Podcast Episode 23: Episode 197: Volunteers, Stewardship, & Shaping Your Digital Team

Description

This episode lays out the case for using volunteers on church digital teams, challenging the idea that paid staff should handle everything. The team unpacks why volunteers matter—from stewardship to discipleship—and offers practical tips for recruiting, training, and retaining them. Learn which roles work best, how to overcome common objections, and how to create a culture of trust and shared ownership. You’ll leave inspired to define one new volunteer role and start building your team with the people God’s already placed in your church.

Transcribed Content

Whether you're learning the basics or you want to be a Rock Master, we have a class for you from high level overviews to specific features. Find the training class that fits your needs this year at community.rockrms.com/classes. Welcome back to Rockcast. This is the podcast that takes you behind the scenes with Spark Development Network so you can find out everything that's going on with Rock. I'm Emily Forman. Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo are joining me for this conversation about Rock, and we are going to run through a quick Rock update for you today. We'll talk a little bit about metrics classification and why we should be using Rock volunteers in your ministry. And then we'll give you a quick update on Rx 25 and some upcoming classes. So let's dive in. Nick, what can you tell us about where we are with our Rock version updates? I can tell you that it feels 17.1 just came out, but in fact, it's been a number of weeks and 17.2 is about to go beta. So we just have found our last two little issues. We're putting them into the package for 17.2, and that will go to beta hopefully this afternoon. Now, one of the things that we're going be doing in the future as we go forward here is we've been converting a lot of blocks to Obsidian, and we're going to put together a list of the blocks that are not going to get converted to Obsidian. These are example blocks and weird miscellaneous blocks that are just going be sunsetted. So at some point there'll be a tech note, which itemizes these blocks or components that are basically being obsoleted. And that's gonna be coming soon too, probably in a V18 tech note. Great. And one thing that is possible now with V17 and with the latest release of the AppFactory V7 shell is that Rock Mobile Chat is now coming straight to you. So if this is a feature you've been wanting to get your hands on for your Rock mobile app, you will need v seventeen one plus the v seven shell update. And, of course, then to configure the the feature in your app and make sure to add that chat subscription to your AppFactory subscription. So that's available, very exciting. And I know a lot of churches have been interested in seeing how this works. I think that pricing is available now on the It certainly is. And pricing goes to pay for the service, but also goes to pay for the code for us, our part to maintain that code, to add new features to the code. The only thing I would probably just note is when you pick the package size for chat, it doesn't have to be the same package size as your mobile app. Your mobile app is based on the average weekend attendance. Chat is based on how many average monthly users you have. And they can be different numbers. You could get freaked out because some of the packages get kind of big, but I don't know if there's a single church in a community who needs our extra large package on chat. That would be a very different, because that's 10,000 monthly active users, which is a lot. They would have to be doing something very interesting inside their app with chat for that to be the case. Yeah. So that goes to pay for the service and also to pay for the creation of what we've done, but also the next features. And we're already working on a lot of new features for chat. So phase one was not the end. No, but it is an exciting beginning. So jump in if you're ready. And another exciting topic we have today is a metrics classification. You had a quick note on that, John. Yeah, so metrics classification was a feature we rolled out in version 17, and I just want to highlight it. And I know we've talked about it a little bit on the podcast, but I want to mention it because when I talked about it before, it was coming, now it's here. And it's a very important feature to us and the core team because we want to keep growing some of the analytics that we can do for you inside the product. However, we need to know some things about your organization. So a very good example of that is sometimes when we're looking at analytics, we wanna kind of show you the analytics based on the size of your campus or your total weekend attendance. For instance, maybe you have a campus who has baptized 20 people and you have a campus that baptized 200 people. Who's having a greater impact? Well, it's easy to think that's the 200. But if you look at campus size and consider campus size, it might be totally different. It might actually be that that smaller campus is having a bigger impact based on their size. And so we wanna provide those kinds of insights for you, except today we have no idea your