Podcast Episode 27: Episode 191: v16, v17, v18 and more

Description

In this episode, Jon, Emily, and Nick dive into the latest Rock updates, including v16 enhancements, v17 in beta and an exciting look at Chat coming in v18. Plus, RX25 has been redesigned for all church leaders and submissions for Gold Circle Awards are coming very soon!

Transcribed Content

This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock partner Triumph Tech, a full service specialist partner. Rock partners provide crucial support for Spark Development Network and important services for the Rock community. Connect with Triumph Tech today at rockrms.com/partners. Welcome to this episode of Rockcast. We're excited to tell you everything that's been happening here regarding Rock the product, the community, and our upcoming events. I'm Emily Forman. And today with me are Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo, and we have an exciting range of topics for you. We're gonna kick off by talking about the latest with our version updates. We're also gonna update you on what's coming with v 18 and, a little bit about what's the status on chat, the feature many of you have been very interested in. We'll talk through some things about the upcoming RX and how you can get involved now, as well as a few other community updates. So we are looking forward to sharing with you. Nick, let's talk a little bit about where we're at with our version updates. Sure. We are in the second we're at the end of the second round of alpha testing for version 17 o. So what that means is we're about to start beta. So 17 will be in beta probably two plus weeks. We'll see how that goes. And in the meantime, we're working on 17.1 fixes and whatnot. And then I think this is old news, but 16.1 has been released. It was another little patch of bug fix back in March 13. So one thing I did want to draw attention to is on the release notes page. We added a couple little things that aren't quite obvious. One is called heads up, and then the other is called tech bulletin. So there's these two little links where you can see the heads up note for each release. And what we're doing is we're trying to remove the heads up notes are those things that show up when you're about to hit the install button. Sometimes they're a little scary looking. So those will still be there. We'll have heads up notes if there's something urgent that you need to be aware of before you press update, but you'll always be able to see those notes later as well. Whereas today, they're hard to see once you've already installed. So you can always see those on the release notes page. And then the tech bulletin is just our way to expand, to give people a little bit more detail about one of the changes that we've made in that release. So go look at it, check it out. I think it's mostly in the V17. We haven't really gone back and created tech bulletins. But tech bulletins would be more for , more technical audience. The average church probably doesn't have to worry about them, but there's some technical churches out there that have technology teams and they want to know some of these details. And we don't want to pollute the general audience with having to know all these technology terms. But we feel we need to say, give a heads up. Just trying to get the best content to the best audience, filtering as much as we can. Very cool. That should help answer a lot of questions that people have and provide some of those next level details that they've been looking for. Alright. So that's V17. What's coming up with V18? Well V18, we're doing a lot of the product planning for that. The hardest thing I think about where we're at right now is just trying to limit what's in 18. There's so many ideas and things that we want to work on, but trying to limit that. I think you'll see a continuation of a push for communication tools and continue to polish the communication tools. So we're working on a new ideation around communication analytics. So you can kind of see how your communications are going. I do think that is a pretty often missed tool. once we send the email, we tend to move on to something else. And I think it's important to see how those emails are being opened and how the audience that you're sending it to are interacting with those emails. We're adding to that a report of spam capability. So some of the transports that we use, the email transports that we use can report back if someone reports an email being a spam. Currently we do some things with that, we'll unsubscribe them, but it'd be nice to kind of track that too. So we're adding some tracking for that. We're also polishing the unsubscribed experience for communications. And that's a very difficult thing, most platforms don't have the problem that we have. It's very simple process for them, just unsubscribe. To us, it's much more difficult because you could have gotten the email from a communication list. Might have just been sent to you. It might have been a bulk email. In the future, there'll be other ways that you could receive emails. We want to make sure that we try to not inspire them to too quickly go to the nuclear button, which is just unsubscribe me from everything. We wanna try to make the most atomic unsubscribe as possible, because that's what's in the best interest of the organization. So trying to get that to them, we're trying to make it friction free, we don't want to frustrate somebody. I think whenever anybody puts Slacks or clicks it unsubscribe link, they're kind of already frustrated. I know I am. And so what I don't want to do is get there and have to try to understand algebra to get this thing unsubscribed. So we take the least or the most atomic unsubscribe automatically we do today. But then we try to coach them through other things that they could do, including removing themselves basically from the database, or inactivating themselves from the database. And that's the last thing we want them to do. But if that's what they're no longer in the organization, this is actually a helpful thing to make your data a little bit better. So kind of reimagining all that with some of the additional tools, made the unsubscribe even more complex. And that's another thing that we're gonna be surfacing in the analytics is what email to blame for an unsubscribe. So on top of that, there's some other communication tools coming. There's a saturation report that we're putting in, so you can see how how many people are getting certain