Podcast Episode 16: Episode 202: Rock's Future Anchored in Vision

Description

In this episode of Rock Cast, Jon, Emily, and Nick share how our latest development updates and implementations are anchored in wisdom and mission. Tune in for a behind-the-scenes look at what the team has been building from the Outreach Toolbox and AI Agents to documentation improvements, and the v19 and v20 roadmap.

Transcribed Content

This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock sponsor, SubSplash. SubSplash is a technology company that provides software solutions for churches and nonprofit organizations. Connect with SubSplash today at rockrms.com/sponsors. Welcome back to Rockcast. I'm Emily Forman, and today, Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo are here with me. We are going to tell you about everything that's going on here at Spark Development Network. And let me tell you, we've been busy. Yes. So we will run through the latest with the Rock releases and where that cycle is right now. John's actually been on the road this week meeting with several churches and has some great updates from that. And then we have quite a few other things on the community side to run through related to surveys, the conference, commitment updates, and some announcements. But let's kick this off with a discussion of the latest releases. Nick? I'd love to talk about that. So we had a little bonanza of releases recently. And so 17.6 was really the last, , mainline release. It's a security update and we recommend everyone install that. That was at the October. And now we're in November. We've been in alpha testing for version 18.0 and that's gone great. We got a number of fixes all lined up and we'll be repackaging that and our alpha testers will test those fixes and we'll be releasing 18 after that. However, we have started working on some 18.1 fixes and then the really scary bigger stuff for 19 that's started too. , , when I say scary, I mean, if we're gonna change a model, we do that in version 19. Right. The the larger things on that front. Yeah. Big features. Sure. Great. Well, thank you for that update. We are so happy to have such an engaged testing group, and our alpha testers this time really came through for us. So thank you. Mhmm. Alright, John. Tell us a little bit about your trip and some of the things you were covering with churches this week. Yeah. So one of the roles that's great to be a part of is just going out and making sure that we understand what churches are doing. I think that's what makes Spark different is we try to operate in the trench with the churches, and we definitely don't live in some ivory tower. Engagement goes in a lot of different ways. The biggest is Rocket Chat. So we're in there constantly every day, having conversations, what's working, what's not working, what do we need to be working on in the future? And then after that, there's calls that we have constantly every week. We're meeting with churches, understanding their needs, seeing where they're going. And then occasionally a few times a year, we're out actually with the churches in their environments, learning from them. That happens again. Some of it's ad hoc, some of it is scheduled. So we had a scheduled one with a group of churches, about six churches. And it's just a great time to get together. They each have a small part of the agenda to talk about , what are they working on? What are their biggest struggles internally? Holistically, not just about Rock, but as a digital platform, ? And I think there's a lot of commonality. And ironically, there always seems to be , you get there and a lot of them are having the same struggles and working on the same things. So definitely connections is a topic we talked a lot about. How do we empower churches to make sure people don't fall through cracks? The biggest thing we probably talked about though, is process and strategy. Obviously the tool is a big part of that too. And we talked about that, But a lot of it is even outside the tool. And one of the things I've seen in my work, over twenty years in churches, definitely technology is important there, But you have to have the right psychology behind it too, accountability and celebration sometimes of, and story. Because a lot of times you get the right tool and you finally get it all dialed in and now you hand it off to the person, now it sounds work, right? Yeah. And that's where you really have to pour in. I almost think too, and this might be a whole another topic for another podcast, but sometimes you almost need two types of pastors, the highly relational pastor that's out there building connections in person. And sometimes you almost need a different type of pastor who's handling these follow ups. Because it definitely takes a little bit more of a C mindset, on a disc score of tenacity and pushing through the volumes that need to be done too. So anyways, probably a different topic. But anyways, great to meet with them, hear a lot of things that's going well, hear some of the areas that we need be focusing on. And I think we have a good alignment with that. If we look inside of what we're trying to project for V19, which we kind of showed that chart, our intentional prioritization framework and kind of how we're adjusting the sliders and connections is a big piece of that. And why is that? Well, of all, connections needs a polish. We understand that. But another reason why that slider was moved up was , A, yeah, we wanna do some stuff in polishing, but we hear from the community that that's what the priority is. So we're in alignment there. But what I wanted to share though is what I shared in terms of what has been going on of recent. Because we all get a segment to talk about, what are we working on now and where are we going in the future? And so as Spark, we continue to keep wanting to push the six anchors of digital strategy. And I'm not saying these six anchors are the final anchors, right? They're probably going to shift, but we have to have something to anchor to. We have something to build from. And so how do we build these into our incorporate them into our core product and implementation? So how do we get that implemented and share those strategies with churches? And it's so, so difficult because our current strategy is hindering more than it's helping the implementation of the new strategy. Cause when people hear about digital strategy, they think our current website, they think of our current apps. Exactly. Which for many people are just stale, a stale strategy, right? I would say , why would I even go to my