attendance. Now you might say, Well, yeah, you do. There's a metric inside of Rock that has all that. And I hope so because we ship with that. However, we don't know what the intent of that is. And so we've provided these classifications and there's a certain set of classifications in 17 and we'll add some more over time. But what we need you to do is to go through and mark your metrics with those classifications. Now we've done that out of the box, if you haven't kind of monkeyed with something, it might already But be we also know that the Rock community is pretty good at monkeying around inside the earth. And to be honest, Rock was meant to be monkeyed with, so you didn't do anything wrong. So we just need you to help us by marking those classifications on your metrics. It's important too, that you read about the classification. The classifications are actually a defined type. And inside that defined type, we kind of tell you how your metrics should be partitioned. So for instance, total weekend attendance should be partitioned by campus and then service. And that's why we shipped it. So hopefully you didn't, again, monkey with it. If you did, great, we're good. But we just need to make sure that we know about those partitions so that we can do things right. There's some features coming in 18 that we're gonna be relying on those. And if you don't have them, the analytics won't be able to do the reporting or you might get some strange results because your metrics not right. So just wanted to kind of pitch metrics classifications for the win. New churches coming out of box, it's gonna be a lot easier because they're gonna come already pre configured. And you're gonna see this as a theme going forward is that we as a core team want to know more about what things are configured in what ways, so that we can give you more insight in your organization. Before we move on to the next topic, I just want to kind of put out a little tech update on inside of Rock, there's lots of different ways to geocode your addresses. So geocode is just a fancy word for saying, tell you the precise location of an address, basically give you the lat long, latitude and longitude. So we have these services that run that do that for you. Now, the cool thing is , and this is a really cool thing, honestly, is that we have one called Smarty Streets that does that. It's already established in your instance and it's free, kinda. we pay dearly, Spark pays dearly for that. And that cost has actually been augmented by a sponsorship. So sponsor has paid for you to have free SmartyStreets. It used to be SmartyStreets gave that to the community for free, but they have since a lot of organizations, still a great organization, not trying to dossier, but they've been bought out, , and their new handlers didn't have the generosity of the original team. So that they basically said, Hey, you guys have to pay for this now. And we looked at that and said, well, that's a disaster because we don't want every church to have to go get an account. And so we asked for a sponsor, a sponsor stepped up, I think two years ago when this happened. And so it was Triumph Tech pays for that cost for you guys. And that's what you should be using Smarty Streets, because it's great. It's a really great service and it's free to you and you don't have to do anything. it's just win, win, win. However, a long, long time ago, back in the one zero days, we had different options. This was even before Smarty Streets, I believe. I think back then we were using a few different other vendors. And one of the vendors was Bing Maps, if you're familiar with them, that's a Microsoft mapping technology. They had a service you could get, and you could get a pretty generous free tier for that. And so that was in Rock. No one should be using that. Smarty Streets is a 100% the way to go. But if everything in tech things change. And so Bing locations has announced that they're not supporting that API anymore. You now need to transfer to their Azure mapping service. So this should impact not as too many people. And we're talking about on the podcast because I feel the type of person who might've changed this probably is more apt to listen to the podcast. And we don't want to confuse and put out a lot of messaging to newer churches who are , what is this? What is this you talk of? So if you happen to have played with Bing, you probably wanna turn that off. You're probably getting exceptions in your logs and you should probably be using Smarty streets. So in the future update, , we'll remove that and we'll probably, if you had it turned on, we'll probably turn on your Smarty Streets for you. But again, this generally is going to impact people who've been in the community a long time. And we feel the best probably medium for that is the podcast. So we don't confuse a lot of the more essentials type churches with that. So just a little heads up on that. That's good information to know. And And if you don't remember, if you messed with Bing, just go check it out. Yeah, just go into your location services, click on the Bing, if it's active, deactivate it. And if it has an API key, you might just get rid of the API key just as a double check. Great. And if you weren't around