Podcast Episode 45: Episode 19: Are you ready for the flood?

Description

Getting the community ready for the summer promotion of Rock and the upcoming test phases of v5.

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 ROCAST podcast. We have some great things to go over with you today and we are gonna start out with some exciting new promotions and information that you'll see coming this summer. So we're gonna change that up a little bit this summer, and we could see a flood of requests and questions. And John, what do you think? What are we gonna see when this comes out? Well, I don't know. I wish I knew, but that's what we need to get prepared for. And so we've talked about on other podcasts how there's a tidal wave coming, and these are the first two waves of that. And so we wanna just kinda make some announcements of some things that are gonna be going out in the next few weeks, in a few months. One is that, , we're really honored to have NewSpring sending out an email to all their leadership network about Rock. And so they have about 34,000, I guess, people on this email list, and it has a pretty high open rate. So they're gonna be sending out an email about Rock, and that's gonna lead to a lot of interest and a lot of people showing up at the Rock site and probably the Slack channel and probably the q and a. And we just wanna make sure that as a community, we're ready for that because, again, the small spark team can't can't keep back that wave. No. In fact, it's it's already pretty bad. Yeah. Taking a lot of your your time. Or pretty good. Good. Depending on how you look at it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. On a daily basis, so we I mean, we're there's a lot of time we're putting into just supporting various questions and stuff. A lot of them are are not even seen. There's some that are, , on the public channels, but then we get a lot of private asks too. And, , those are good, but they do take a lot of time. , when you're trying to get heads down and focusing on getting some stuff done, it can be overwhelming. And so we can't have any more than that. So we really need the community just to step up and just be that first level of support, welcoming them, helping them kind of figure out what is Rock, steering them to resources. Right? Right. Because one thing you really have to do is you have to, , pull back because you already understand Rock. So to you, this is all kind of understood. And the one thing that people don't understand about Rock is the model. And we really need help with with just coaching them through that about , what does it mean not to have support? Hosting options. Don't forget what that they don't know. , you're coming at this at a totally different, , take. You've already had months to understand all this, and they don't have that. So we need just a a lot of help and support there. There'll be questions that they'll have. Did you have some of your in there? Well, I would say people who are asking questions on Slack, it's always best to get people to ask the questions on the q and a. The q and a lends itself to search to see if somebody's already asked that question, and I think a lot of people don't think about using search on Slack possibly because it's a little hostile as some others have said. So, yeah, be out there monitoring the Q and A site. Yeah. And there's a tension of , how do you do that? Where do you do that? Sometimes someone just wants to post a query onto Slack, say, hey, can someone run this and tell me what you see? Sometimes it's a little easier in Slack than it is in the Q and A, but, , just use Nick's what Nick said wisely, the searchability, the retainability is much better on the Q and A site, but you don't wanna shut someone down. And I've seen it a few Slack community members after the answer has been said, they go and encourage a person to go put it on the Q and A, which is a great thing to do too. Yeah. And and Slack does lend itself really well for , that's a great example. Hey, guys. Can you run this query? Tell me what how many results it's returning. , that that's not really something you want in the q and a. That's perfect for Slack. Right. Exactly. And also as people join, we don't wanna be the community that has a whole bunch of rules and says , you're doing this wrong, go to the Q and A and do it. , that we wanna be welcoming, open and say, , that's a great question. , if you put it on the Q and A, you might, , get a response versus , we don't do that in Slack. So just we just gotta be careful, , our tone too. , a lot of times it's hard to see. It's email. , you don't sort of judge someone's tone over email. Mhmm. Slack is kinda the same thing. And and what about them brushing up on, , our partners and vendors page? Right. Yeah. That's a good point. Mean changing all the time. Yeah. I mean, I would definitely go out there and look at that and see what's available. And, , we have some time. , this e the first email from Newspring is going out in early June. So if you have questions today and the next week, , we can be talking about that in Slack. So if you do have any questions about that, let us know. The other opportunity that's coming this summer too is that Willow Creek has, , graciously donated a ad in their Willow Creek Leadership Summit notebook, which is a huge deal because that notebook is very well used. I think back to all the notes I've kept in my previous notebooks that they pass out. So they've graciously given us a really nice ad in that. And so that goes out to a 25,000 people, and they basically stare at it for, , more than two days. Right? So so that's gonna bring some some people to the site, and we need to be prepared for that too. And that's August. And that is August. Yeah. And we have a few other things, so you'll see come up from time to