more about that probably at the conference too. Definitely. And there's some other things too we wanna do with the q and a. We know we need to, , upgrade it, add some features. Search is coming. We're looking at some new technology as it applies to search. And instead of just hacking together some kind of better search for the q and a, we really wanna see if this new technology can help us out. But that newer search technology is still in the research and development stage, so I don't think we can commit to having that. But it's looking really good. And if it does work, it'll be incredible on the search. Take it from John. You wanna be staying tuned for that. Yeah. I'll be honest, I forget about the Q and A sometimes. Was out there last week and there's some really good discussion going on there that I think if you're only in Slack, you're actually missing out on that. Not only can you help people who need help, but you can also learn stuff too there. So I mean, definitely get out there. We can't it can't be one person Right. Monitoring that. Slack is a little bit of an easy button. ? It's it's really easier, but it's not as, maybe fruitful. Right. I mean and Slack's only around for, , three or four days at the moment. ? If you wanna go back and see something, you can't. Yeah. Yeah. It's gone. Well, it's most things in life that are easy, it's it's not necessarily the best way to do it. Right. Yeah. And the good thing with, the q and a's, you can be Google searched. So at the moment, , if someone's looking for something, , Rock based and they can't find it in the docs, they can just go and find that by using Google. You can't do that with Slack. That's a great point. And, , I've I've just realized we didn't mention that Taylor's also joined us today Hey. In the podcast. So, Taylor Cavalletto, feel free to jump in at any point. Yeah. Definitely. All right. So one of the other things that we're gonna be, that's taking a lot of our free cycles, not that we have a lot of free cycles, but a lot of things that we're looking at trying to strategize on is this really the donation models? Now that we're about a year into full time in Spark, we've had some more data as more data points come in, and we really gotta be focusing on the donation model. And we're spending a lot of time looking at, how do we cast vision for that? Our goal and strategy, it always has been, is to keep it accessible and free for those who can't afford it. But I think we need to do a better job communicating the need and what we achieve with what is given. So that's going be a huge component of the conference is really just kind of showing what we do with your investment. But besides that too, we also need to work on a strategy of how do we get to fully funded. And so that's something that's taking up a lot of our time and mindshare right now. And we'll be talking more about it at the conference. And then coming out of the conference, we'll be obviously sharing with those who weren't there too. Right. So it's one of those topics that's so important, but it every moment that we spend on it, I kinda , well, I'd rather be, , actually implementing something or fixing something. Right. But without fixing this issue, code doesn't get developed. So it's really foundational. Yeah. And it's really that we really have to get off the we have two full time jobs. , that's that's the thing that needs to change. Right. And I'm not sure everyone fully realizes that that, , a large portion of the core team's time isn't spent on core. And, that's just because we're not fully funded yet. So Well, just even what is the vision? who what is the core team? how big is it? I think there might be misunderstandings there too. I think when you hear this podcast, you're thinking, wow, there's a lot of people all working. Yeah. That's it's a Friday. How much people came over to the office? On our day off. Yeah. And and we're doing this podcast. But normally there's two and a half people here, and two developers and Emily's helping with the finances and accounting. There's so much that goes into running a nonprofit that, you have to do. And she helps us with all those details. And , one of the things I think we probably haven't done a great job of talking about on our end is the fact that Rock is protected and run by the nonprofit Spark. So I think that can be a little confusing to people right off the bat. But we are a ministry, so we may look a business if you're not super familiar with Rock and with what we're doing, but we're a ministry just you in your churches and your ministries. And so we function the same way that you do. You have people that need to focus on making sure that donated dollars get put in the right places and that the stewardship behind that has the, , the right vision in mind for the end goals. And we do that too. So we are, very concerned with the stewardship of your donations to Rock and we put them to very great use. But if you have not picked up on that yet, again, I'm not sure we've done a great job to date communicating that. We are a nonprofit, and we don't we don't charge you to use Rock. So we get by solely on on the donations of the churches that are using it finding value and wanna