back then disregard that announcement. Yeah. Great. Being what? Being what? Perfect. Moving past the being what, how about volunteers? John, we've heard a lot of questions from people over time about using volunteers. We've made some suggestions in that area, and I know you've been compiling some good insights about volunteer use inside a Rock team, and have some great experience you can share with that as well. Yeah, think this is a very important topic for a few reasons. One is I think there is a lot of interest in the community about it, and there's been some discussion recently, which I think was very great. But I think for another reason too, and we'll be talking a lot of this at conference, digital ministry is really growing. And I think it's so important that it does grow, because I think it's a very powerful tool. However, it's a very scary tool. I feel if we don't do this right, we have a great opportunity, we have to do this right. And I think one of the things that we have to be very cautious and careful about is as we are given more budgets to invest in digital ministry and more trust from our leadership, we have to steward that trust and that money really, really well. I feel we're about to get a really golden opportunity and we have to do this right in a way that honors not only the stewardship, but also honors God and the kingdom. Because I do think that digital ministry, if we're not careful, we could really, , beef this up pretty good in lots of different ways. And I think we have to do this in a way that doesn't follow just a path of secular technology. We can be inspired by that, but we have to do it differently. We have to do it a way that honors God's church. I think volunteerism is a big piece of that. Not only for the cost, but also just for, this is the way the kingdom should work. And so, the first thing we have to recognize, the church is different than the way the secular businesses run. We should be inspired by some other ideas, but we should not necessarily be too inspired, right? We have to apply that in a way that honors the church. And the church isn't meant to be run by staff. Unfortunately, it is. I think the Mormon church actually does a really good job of this. pretty much everybody there is unpaid and a volunteer, but that's very, very hard to do in our culture because of how busy we are and how much stress, the average person has to get through this culture. It's very difficult to get people to do that. Now, when I worked on a staff at a church, which I did for thirteen years, I would always say that staff was a necessary evil. And that's a really harsh term, I think, to think through that. But I think it's good that we hold that in our minds because we have to make sure that our first thought isn't always pay someone to do it, pay someone to do it. We have to understand that we are necessary, but it's not the intention, right? You wanna minimize that as much as you can. And that, the perfect world, if when God's kingdom comes to the earth, we won't be paid to work in the church. We won't be paid probably at all, but , we should be honoring that. Now I get it, it's so much easier just to pay someone. I've been there, I know. It's so much easier just to get someone to pay someone. There's that financial norm that when you have this contract, this employment kind of contract, and it's , you pay and you get it. You get to say it the way you want It's easier, but it's not always the better way. In fact, I actually think there's a lot of ways that's actually worse. So we can't let the convenience of that drive our decisions and shape the culture of our team. Now we've got to steward this the right way. And I think everybody else in the church is using volunteers, right? You can't go, I hope, right? There's probably a few churches that that's not true. I hope when you walk into your children's ministry on the weekend, pretty much everybody in a room is a volunteer. And I know there's some, actually know some churches that don't do that. They actually pay all the people inside there too, but that's the way most of the church is running. And I think as a digital team, we can't be We can't be , Oh, those are the guys who don't have to use the volunteers. No, we need to be in the trench with them, doing the same things and leading and hiring the same ways. Not only is it good for us, and we'll talk more about that, but it's good for them. Volunteerism is a great way to increase discipleship. And that's what we're called to do. I know we're called to do a lot of digital things and a lot of technical things, and that's a little different than some of the staff maybe, but we're also called to the church to disciple people, to build the kingdom, and to make sure that people have a place that they can grow and use their gifts. Now, honestly, I'm very passionate about this because what? I started out as a volunteer. I wouldn't be here today if there wasn't a volunteer opportunity for me. I started out wanting to use my technical skills in the church. And so I had obviously some of those from the corporate world. I kinda had to lightly push in a little bit, trying to find those types of volunteer needs can be a little bit difficult, but I wouldn't be here