time. Church Tech Today is going to put a post out here in the next couple of weeks, and we have, Church Executive has also offered to give us couple of product spotlights in the month of June in their e newsletter. So we'll see we're gonna start seeing some momentum there. And the really cool thing for you guys in our community is that you are the the first impression of Rock in many ways, and you're one of the reasons that Rock is different from everything else that's out there. So as people come and they're warmly welcomed in Slack and they're received in a way that that you have made standard, they can really see right away firsthand, hey. This is a different experience entirely, and that just kinda opens the door to the rest of the possibilities and opportunities out there. So thank you guys for for doing what you do, and we're we're excited to see this growth and know that you are as well. And and you're just a wonderful resource, great friends, and and, , just great friends of Rock. We appreciate you. Yep. So what else we got? Well, we I think we also wanted to tell the hosting vendors and people who are doing any sort of hosting support to to be prepared. We're still thinking that there's some opportunity there for lots of smaller churches for a quick setup and turnaround. And I think that's a need in the Rock community. For sure. Yeah. Definitely. So that's about it for the flood. For now. For now. It is coming sooner. Yeah. Guess we'll have maybe by the next podcast, we'll probably have a little bit of that flood happening. Yeah. And we'll we'll give you some updates on some of the stats that we see and, , we can let share with you some of our analytics, Google Analytics on what we're seeing, but I think it'll be pretty evident too just in the normal Slack community and the Q and A and you guys will see it. Well, also, , as that goes out on your social media accounts, , if you could help with that too, , as people are starting to look at it, it'd be nice to see some ideas about what's flying around and and your guys' churches and how you're using Rock responding to those social questions too. So keep that open. But maybe transitioning from a flood of new people to a flood of new features. We're getting ready to have five O rollout. So there's an alpha and beta coming up. So Nick, do you wanna kind of go over that? Yeah. So again, the alpha, we're targeting June 7. So that's gonna mean you guys that are on the alpha team, we just need you to get that installed as an upgrade to an existing copy of your site. Just make sure the install goes well. We don't want any issues. That's really all we do for Alpha testing. You guys are more than welcome to continue and do beta testing, feature testing, and whatnot, but we're gonna start that on June 28. We have a spreadsheet, which I will be linking to on our website. We'll have a link called what can we call it, John? Slash beta test? Yeah. Isn't there already, , a beta page for, , the beta folks who just add it to that? Okay. That's a good idea. So we'll put the link to the spreadsheet on the alpha and the beta page so you guys can go through that. And it's pretty self explanatory. At the top of the page, there's a little instruction about what to do and just follow the instructions. And as you test a feature, you just basically put your initials down and any comments and pass fail. So over time, we'll grow that list of tests. And as you guys think of new tests that you wanna add to that spreadsheet, by all means, go right ahead and do that. That'll give us a little more comfort as we move forward and get ready to then launch for real, for production release. Mhmm. Now, of the things I noticed is v five is pretty large. it's been in development since December. Yep. So I think we're gonna try and steer away from super large mega releases, aren't we, in getting back to more smaller feature release? Yeah. I mean, would think I would say five isn't as big as four, but it's probably bigger than what we hope to have. Right. Six should be not that big. Hopefully. Yeah. We didn't think five would be this big. That's true. So some a lot of it's just the nature of trying to get all the features in that we that need to be in there for for lots of different things to all interconnect. So, , we really wanted to have check-in updates in v five because there's a lot of new churches who wanted some slight tweaks to to what was there. So that kind of extended it a little bit in a positive way because those are great features. And and even churches who don't need those features, the the check-in administration screens are completely different. And they're so much faster and they're so much A radical overhaul, I would say. Yeah. Too much simpler too. Good. Yeah. Yeah. So now you can switch a whole bunch of settings really easily, which before you're diving into block settings and and now it's all been abstracted out and so much easier. Also too, for those of you who've been having issues with with the workflow editor, significant improvements to the view state on that. I think it's 75% smaller on on that page. And this is insanely different using it. , you rarely even see that little weight ball. And and that's , if you if you ever use that, that you pretty much stare at that thing for long time. That's a big change. We put that there so you'll pray every time you see it. So you should be very well spiritually mature now. But it's it's radically different. That's not the end state of where we see workflows and the workflow editor going. That's just think of that as an incremental improvement because we have an exponential improvement that we're, , trying to work on. It's in the crock pot. Yes. It's actively being considered and and and, , we're actually we think about it a lot. But that's just something we just need know we