numbers of emails by a Oh, wow. Range of dates that you give it. So again, that can kind of help you figure out , are your people getting too many emails? It's been interesting and, , in preparing for that feature, just running it on some different churches data. And there really is a widespread of churches sending different varying amounts of emails, which is interesting. And then the final feature that we're working on, and this is probably one of the more exciting features for V18 is a communication campaign. So that'll help us create trip campaigns or sequential communications. It can be used for a lot of different purposes. And we're really excited about the user experience for it and the power it'll give you. Technically, can kind of do this a lot today with workflows, but it'd be very tedious to set this up and maybe a little fragile. So this tool will actually allow you to set these up fairly easily. And so real excited about getting that out to people. That'll be fantastic. And there's a plenty of other features that we're considering. I hate to bring them up yet because I don't know, I'm not sure what's going be in and out. We're trying to prevent v 18 from turning into a v 17 that took a long time, but you got a lot of features. just read the release notes on 17. It's pretty crazy. But we're trying to limit the scope for 18 so we can get it out faster. And it's changing daily, based on what we're seeing and hearing from the community, what the priorities should be, we're changing that. And, , a big thing that's just changing every day is just the whole AI thing. Trying to figure out the appropriate best use of AI within Rock. It taking both a short term and a long term vision for that. So those are the things that are taking a bit longer to kind of figure out what we wanna do. And anytime we look very far out into the future, just the nature of rocks dynamic, very in the trenches with churches, way of operating. It's always a little fuzzy, but it's exciting to see as things begin to gain clarity. Yeah. And I think even for me personally, the most frustrating thing right now is just how AI is changing so quickly. And not necessarily the models and everything, that's certainly true, but it's the technologies that are coming too quickly to create a roadmap for basically. It seems every other week the roadmap would tweak or adjust. That said, we're doing a lot of experimentation, a lot of R and D, some with live data with partnering with churches that will eventually be put into core. So there's a lot going on. Just trying to navigate the path I think is the problem. And the diversity of Rock, everybody wants to use a different AI platform. True. Good reasons, right? It's not unreasonable to want a specific one, but to for us to provide all of them. And and again, it's there's another tension there too of trying to make it approachable to the essentials church. So if you if the first step after installing Rock is now having to provision 12 AI tools with Oh my. Each with their own API keys, , it's gonna heighten the the fair assessment that, yo, you needed a programmer to do this. And it's , that's not fair now, but it could be if we keep going down that path. But we don't want to rob the power either. So how do we find this balance? Again, it's way more difficult than even that. Wow. So very exciting things coming and constantly changing as usual inside the Rock community. Let's talk a little bit about our big upcoming event, RX. We've had a lot of announcements about it in the past. And one of the great ways people can get involved right now is by inviting their leadership. So we've broken the event, we've changed it up a little bit, and we now have an an entire leadership day. There'll be a great time for your executive leadership to go have an opportunity to partner with you in in hearing what Rock is all about with an incredible amount of vision casting that will tie into their strategies that they're already trying to work on within the church. So we strongly encourage you to bring your leadership. It's not the same event that it was before. To that end, on our Rx page, we do have a leadership flyer that is available for you to share with your leaders. And we have more content coming. Right, John? Yeah. There's a lot more consideration going into, especially at that first day. I mean, your leaders only need to come to the first day. Yes. They're welcome to stay further. I mean, I think they'll be inspired by the community. But honestly, think the value for them will drop a little bit after that. But I think them seeing what your workspace is, in this community, in this tool is gonna blow their minds. Yeah. I think there's a lot of value for them to be here for them, but it's even more valuable for you. Because I think it's gonna unlock a vision that a shared vision with with what you're working on. And a shared understanding. It will hopefully help start to make that translation a little easier between you and your leadership. If you're talking about tools or projects to tie it into that vision. So give you something to build on together. And I think the first day is gonna be very different than anything we've done. It's really gonna be tailored for them. We're gonna simplify a lot of talk about digital ministry and AI. So it's, we're gonna give them a good dose of this. And it's already being , we already have copious notes of the sessions. And we continue to add to them every day, literally. I was just adding some stuff this morning from a podcast I was listening to in the morning, that we don't want to scare them off, we don't want to make it overly technical, we want to talk about high level strategies for digital ministry, we wanna relate it to secular concepts, but I think there's a lot to learn from those, but there's a lot of things that don't pull over. And I think one of the things we're gonna do, work really hard on is providing care to say that we're not doing it wrong. The church is not doing it wrong. I think there's a lot of people maybe in the digital space right now who are battling leadership and saying, You don't get it. And I think that isn't necessarily correct. I think we haven't cast the vision. And I think what we were trying to do isn't that much different than what they're doing. And so they're not doing it wrong. There's just new tools. So I think they're gonna leave, our hope is that they'll leave feeling a new understanding of digital ministry and also kind of just