today unless someone had given me a shot. Someone on staff had to be , Oh, great. Here's a guy who wants to volunteer. Let's see how we get this plugged in. I can honestly tell you too, there's a person on our team who started out as a volunteer with us at CCV. She came out of the, she'd left the workforce , to have kids and wanted to come back and start to renew her skills. Now, if I'm being honest, was a little bit the person probably had to take the flyer with me. Oh, okay. That's gonna be some work on me. what? A lot these volunteers, they don't work out. They have an itch to wanna do something and then they lose the itch and then you invested and you didn't get the time. I know that happens. I've been there, but you're gonna get some real wins. Person committed, learned, grew. Yeah, it took some effort on our side, but the net reward has been amazing. Amazing amount of work that we got for what we invested, but it's not about necessarily what we got, it's also about what they got to. They got to put their work into service for eternity. And so there's success stories here, a 100%. And I know that not every volunteer is gonna work out. That's okay. Because what? The Bible even tells us a parable about that, right? It's a parable of the seeds. That some of the seeds are just gonna get plucked away, some of the seeds are gonna get choked out, but what does it say? The seeds that do stay have a multiplication effect of a 100, a thousand. And that's so true. The parable is true in this case. So you have to do that. So what are some good roles for volunteers? Well, I'd say that there's plenty. The biggest easiest one is data entry. If you're paying someone to de dupe your data, I'll just be clear, you're doing it wrong. Yep. You should get volunteers to do this. And let me say another shocking thing. There's people who enjoy doing that. I know it sounds strange, because it seems for many personalized styles mine, that it's not really what the box we to check. There were several data entry volunteers on our team at CCV who loved doing what we did. It was almost bubble paper to They just loved just cleaning things up and straightening things up. And at its prime, know, back when we were there, and I think it's still the case, we had zero duplicates. There were times literally I had to get on the phone with our main one and say, stop duplicating right now. Okay. Deduplicating right now. I actually need, I'm testing something. , back down. Pause. And they just love that cleaning. Sometimes they would do it that while they're watching a TV show. It just felt instead of doing whatever those dumb games that people play, the fruit slasher thing, I don't know what it's called, or bejeweled, whatever it is. They de dupe data that made them feel good. But data entry too, if you have something that you need to have entered, they love doing that. Yeah, basic SQL and lava reporting. There's a lot of people with technical skills and they would love to know that they could do this. Content tagging, workflows. I mean, you could teach volunteers how make workflows. Documentation, guaranteed there's something that needs to be documented in your environment right now. Yep. And they could do it. Once the cool thing is once you train them how to document it, you kind of train them how to do the job too. So boom, now you can do the job. And getting some input from the community, a lot people are using them for website testing, which I think is a great idea. Certainly can be done. A lot of these roles can be done remotely, which is really great for people who maybe need to serve from home. one of our data entry dupers I just mentioned, she was a shut in because she had to take care of her husband who had some really severe handicaps. And so allowed her to serve in a way that she couldn't in any other way. And again, she just felt very empowered by that. Now I would say that this is really good for remote, but I think it's also good to bring them in occasionally, just so you can build culture team with them. So while they might do a lot of their work from home, you probably also wanna make sure that you create that physical community too for long term retention. Although don't push it too much because that might be the one thing that they actually not having to come in. Now, common objections that we need to overcome is the first one's probably the biggest one is , but they'll see sensitive data. And my kind of thought on that is, yes, so what? the person you're going to pay is going to see it too. That's exactly right. Someone's going to see it. So is it true then that you have to pay someone to be honest? And I would say, no, that certainly is not the case. You could pay someone to be, and they're going be dishonest. I've had some of those in my career too, right? You paid them and they were dishonest. Hopefully we don't see that as much in the church. I think that's true, but it does happen there too. It's not about the money that's going to keep someone honest, it's about who they are as a person. And so I think we just need to get over that. But we do need to have protections in place, obviously. So make them sign a data protection agreement. And Emily, I think you have an example We do. Yes, we have