need to kinda get fixed in this release. So but you you mentioned the dates. Right? The for alpha and beta? Yes. June 7 and June 28. We don't know what date for the production release yet. It'll depend on those two events. Yeah. I would say because there is a bigger alpha, , if you could start, Nick said, get start doing some beta testing on the alpha, that would be hugely helpful. But again, we just really need people to help us with the alpha and the beta. you guys are the QA department. So Right. That's a really good point. We don't have a QA department beyond the developers doing development and running into issues. So because this isn't a company, we're not a vendor, you guys are that team. So what you do really matters. It affects everyone. And don't take that task and job lightly. We really appreciate it. And so do customers when a release comes out and there's no bugs. Yeah. So that's critically important. So, yeah. So it's exciting. Okay. So what can we talk about next? I think we should talk about our new documentation and workflow actions. Great idea. John, it's it it seems that was an easy thing. It looks so beautiful and wonderful, but I know that that had to have taken you tons of time. Yeah. It wasn't necessarily the most pleasant thing I've done. Just a lot of tediousness, but I it a lot more. it's so much easier to find your workflow actions and it was just overwhelming. I found it overwhelming even having all that in the documentation. I was constantly scrolling through trying to find what I wanted. So just in case somebody isn't aware of what exactly we're talking about, starting today, if you go to the workflow documentation, right, is there a link from the It's gonna be in the v five docs, which aren't available today. Okay. But yeah. And from from the official guide, the guide that people are already familiar with, there's a link over to essentially the same style and format as the LAVA docs. Right. But if you go to the learn page today, there's a link from the learn page to the workflow actions. Perfect. So you can get to it today. Okay. But, yeah, it's just some much more approachable way of of looking at the actions and seeing what your little Legos can do and seeing a a screenshot of what it looks . And the one thing I would say on that is that there's some good documentation there, but if you guys find neat new tricks and tips, send those to us and we'll add it to the documentation. If you find a neat little way of doing something, especially around lava, how you might use some of those with Lava, , do send those to us and we'll keep adding to it. And as we find new ways, , we'll keep adding to it too. I've already made updates to it. Having it being in that format, it is a lot easier to update. So it makes it easier for us to go, okay. what? I'm just gonna add that. Whereas before, if there's a huge amount of friction to get that in there, sometimes , what? It's kind of a cool tip, but I don't have time right now. So Right. So we'll hopefully be putting more and more tricks in there. There's a lot more actions in v five, so that's pretty exciting. And there's a lot more to come. We have a lot more actions that we want to write. And it's been kind of fun because I've been doing some, a little bit of volunteer work with Rock, setting up some workflows for churches just getting started in church management, which is pretty exciting. And as I walk through their shoes, I'm , oh, we need a new action for that. That's just, that's just a little tedious. I can do it. I can just jump in the SQL and get that data. So for instance, spouse, they wanted to get the spouse of the person who was on the workflow and, , it's a little bit of SQL. So now I created a new action called get spouse. So Much easier to run. Yeah. Than crafting your own SQL. Definitely. So although you'd be surprised how hard it is to get someone's spouse. there's so many nuances to that, that is kinda crazy. Mhmm. And it's not necessarily complexity within Rock. It's just complexities within, , the the data and trying to make sure we don't give you someone's daughter on accident. Right. Because of bad data. Right. Still could happen. I mean, you have bad data, garbage in, garbage out, but trying to make it less likely to give you an inappropriate spouse. So, yeah. So definitely check it out. Let us know what you think. One more point to make today. Yes. We're coming up, the conference in August, which we wanna still keep talking about. If you haven't registered, you should do that. Our early bird pricing ends in June, so that's coming up. Starting June 21, the price will increase. So get in under that deadline. We are working on our schedule session schedule, so we'll have that up and ready to go in a couple of weeks. Beyond that, we have I just wanna remind everybody that August are going to be packed morning to evening. We'll provide your food. We try and make sure it's really good. It was last year from our feedback, so we're working on that already. But do not schedule your flights for the days of the conference. We are not having any of that fluff third day that people can fly out and miss. This is all the stuff you want to make, so we're trying to make it efficient for you. That said, make sure you're flying in the day before and flying out the day afterward. Otherwise, you will miss not only important content, but an important chance to connect as a Rock community. And since that's one of the key pieces of well, it's really the glue that holds together everything that we do, that would be a really sad thing to miss out on. Gonna say you're robbing yourself You are. Probably the best part, which is the network, , the community. Yes. And it's amazing how much you'll learn just by talking with a couple other people from other churches and organizations. I know from