share it with churches that otherwise couldn't afford it. And that actually came up kinda during a board meeting recently where one of the board members was saying how at his church they do understand that spark and Rock is a ministry and that they get it and they contribute money to spark as if it's another ministry in their church. And that's an amazing catch if everybody could catch that, if all churches could understand that, I think we'd be fine and God will I'm sure get us there at some point. Yeah. Because our need is not that It's not. And we'll be sharing it transparently what is the dollar need at the conference? And then coming out of the conference, we'll we'll definitely, , if you for some reason you can't make it, I know some people are having babies so they can't they can't be there, which is a great excuse not to get to the conference. It's about the only good one, communicate that. But Right. But I think when people see what the need actually is, I mean It's definitely not as remarkable. Yeah. One of the great things that we're noticing is some stories trickling in from ministries that are using Rock that have never had a church management system before because they couldn't afford it. I know, Erin, you shared that your the church you were working with at Hope, they were on spreadsheets and On pay lots of paper. Oh my , years worth of just paper documents that I, , had to put in myself. That's wonderful. But, yeah, I mean, , the transition from nothing to something and when that something is Rock is huge, it makes an incredible difference. , you don't have to spend half a day searching through, , six years of back records. You can search it, and it's there in five minutes, if that and you can do aggregate data. You couldn't do that before if you had, , paper. You had to, , tally that up somewhere. But with Rock, you can do a data unit report and it's there. And then you have all of that, power, all that information in the hands of the pastors who do not have to shuffle through all this stuff anymore. Right. They're able to, , help keep people from falling through the cracks, do the follow-up and the relational, the relationship building that otherwise can get lost in the shuffle when you can't find the information that you need. Exactly. This is very powerful. , tools to decision makers and the people who need to be doing the the real stuff. Right? Right. And that, at the end of the day, is really why we ask for donations and why we do it for free is so that these churches that might not have had the chance to have these tools can actually have them and use them. Yeah. Definitely. Paper, trails can inhibit growth big time. So you have to pull some of those things together in order to get your organization ready to move to the next stage of growth and we want to help with that. Well can I just bring us abruptly and do our marketing segment? Yes. We got we got invite intro music. Marketing segment. I could look into that. It's conference season time. Exactly. So we got invited to go to NACC. So we were given a booth space and we took that opportunity and we got to to go. I brought my wife. She, manned the booth with me. And, it's funny because one of the things that people would come up to the booth and ask, when they found out it was free, they'd say, well, how why is it free? And my wife would explain, well, it's it's a ministry to us as well. , we're engineers. We're software engineers and developers, and that's what we do. God gifted us to do that, and so that's our ministry. So it it just goes again back to that philosophy. And I'll just touch on one other aspect, the financial side. I think originally when we first started strategizing on how we're gonna fund Rock, we had a really low, , percentage that we're asking churches to give. But at that time, Rock wasn't really fully featured. And I would say it didn't compete with all the other products. And I would say now we're either at or starting to go beyond where the other products are. So it makes more sense to me that, , our strategy is gonna change a little bit with our with our ask, what we're asking churches to do and give. So at NACC, we had a number of people come up and ask questions and there was a lot of interest, but we're mostly there just to kind of have visibility to show churches that there's an an option. There were only a few other church management systems there represented. I think the buyout that's been happening in the industry has affected that quite a bit. And I got to meet with some of those other churches or not churches, vendors and chat with them quite a bit. It was it was pretty interesting. Hey, Nick. What's NACC? Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. The NACC is the North American Christian Convention. Apparently, it's a very long running convention that started many many many years ago and seemed to be more on the traditional Christian church side. But it seems they're they're trying to reach a younger church mindset as well. But that was out in Anaheim, California this year. We got to use our booth for the first time. Got that booth was almost a majority vast majority of it was donated. So it was nice to Yeah. That was really cool because that new booth has a monitor on it and we were able to do live demos and show people Rock, , actually do stuff with it. It was pretty cool. Oh, that is amazing. Yeah. So coming off of tagging off of that is the next conference is the Leadership Summit. So Willow Creek has graciously donated an ad in the notes section of the Leadership Summit this year. So of the all of you who are going to Leadership Summit, be sure to look for that ad and and share it with all those around you. So that'll be huge. That's a huge visibility plug for a Rock, and we really appreciate that. Right. So be on guard the following week. All you guys to look for another bump in the q and a and slack community. Make sure to help people who are just getting started or looking for answers. That's right. If you're a longtime Rock community member, remember that as someone downloads Rock for the first time, they get an email with links to sign up for Slack, to go to the Q and A and look for information. So they're directed to the places where you are so they can connect with you. So keep an eye out for that, welcome them and see if you can give them a hand. And kind of tagging on with something that Nick said too, he was talking about the free aspect of Rock and that's certainly a big selling point to a lot of people. And I think for good reason, but I think we all as a community need to be making sure that yes, it's free, but it's still, it's very dependent upon donation. And I think a lot of times people hear the word free, and that becomes a biggest selling point. And so there's a couple of churches who, large churches who are calling us and saying, hey, we wanna know more information about this. And every time they say the word free, I kinda , okay, yeah, it is free, but don't think of it as free. we really are dependent upon your donations. It's free for those who honestly, who simply cannot afford to pay. Right. We were even challenged by someone to not use the word free so early on in the messaging because it kinda sticks with them. Right. And it it's unfortunate. It's not the reason to switch. Right. It's not the reason to move to Rock. But it does give you an opportunity to partner with us in ministry in a unique way that you may not be partnered with in your church currently. Yeah. I think you're right. If it's if it is the only reason why you're you're actually switching, I don't know if I would. , if that's the only reason why you're switching church management systems, I think you probably should reconsider making sure that this is the right solution for you. I have no doubt that from a, ability perspective, it's the right choice, but of course I'm biased. But if it if it's if you're truly just doing it just because you can pay less, , you might you might need to think that through. You can definitely direct your money into ministry better. I mean, it's you can take the funds you're currently using now for church management and know that the that the way that they'll be used with Rock will be more efficient and will have be completely directed into helping other churches. I mean, that's Yeah. It it's a better kingdom investment. That it is. We're very low overhead. And we and we love the fact that it's not a vendor client. It's not we own the product, and if you give us enough money, you can actually use it. It's here is the product. What do you wanna build with it? What do you wanna help us invest in us to build into it for everybody? So we really don't see ourselves as this is ours and if you pay us enough, you can actually play in our sandbox. Right. That's a good point, John. We're building a sandbox everybody's allowed to play in. Right. Now there has to be every sandbox, you have to be some monitors that say, hey, please don't throw the sand. Some common law. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, yeah, that goes into another topic. But, so there has to be, , some rules so that we're not building sandcastles that are encroaching on each other or collapsing on each other. But we're more of the sandbox monitors. And we're so excited. I love seeing in Slack every day that there's churches innovating together, not through us, but just amongst themselves. And everybody gets benefit out of that. And so we're here to provide the tools Slack to provide the core functionality and the foundation for people to build cool things. And the tools this, the Rock Shop to then deploy those cool things out to everyone. And I think there is a lot of innovation going on amongst the churches. I think there's lot of innovation going on within the churchship. And I would just urge you, take the time, a little bit extra time and package those things up and share them. Because the value added is multiplying if you share it. Whereas it's it's it's just a single , you're doing addition when you're when you're just doing it within your church. You can multiply it, if you share it with in the Rock shop. And it it really doesn't take that much time. No. And if you don't want to sell it, if that's not your heart, you can package it up, put it in the Rock shop, and offer it for free. Right. And so that would just be another thing. If you're saying, my vision isn't to sell