one that we're gonna be putting in the show notes, which will be on our blog. So if you're listening to this somewhere else, you just go to the community.rockrms.com site, click on blog, and it will be right there in the blog that hosts this podcast, we'll have our show notes. Yeah, and realize we live in the world of AI, so you could also just Pretty quickly, just put one together. Create one. Or you could use this one and say, change this to do whatever you want. So make them sign that. And to me, education is the first key thing. I do believe that at the end of the day, most people are honest, especially who work at a church or who want to volunteer at a church, and they just need to know the dos and don'ts. I literally, this was a long time ago, 02/2002, we had a volunteer who used the church database. At the time it was Shelby v5, which was a long time ago, and they sent an Avon request. Oh my gosh. In all honesty, we didn't have a data protection thing back In all honesty, I really truly believe they had no idea what they were doing was wrong. they just didn't think about it. They thought, Oh, here's a list. I mean, I know we're all saying duh, but we live in a different time too. Yes. So I do believe if we had a data protection policy, they'd be , Well, I can't do that because it said not And to do we literally didn't have it. Well, guess what? We had it after that. Run a background check. I think that's completely a good idea. And sometimes churches will run a financial background check for positions this too. Think that's okay too. I think, with a background check catch anything, probably not in reality, but I think it does say another thing , Hey, we take this very seriously. I think even if it doesn't find something, it's telling the person , Hey, this is an important thing. And also realize too, there's other volunteers in the church doing much more sensitive things. I would say watching kids is way more sensitive than the data. I know that seems odd, but I would say, someone would say, Hey, hurt my child or steal my data. I'm going for steal my data So a 100% of the just put it in context. I think just sometimes we can be a little bit too careful. I know at CCV, when I was there, we really empowered these people. We build trust, you didn't get it day one, right? You would, Hey, in, just do some data entry for us. And if we see who you are, we build that rapport. Okay, we're going to give you more access. We had several people who had pretty high access back then, and we never had a problem ever. So you need to learn to trust them. Just again, getting paid does not also make them ethical. In fact, I think it has nothing to do with that. Another objection, training takes too much time. True, that's true. Here's what I would say, train a volunteer really well and tell them their first job is to document it. Then they can train the trainer. That document becomes your onboarding guide to everybody else. And in fact, they could probably just do it for you. So yeah, it's an investment, but back to the parable of seeds, it's totally worth it. So another thing that we're probably gonna run into then is , well, how do I recruit volunteers? That just takes a lot of time. And yeah, it does. But again, it's an investment. It's what we're called to do. So don't do it for just you. You will get stuff out of this. Trust me, you will. If you do it right, you will get stuff out of this, but it's also about them. And I would just say recruiting is not a passive sport. It's not a lake fishing, it's fly fishing. So lake fishing to me is when you're fishing from the shore, usually have a little bobber and you just put it in the water and you just sit there and wait for the bobber to go up and down. That is not recruiting. Recruiting has to fly right. You got to go where the fish are. You got to figure out what are they biting on today? what flies out there? You have to put that fly in the water. And when you fly fish, you have to set the hook. So you have to be laser focused on that and you have to set the hook. So you gotta be out there. You can't just be passively doing that. You have to be intentional about it. I would start by defining a few clear entry level roles. Deducing and data entry is where I'd start a 100%. I'd probably also throw out there a reporting. Hey, do SQL? You can apply that to the church. Start with a few key, clear, easy ones. Now it could be , where do you post this? maybe your church doesn't have a way on the website to find it. Now that's a little passive, so you have to be active, but do both. Well, news, you have a tool that can put that on your website really easily. And that might actually be the first project is , I gotta get my serving opportunities out there, not just for my ministry, but for all ministries. However, I don't rely on just the church website to get that for you. You can also ask other ministries. Now, they're probably not gonna give you the best volunteers, I wouldn't. But here's what I would say, Hey, do you have any volunteers that maybe have a spouse or a friend who are very introverted or maybe prefer technology? Just realize you are fishing for a fish that many other ministries don't want or can't use. Introverted people don't make good