debunked that, know, there's while there's a lot of change, a lot of stuff that maybe I think was some people think need to change aren't gonna change. physical the need for physical community. Mhmm. Yep. This is unique to the church space and will continue to be. Yeah. So don't feel , oh, they're not gonna get it because the last keynote would have been over their head. No. Get that. And trust us, we're changing that. Yes. And if you missed it, I don't know how you could have, but if you missed it, we are having Dan Heath there as a part of our keynote experience as well, with some really great content that will give us step by step as we walk leaders through the strategies and things that are applicable to them, how that can come to pass in Rock without getting very technical. And then that change management that Dan Heath will be speaking about is just gonna be a really incredible way to step through this whole process. And I've got about four books going, so I'm going a little slow. As I continue to move through his book, I'm more and more , wow, this is actually perfect. This is the way the topics and what he's talking about is perfect for what we're wanting for the conference. So very exciting. You can get involved right now by making sure your leadership comes. Share the vision with them, share the flyer, which you can It's a PDF on our Rx website. You can download that and send it to your leadership. And let's get those registrations going. That's the best way to get involved right now. Yeah. And just ask for one day of their time. I think that's a easy ask. Just come to this one day. And there's nothing traveling with your leadership too, just to build deeper connection. And we will, of course, be offering the Gold Circle Award submission process pretty soon. So your church could have an opportunity to win a Gold Circle Award as evaluated by community judges based on ministry impact and design, and those would be something your leadership would have a chance to experience as well, that awards process. So keep an eye out for that. We'll make sure you don't miss it when it is available, But a great leadership opportunity coming up for Rx this year. Now before I forget, let's talk about an update on the chat feature. Yeah, so chat is a project that we've been working on for a long time. Initially it was both a technology research project to figure out how we would do this, but also a funding. And the community has really stepped up with funding. Think we've had the most people, number of churches step up to fund a feature, which is really good. So I wanted to kind of walk through how it'll work and some use cases that people are considering. But basically just kind of give you a little bit of the details about what we're thinking here. So it starts with the concept of channels. So chat has channels. Channels for us will be groups. So you'll be able to go into a group type and say, hey, channels for each one of these groups. And there's lots of settings. You can say every group should have a channel or allowed a group to have a channel. And if you do that, then when you go to the group detail, you'll be able to enable channels for specific groups. You can also do the opposite. So if you say no, all all groups are supposed to have channels, you can allow a group to opt out of a channel. So everything in Rock, it's expensive. But when you think channels, think groups. Every channel in chat will have a group behind it. There are two new group types that come out of the box to support this. There's something called shared channels. So these are gonna be groups that are gonna be backing the shared channels within chat. So in your chat, you could have a shared channel for every campus. You could have a shared channel for any kind of topic that you want to put out there. It's kind of up to you how you want to use these shared channels, but they're just open channels for anybody to just jump in and get to. There's also going be a group type for direct messages. And this will be a group type that backs all the one to one or, , a direct message can actually have more than one to one, can have small groups. But these are these are gonna be channels that are created by people to talk with each other offline. Now again, all your small groups can be enabled for that, and those are gonna be no one can get into those unless they're in this small group, and they'll be seen and controlled by Rock. So access to those channels will be done through the syncing process. So the when we did the chat feature, a lot of the work was this back end syncing process. As much as you think it's a front end thing, in there is. There was a lot of work there too. But we're using a service that provides a lot of rich capabilities out of the box in terms of the UI. But the sinking that into Rock was a bigger challenge than I think many would expect. Also once a night, we will sync interactions, so we can know how people are using chat. Now we're not syncing or moving message data back into Rock. We don't need that. That's a lot of data. You can get access to it through the API if we need it, but right now we don't feel we need that. But what we will do is we will write an interaction per channel, per person every night. So if a person talks in a specific channel, we'll write an interaction saying that person talked in this channel, and we'll also say how many messages they sent that day in that channel. So if I went into four channels and had a conversation, I will have at the end of the day, four interactions written, one for each channel. And we think that's gonna be super powerful, because now we can write data views and say, okay, who's interacting with you in chat? that's another way of knowing who's active in your church. Now, you might be asking, what kind of features do you have in chat? It's pretty rich user experience. So you have things images and files, reactions, conversations and threads, you can tell what's been read and unread, typing indicators, pin messages, you can mention people, you have push notifications. So it's very, very rich chat environment. Now some of the use cases people are hoping to use with this and they're all over the map. That's what's really cool to see. Some people just want to have chat capabilities for their small groups. So that's a great use case. Some people are very interested in the shared channel approach where you can basically jump in there and just start chatting about anything. That's the one