church's website today? Unless I need something, to change my giving or to sign up to do something. There's no real reason for me to go on any day and we have to change that. And so again, we need to keep pushing the six anchors because vision is a bucket with holes, leaks. We have to keep pushing the water in. And you have to remember that too, because you have to keep pushing this within your church. So again, the six anchors break the Sunday only mold, that is the hardest one. It's the hardest one. There's some churches doing well at that. I think they're piloting some stuff, I think we shared LCBC summit. There's some others now, Trinity fellowship with their journeys. They're engaging people daily. And boy, the metrics that they're seeing are incredible. And we saw some of those metrics this week. In fact, talking with some people at Summit, they were actually saying that the metrics that I shared at the conference are accurate, but they're even minimizing, I think, the impact. I said, the average church gets five prayers per prayer request, and some it gets 200 because of these tools. And because of some processes that they're doing, they actually think it's probably closer to 400. Oh, wow. Because we were looking at a big swath of time, right? But they've changed some processes now. And if we just looked at since the change of process, it'd probably be closer to 400. 400 prayers per prayer request. That's just showing you the impact that these strategies are having. So again, no one can convince me that that's not the most important anchor to get people engaged daily. And again, we probably could do a whole podcast on that. The other one is empowering our people. Giving them the same tools that we build for ourselves as pastors, we need to give our people those same things. Invite them into the factory of ministry and give them a machine. Right now, we say we invite them into the factory and then they kind of have to stand on the edges and they don't get a machine to do. So let's give them the machine. Engaging two audiences, I think this one's a little bit more easy, the seekers and the church family. Fusing analog and digital, I think that's another one that we can really push on. It's every time we hear about an analog event, we should be thinking, how can digital support this? How can digital make this better? There's a lot of things that we could do there. Measuring what matters, making sure we have the right metrics. And then the sixth one, which is always kind of the foundational one, stay rooted in mission, to make sure that we're not chasing bright shiny objects, that we're not chasing too many things, that we're focusing on a few things that are going to have missional impact. So again, that's a big thing that we are consistently talking about and working on internally, and we wanna keep talking about because vision leaks. And in fact, I think we just published a blog post that outlines these and provides a takeaway. So it's a printable that you can have on your desk, in your notebook, or anywhere to remind you because it's so easy for these things to slip out of our mind just at the point of application. Yeah. We're gonna keep pushing that. And I I think that takeaway is a is a really good thing. And I know it sounds a little cheesy to take it and then put it on your desk. But if you don't, it's gonna slip out of your So I would, in some way, I think we should all have a some reminder of the six anchor points, even if it's just a little thing taped to the monitor. I think this takeaway is kind of nice because it unpacks a little bit more to one sheet. I think you can fold it a tent. But you gotta have something that's continued to remind you that otherwise life happens. We all got back from the conference and Our guess inboxes were a little bit fuller, our Asana lists were a little bit longer, and we just fall back in to the mundane. And we have to make sure we step out occasionally to make sure that we're focusing on those. And what better time to put these into practice than as we're approaching the Christmas season? There are so many opportunities to engage your digital ministry and digital strategy within this season. Yeah. And as we plan for next year. Mhmm. I think that intentional prioritization framework should be something that you guys use too, to say, Hey, let's intentionally prioritize our resourcing. We know we have limited resourcing, but let's be intentional about how we do that and not just let it happen. So that's something I'm hoping to get an ex post article on to help unpack how we do that a little bit more. But getting into what's really been going on, some very specific things, content library, that's going really, really well. So we have 200 plus articles already added to the content library since the conference. Wow. And these are really good articles. These are really seeker sensitive articles. So special shout out to Sun Valley for really pushing that in. But it's not limited to their The amount of interest that we got in the content library from the conference has been mind blowing. It was kind of a last minute thing to say, Hey, we keep talking about this, we should probably put an action point. So we threw up a quick QR code at the last minute, literally in the decks and said , Let's get engaged. And I was expecting a handful of people. Boy, were we surprised by the number of people who engaged with that. Think it was over 60, which Wow. Blew my when I asked how many people signed up, I was expecting low teens. And to hear 60, was blown away. So we've already activated on that. So we have already had a meeting where those people got engaged to say, Hey, there's really kind of two groups. Some of you have content that you want to share, so let's help you get that in and answer some questions about that. And then there's some of you who want to help write more articles. We kind of thought those were gonna be two different groups. Turns out there was a huge overlap in that, which is awesome. Very cool. So I'm really excited about that because I think the content library is gonna be key. And we wanna add more features to the content library. But we really wanted to show, we really wanted to get some momentum on what we had before we invested more time and money into building it out. And I think we're starting to see that. So it's good. Outreach toolbox, we talked about that feature. That's the first feature that gives a machine to the factory worker of our church family. And that's coming along really, really well. So we're making really good progress on that, really