greeters. In fact, I am very introverted and I just feel there's not a lot of volunteer opportunities that- That's Yeah, can and will go do it, but I don't feel comfortable doing it. If someone said, Hey, do you want to come in and do this type of stuff? , Heck yeah, that sounds great. So the good news is you're going to fish for fish that no one else really wants or needs, and you can be that home for them. And that's what God's called us to do. So ask your other volunteers, Hey, are there any spouses that of? Or maybe can I borrow a volunteer to help me recruit volunteers? Now realize there isn't something in it for them too, that staff person who's giving you the volunteer, because you're gonna do a lot of stuff for them. the data is gonna be de duped. you got to sell and cast vision to them. , Hey, help me help you. , I'm not really good at this kind of stuff. I'm still going to do it. I'm not going to pass the buck to you, but could you help me? Could you coach me? Could you give me some leads? Can you tell me , who would you talk to? And by doing that, just realize it's going to improve our data. I'll be able to do this kind of stuff for you. And there'll be more apt to help you. You could also try some content magnets to kind of draw these people in. Maybe share an article or video of something AI in the church. that's going to be a magnet, that's fishing with the right lure, right? And you're going to kind of draw them in. And maybe at the bottom of that video or that article, you could say something , Hey, are you interested applying these types of technologies in the church world? We got an opportunity for you. Add a little simple interest form at the bottom. And realize too, you don't have to go make that video. You could just take one off the internet. There's some even in our community, hint, hint, wink, wink, AI in the church. You could literally just take that video. Yeah. It's on YouTube, put it into something and push it off, right? And just use it as a content magnet. So just realize you're fishing for fish that many people don't want, but God loves them and God wants them involved in His church and they're perfect for you. So now you have your volunteers, that was a lot of work, now you want make sure you keep these volunteers, right? Yes. So volunteer recruitment, make them feel as much as a part of your team as possible. Make them feel they're just one of you, they're just not paid. And maybe that's a noble thing. When you go out to lunch with your team, maybe bring some of your volunteers with you, have a special night, maybe a pizza night. We would do this one thing too, where a couple of nights a week, I'm sorry, a year, we'd have a whole bunch of volunteers come in and all we would do is clean people's computers. Would just go into every staff person's computer and we clean their computer, their mouse, which was very disgusting, the keyboards. Would look for, back then we actually had phones on desks, shocking technology. The phones would have these little cords that would always get all janked up and we just buy a whole bunch of them and replace them. People love that. Would get so many emails the next day. Oh, my mouse was so disgusting. Thanks for cleaning it. It's just a good way to get people in and working shoulder to shoulder. And you just get to know them. Schedule encouragement. I think the keyword is schedule it. So you remember both written and verbal. And here's one that I'd be very, very sensitive about. Be cautious about paying your volunteers. Here's what I'd say, never pay a volunteer. Once you pay someone for a role they were doing as a volunteer, you permanently shifted the relationship. It doesn't matter who they are, how noble and how humble, there's just something about that. You've actively changed from social norms. I'm doing this out of generosity to financial market norms, a transaction, a compensation, a value exchange. And once you do that, you've permanently changed that relationship permanently going forward. And again, that sounds a very negative thing to say about the person, but it's not, it's just the way, unfortunately we're all wired. No matter how humble or mission minded they are, the shift is hard to reverse. So now they're always going to be , well, am I going to get paid this time? And again, it sounds very negative to them, but we're all that way. So never ever change that market norm, social norm to market norm. Instead give personalized gift cards at random times. don't always make an exchange. sometimes have them do something big and don't give them, give them praise verbally, but don't give them a gift card and then randomly give them a gift card. And I would say personalize it to something that they want. , don't give them the Starbucks gift card if they don't Starbucks. So know what they and give them what they and do it at random times. So it doesn't feel transaction. It just feels they're being honored for the service as a whole. So just final wrap up, remember volunteers aren't just helping you, they're growing and they're calling. And we're called when we work for a church to do both. We're supposed to shepherd that church in terms of digital, but we're also there to be pastoral in our own way. It's not