past events, that's been huge. Absolutely. Whether it's not recreating the wheel or it's finding a new tool or it's realizing that you can all collaborate on something together that everyone wants. Right. We've seen all of these things happen and more. So don't rob yourself of that experience. Make sure you're scheduling your travel time accordingly. Otherwise, you will miss out. Right. That's a good that's another good point, collaboration. We might have someone from our team there collaborating with other people on a secret is it secret? Can we talk about that? It's not now. Well, I haven't said it yet. Yeah. I know that last conference, a few of us in the community actually started bouncing about this idea for a room and resource management plugin. And that's actually something that is currently in the works now. We're kind of looking, Central Christian Church is kind of looking at some pieces of it that we could throw together. And we're looking for other churches' input to that as well, kind of a next step up from the initial talks at last conference. So going to these conferences is a really awesome idea to get together with other churches and talk about plug ins that maybe CORE doesn't want, but that a bunch of you do. Right. So that's a good example. And by the way, that was Taylor Cavalletto. He's currently filling in for David's normal silence and quiet. He's doing quite well. I if I close my eyes, I'd almost think it was David. He's even sitting in David's chair. David's out on vacation today. Yep. That's that's a first for a long time. So is there anything else we wanted to chat about before we wrap up? , in the conference, just rehashing kinda what everybody said. Don't leave early. Also, it's a little bit different about this conference than the last one. It's gonna be less hands on training and more sharing of best practices, more looking at what other people are doing. It's kinda show and tell at school. There will be some unpacking of some, , new features and how they work. So it'll be a little bit of that, but we really wanted to make it more of a show and tell. There's a point and I think in the second day last year in the afternoon was a lot of that in conference and that was really cool. So a lot of those things I'd actually heard about, but to actually see them and see screenshots and it was , wow, that's really cool. Right. So even if you're not on the official schedule to show something, but you have something to share or show, keep your notes, , get them ready and share them in the off time during the breakout session or during the, , lunch and dinner and evening time. Just because you're not on the official schedule doesn't mean you shouldn't come prepared to share. Absolutely. Good point, Nick. And there'll probably be some open times where you can raise your hand and say something and share it that way too. Right. And it's not too late. If you have something if you feel you have something larger to share, we still have, , could probably still work in the schedule as long as we find out in the next, , week. Really soon. Yeah. So it's gonna be a little bit different that way. Also, we are we will be showing some new stuff, some new technologies that we have never even mentioned on a podcast yet. So it is secret. Just because we wanna make it a surprise. Yep. And you're gonna love it. It's so good. , you're really gonna love it. So you're gonna wanna be there to see it, to understand it, to be the first to understand it and see how you can use it in in your ministries. So you want to be there. Absolutely. Yes. And don't and just because the price doesn't go up till June, , it really helps us to know ahead of time, , roughly how many people are gonna be coming. , it helps us plan. It helps us get our quotes at least in the bright ballpark. Right. Because right now, it's it's it was last time. Everybody seems to be waiting till the last minute. And and there is limited space at the venue. , we can't just take on everyone that might come flooding in. That's another good point. So that's gonna break our heart too if we max out, but it may happen. Yeah. So don't wait till the last minute on that because you might be the one left out or you might be the one that, , we just we want you to be there. The the campus is beautiful, but it's not infinite in size. Right. So, Yeah. We we only have certain space and buildings on that campus. We can't just take over the whole campus. I think there's security guards that will prevent us. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, don't don't wait too long. If you're gonna go sign up, if something does come up in the, , in the past, we have been able to do refunds with it as long as it's within two weeks of the conference. And after that, we we signed on stuff that we actually paid out for. Right. But so don't go in there thinking, well, I'm gonna quickly refund it. But if it needs to be refunded, we we can we can help you with that. So as long as it's within two weeks of of the event. So get out there. Cool. So I thought maybe Taylor might wrap us up with a prayer. Dear Lord, I just wanna thank you for the Spark Network and just everything it's done to help the churches and the organizations it has. I just wanna thank you for the awesome community that is sprung up around Rock and Spark. I just wanna thank you for these awesome workers in your kingdom that are helping each other, answer questions, solve problems. I just pray that as we go into this conference and as we get ready for this new influx of people that you just bring everybody together to welcome them in with open arms, answer any questions they have, to just be a shining example of what we can do together with this technology for your kingdom. I ask this in your name. Amen. 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