something the church wouldn't wanna accept income off of that. You don't have to, but share it please. Yeah. Yeah. Or you can just donate the income too. That's another option. That's true. You could drag that slider. That's right. Whatever you charge, you could donate that all back to Spark. Yep. So we talked about the Leadership Summit. I would just say too, if you've not been to Leadership Summit, you really should go. It's one of those conferences that really, I wouldn't be where I'm at today without that conference. And I always say there's two things, two events that happened in my life, two ministries that, not ministries, that's the wrong term, two of these training and coaching sessions in my life that kind of got me to where I am in ministry. One is a leadership summit, , routinely going to that or the church that I worked at CCB, they heavily invested in in staff going to that. And the other one was Alpha. Then when I was a new Christian, that just poured so much into me. And so that's a UK thing. So Right. Yeah. It's huge. And it's amazing. And I just this summer, made my kids watch the alpha videos. They have some new ones for youth that are, , crazy good. And so he really enjoyed that. So that's the leadership summit. Nick, do you wanna talk about the survey we just sent out? Sure. We sent out a survey last Friday, I think it was. And it was just a simple quick four four question survey to get some data from you guys. And a fair number of people clicked the link and a fair number actually then submitted the results. But some people didn't finish. They clicked the link looked at the survey and never submitted it. So would that be because the survey was so long and difficult? No. John said it took about ten seconds. Called it a thirty second, but you were very conservative. That's good. Yeah, didn't want to mislead anyone. Maybe somebody's an extra slow reader. I'm a slow reader actually. So if you haven't yet completed your survey, please go ahead and do that. And immediately we've seen a bump in the number of organizations now on the organizations page using Rock because that was one of the things we got out of that survey. It exposed them a little bit more. Yep, that's great feedback for us. So take ten seconds and help us out. Just answer a few questions. When it's so important and I know it's only four questions, but those questions are so important to us. one of the most common questions we get is how many people are using Rock? That's a great question. But because we don't put a gun to someone's head and say, pay us, We don't know. We just let people download it and we don't know. we know how people actually download it because we have to track that thanks to the IRS. But And we're pretty conservative right now when we tell people how many churches or organizations are using Rock. When another church management system vendor came to our booth at NACC and saw the full list, they were pretty shocked. And I said, well, yeah, we we don't we don't make them tell us if they're using it. So we don't really know. Right. But this survey is a great way for us to actually know who's using it, who's planning to use it. And that's so important to us because we're talking this to some future partners who may want to make contributions. And that's one of the questions they ask. And we don't know the exact number or we're giving them a conservative number because we don't wanna overstate. It might dampen what they think the impact is. I think I've never had a conversation where people weren't impressed, but I think if they knew the true number, it might be more impressive. So take the survey. Also, it helps us to know how many people attend the church because that gives us a big number to say, okay, this many lives are impacted by the software. So it might seem a silly four questions, but it's very important to us. Well, it also helps us not send you future emails that ask you, very basic questions assuming that you're not using Rock if you are, or that give you information that you've had for a year. So we don't wanna waste your time with unnecessary communications either. So that'll just help help us delineate who needs to hear what. Yep. Definitely. Well, think that's a wrap for today. So got a lot of stuff going on for the conference. A lot of conference talk yet to do today. So we got to hit it. Hit that. Yes. We're never That's the truth. Alright. Taylor, you wanna take us out in prayer? Yeah. Definitely. Dear lord, I just wanna thank you for the impact that we've seen Rock create amongst the church throughout the world, God. Aaron being one of those examples that it's not just The US that we're affecting, but, , this is a global phenomenon. And I just want to thank you that we've been able to do this much with what we have, God. I just pray that as we enter into this new season, we come up to this conference, that we just see a community come together helping each other, helping the core team, God. I just pray that together we can do even more to further your kingdom, God. We've already seen this much, and we just wanna see it grow exponentially. We pray this in your name. Amen. Amen. 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.