about getting the task done, it's about discipling them too. So I would just challenge you to find at least one simple volunteer role this week and just get active on doing it. And again, if you're paying someone to de dupe your records in all love, that's not what you should be doing. You should be putting that to a volunteer. God already has the right people in your church to do this. You just have to ask him and do your part to bring them into your team. And again, the rewards are going to be a relationship for you and a relationship for them and discipling. And that's what it's all about, about being in the church. And if that's not what we to do, then maybe we're in the wrong role too. Well, what an incredible opportunity to spread the diversity of what's possible for the church body to better match the diversity that exists of gifts, spiritual gifts, of personality. I know it can be hard to look around if you're not wired that way and think, Gosh, all I can do is hold babies or greet people at the door, and those things drain me. What can I do with my strengths and my gifts to give back to my church? And I think there are more people than we realize sitting in chairs in our auditoriums thinking as they see maybe volunteer opportunities in announcements or on screens between services thinking , gosh, there's maybe my gifts aren't as valuable here. Yeah, and I think leadership too, as they give us more responsibility and funding for our digital ministry, they're watching, how And are you spending if you're going to go spend it on some of the de dupe data, as a leader, I'd be , okay, fine. Get it needs to be done. But now if you go and say, well, I got volunteers to do that. I'm using that money to go get a staff person who can help us take us to the next level on SQL or workflows, who are going to power ministry minded features. That leader, think is going be , this is good. This is right. now often they may not understand that, yeah, volunteer could de dupe the data, but I think that's just our role as being good shepherds of the resources. To explain it. And speaking of casting vision with your leadership, let's talk about RX for a minute. We have made so many changes to the event structure this year to allow you to bring your leadership and share this vision. , we've heard in the past, sometimes it can be hard for your leaders to understand where it is you're going. They want to solve the same problems, right? They're looking at digital ministry, they know they need to solve some of these problems, they're looking for strategies, and communicating, the tools that we're working with, here's some vision. Those things sometimes run into a bottleneck. So we've created the first day of Rx this year, Vision Day, as a way to help share the vision and bring your leadership a little further into an understanding of what's possible, specifically with the Rock toolset and community. So this is an excellent opportunity for you to share that and then kind of unlock what's possible in your ministry throughout the next year. And so the conference is running, I can tell you that conference planning is in full gear right now. It is going fast, our team's working really hard to make this the best event that we've had yet. And so we're planning the event, we have a lot of things coming, we'll talk a little bit about some of the structure of the event, some of the content opportunities. And you may be thinking, great, this is the Spark event, they do it annually, we just kind of show up and that's great. But I would say if you're listening to this podcast, you also have a role in the in the event itself, in the success of it, and this is going to help you and it's going to help the community. And your role is inviting people to attend. That part is not the spark role, that's your role, and you join us as equal partners in this, and this is how it works. So we're putting this incredible event together, and here's what we need from you as a member of the Rock community to help make sure that this does land as a very successful event. One, make sure you get there. There are quite a few people that have attended RX in the past that we have heard intend to register still for this year, but haven't gotten around to it or are working on getting approvals in summer, everything kind of just slows down and gets a little bit more molasses. But I would tell you that those head counts are what help us to plan. And starting in just a couple weeks here, we have a lot of head count requirements up until the event. So don't delay. Make sure you get yourself and your Rock team there. So yourself and your Rock team, the second group of people you need to make sure that you're inviting are your leadership. They've never attended a Rock conference before. They don't know why it would be a good idea for them. So you'll have to do a little vision casting. And we've created a flyer right on our Rx website that's helpful for that, that you can hand your leadership and share with them. You can talk a little bit about the content opportunities that will be there and the networking opportunities with other leaders who are truly seeking what's possible for digital ministry. So yourself and your Rock team, your leadership, and