I think I'm most interested in watching because, obviously that's a new thing and it's gonna be interesting to see how it's used. I think we can all imagine some challenges to that. That's gonna be interesting how we create the processes and how we learn to drive that feature. And I'm so interested in that one. I think the small group ones, we can all picture. Serving teams, while not probably in phase one, there are some churches who are wanting to use chat as another communication medium for interacting with people who maybe don't wanna share their mobile number, or maybe they're not ready to, , kind of step into official communication pattern within the church. So you start to see a lot of apps today. I have one with my doctor, and it's a special app that you use. It's encrypted and everything, we can chat inside there. And then it basically sends me a text message whenever I need to go in there, because I mean, I have push notifications turned on. So seeing different use cases that is really interesting too. So one of the things that we wanna talk about too is , well how does this work? It's a part of Rock Mobile. So you have to basically have Rock Mobile to use the chat from a mobile perspective. There is a website tool, but it's gonna be pretty basic. It's that website version of chat is more for the staff who maybe don't, who wanna have it open on their desktop. It won't have push notifications, but it's there if you just wanna quickly interact with a whole bunch of people and you want, and you're at your desktop and you wanna use your keyboard. Totally makes sense. But it's not meant to be a first tier user interface for the attendees. Someday that might be, I mean, we're not ruling that out. From a phase one, minimal viable product, we're not really pushing web too much. All this is priced though based on monthly active users. So we have this chat services priced that way too. So how many people do you have that interacted with chat? That's how it's priced. That comes from the chat background service, but also that's how we're gonna fund it. So for those who didn't participate in the creation of the tool, then their monthly active users, MAU, will be based on what the the back end service requires, plus a little bit extra to help pay for the existing development and ongoing development. So that's how it'll be funded. There's also some limitations around how many peak connections you're allowed to have. And again, that's all the chat services are funded around those same models. So we'll just pass those along. Right now the backend sync is done, which I said was a big step. Still have to do some fit and finish and some polish. The mobile UIs are done. So we actually have internally a version of Rock mobile with a fully functioning chat application that's being synced with our internal versions of Rock. So we're gonna continue to prototype in there and make sure we got everything. And we're already learning some things , Oh yeah, we didn't think about that. And so we're going back and doing the finish. And the web client is started and we have a few little Polish points to put on that. So all that to say is we're really well along and this will be ready in a 17 dot version. And I'd probably say it's a 17 dot early. I can't say 17 dot one because 17 dot one might be needed to do immediate bug fixes from beta to release. So, but 17.1, 17 point two, somewhere in there, it'll be ready for prime time. So the team's made great progress, the team's worked really hard, they're very excited about this, and it's just really great to see so many people in the community excited for it. That's incredible. I know this is going to get huge traction. And so we want to mention at the same time, this is a great opportunity to check your early access status. Our funding is based off of donations, as , and donating at the minimum recommended amount, which is currently $4.1 per average weekend attendee per year. If you're donating at that amount, that means that you have early access to features as soon as they are released after the beta process concludes. Otherwise, you're going to be waiting twelve months for access to features. Enroc is fully functional. We make sure all the major bug or security fixes are backported there to that twelve month mark. But you really just don't want to miss the incredible features that are coming out, including chat and including what we've been talking about in v 18. And the win win of this is the team has to be funded in order to develop this. And I can tell you that we do more per dollar than any other platform that's building features out there. So please double check your donation status, make sure one, you have a commitment in that's at the early access level for your organization size and two, your donation schedule is up to date. So recurring schedule that's in or whatever your commitment amount is with an annual check or whatever that looks for you, make sure that's up to date. So you don't have any snafus as you're getting ready to roll out some of the exciting new features coming your way. And that also helps keep our team coding. So great opportunity to check that. Really appreciate your support and engagement in so many ways. While you're engaging with the community, Rx is one way to do that annually, But in between times, it's a great time to join some of our community hubs, including those in regions of the country, in the world actually, and topical regions. We've been having some great traction with topical discussions related to data analytics and digital ministry. You can find those in our chat channels and even watch recordings of past meetings with some really incredible content. So look for those hubs, regional and topical, and find one to get involved with in the meantime. Make some great friends, learn from each other, and don't try to have to reinvent the wheel all the time. It's great to have a buddy in the Rock community. And then finally, we've got some new Rock merch that's dropping in our store. So don't forget to check that out. It might be just the right timing for you to keep up with some of your Rock gear. Or if you're getting ready to celebrate something special, it's kind of fun to have a giveaway or a gift for someone on your staff. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of ROTCast. We look forward to continuing to share these updates with you, so make sure you subscribe to our podcast. 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.