then finally, churches that are not on Rock. If that hasn't crossed your mind yet, be thinking about that right now because you're in a local or regional area and not every church has yet discovered Rock. What better way to discover it in an easy succinct manner than to come in for a one day vision day experience? Come in, catch the vision, see what's possible. Maybe stick around for the connect portion, maybe not. But at any rate, to see a little bit more behind the scenes of what's possible with Rock, where it's going, and how that can empower your ministry. Those are the three groups that we need you as a listener and member of this community to immediately begin inviting. So I would ask you, put something on your calendar or in your to do list every week. Be thinking, who of these three categories can I invite to help grow this community? Because this the reciprocal nature of this community is what makes everything better for everyone, including yourself. Yeah. You might even consider bringing a volunteer. That's a If great you have someone who's really significantly invested in your ministry, you'll never create a greater relationship than traveling with a person. we always said that on staff, think you really wanna know someone travel with them. Some people even hire that way. if you wanna get hired on, you have to travel with one person on the staff. So you might try that. And it kind of , just to say what you said in a different way, what if we walked onto the podcast and say, Hey, today we're announcing a new initiative. We're canceling the community. We're going be more vendor centric. That's kind of what you're saying. If you're saying that, well, it's up to Spark to get people to conference. It's , no, our job is to provide a conference. Build it. And the community's job is to make sure that the people get there. And we're gonna of course do our part too, that's what part of being a community is. I think that's what we have. Yep. So this week we're excited that we'll be releasing our speakers page. So you'll be able to see the lineup of speakers that are gonna be presenting at the event, our vision day, connect days across the board. We're still working on our schedule, just know that's a really dynamic piece as far as the individual content sessions. We're still gathering that information from the speakers. So we'll be releasing that a little bit later. But I can tell you a little bit about some of the content that's coming in, which I think might be helpful in anticipating the scope of the event as well. So when you come for vision day, you'll be getting digital ministry content, change management, AI, generosity, design thinking, and how to apply that across the board in what you're doing, and much more. Community content will include things technical training on Lava and Lava applications, Azure, Rock Web Tools, mobile app walkthroughs. We'll have essential sessions for people interested in migration, in team roles, in the basics of the community. We'll have a Dev Track and platform keynotes. We'll have sessions on data analytics and learning management system. You'll find so much content on personalization and digital strategy. And of course, a plethora of inspiring patterns and projects that churches have been creating over the past year using Rock Tools. You can connect with vendors and have many community connection opportunities. This is the event of the year. This is what helps you take your role and your ministry to the next level throughout the year. And if you need even more reasons to attend and you missed our latest blog series, be sure to go check that out as well. Some fun things you can do in the Phoenix area while you're in town. There are a wide variety of fun and interesting things. So go check out that blog. And then finally, we did wanna announce that the masterclass before RX has enough people in it to fill it. So it will definitively be happening. If you've been kinda waiting to see whether or not the class is on before you register, now's the time. It's a great way to get your Rock one two punch, your training, your connection, and your inspiration in a back to back set of weeks. And in August, we also have classes coming up for finance and for SQL. So if you've taken masterclass, the SQL class might be a next step for you. And the finance class can be taken by, of course, anyone in a Rock admin role and also by your finance team. So if you need them to just get a slice of how to administrate finance tools, this is a great easy way to do that without the commitment of a full master class. So check those out. And we really appreciate your joining our listening audience and supporting what we do here at Spark. It truly is a partnership, and it's exciting to think about the ways we can expand it through our events and connections, through bringing volunteer roles to the table. There is much work to do, and the harvest is ready. So let's continue to add more workers to this particular area. Thanks for joining us. Make sure you subscribe so you can catch our next podcast. This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock sponsor, Checkr, providers of integrated background checks. Connect with Checkr today at rockrms.com/sponsors.