excited about that. So just wanna give a shout out to the mobile team. They're doing a great job. And I think the cool thing is that internally, there's a lot of excitement for this tool because we can see the impact that it's gonna have. So the mission component of our of our work in this area is just really encouraging. We've also been working, we said at the conference, on the AI agent. So a lot of the foundational platform is done, a lot of it, that's the hard stuff. That's the scary stuff, I should say. Because we had to come out of nothing and do a lot of research to make sure that we understand the best ways to do context management and all these different things. We're at the kind of what I call the tedious part. So building out all of the skills. So a lot of that's the tedious implementation of our practices and our best practices. However, we do hit skills that are even more difficult. So think about this, how do you help someone find a group? if you're a staff person, you wanna find a Ted Deck or a small group. Well, first of you have to know what the group type is, right? Okay, that's a pretty easy one to solve. AI has that pretty much down, but how do you find, what is your church's methodology for finding Ted a group? it's probably a mixture of location, affinity, but what's affinity? And how do you measure affinity within group structures? Are there attributes that we should be looking at and what type of attributes and how do we measure the affinity? So we're actually having to add some features into the group type to help identify groups that should be findable. Some groups should not help me find the best security role for Ted Decker. That doesn't make any sense. But small groups, serving groups. Again, think about that one too, small groups versus serving groups. What is the best way to match people to that? And so we have to build in these anchor points that we can say, Okay, well, this is how you can describe to the AI how to find the group for the person. And so that's been a fascinating thing. And I think it's going to be very useful even outside of AI to help build group finders and such that can almost know how to self configure themselves. Obviously a lot of work being done on that. We're also working on a lot of documentation changes. So the documentation is gonna change radically. Right now it's in a series of manuals, long form, I would say. And that'll be changing into It's gonna be blown up into hundreds of articles, all organized in a very kind of manual kind of way, chapters and sections and that. But that's a huge task. That is huge. There's a significant amount of documentation out there and more that needs to be created. Yeah. And again, one of the things that people don't think about often is when we change our UI we did in '18, that means all of the screenshots have to change in the manual. That's right. That's a significant amount of work, which is why we don't go around doing that an every release. The cause, that downstream impact is huge. So lots of there. And we're also working heavily on v 19. And so there's a lot of stuff that we're already working on there. Starting on trying to get a lot of the small and medium sized features done because the big feature is connections. And we're in the process of design on that. So we have a lot of FIGMOs going, we're back and forth with some churches on getting input. We want to do for 'nineteen though, is not provide all of the connections features. We're gonna provide just basically one or two major new features. And then in 'twenty, we'll come back through and polish all the features. We recognize, and I think a lot of people see it too, that we need a new experience of how you deal with all your connections. The board is probably, it's good for some use cases, but there's probably a different interface from the board when have a lot of these connections and you're trying to just go through them. So the board's not going away. It's not gonna get updated and polished into Obsidian until probably 20 though. So lots of things on '19 that's taking our time. But we're also starting the strategy roadmap for version '20. So what's gonna be in '20? And the connections will will be a major focus point for '20 and also some LMS updates. So what are those LMS updates? We have a few ideas, but we really, really want your LMS ideas. And I'd to, if you can share those grounded in what's already working. I think it's easy sometimes to come up with ideas before we've implemented it. More and more though, we really want to see the community actually use it then give the ideas. And just know that when we push out any feature, every feature we push out is a minimum viable product. there's other things we want to do, but we want to ship. So nothing is ever feature done. And so sometimes we have internal conversations , Well, should probably have this feature. And , Well, yeah, maybe we're not quite sure though. So let's let the community get their hands on it and make sure that it is what you need. So more and more, we will really want to hear the ideas after you're using it versus , I just read it in the manual, why doesn't it do this? It's , okay, well, we might have a lot of those too, but we want to see how the tool's working in the wild before we go do that. So a lot of V20 stuff, but also we're working on a lot of internal processes, redoing those. And I should say development processes. So we've completely kind of rethought through our alpha beta process. And so how do we make that better? We're not rolling out a lot of those changes this moment because we're right in the middle of an alpha process, on V18. So it's not a good time to change everything right in the middle of it because that'd be very confusing. One thing that we have done though that's different is the alpha processes slowed down. We want to make sure that our alpha testers have time to run their tests. And we want to make sure that they're done running their tests before we move on. I think already we're seeing major improvements. The number of issues that we're getting in the alpha testing is significantly higher than we've ever had. Many of them are very small and we that. , that's okay. we want to get the small ones. Haven't seen a lot of significant hard architectural issues, mainly just small issues. But I think that's going to lead to a much higher quality So initial we're really excited, even though it's taking longer and it's been very hard, that the team is doing a great job. the number of issues that are being smashed out daily is awesome. A little hard to triage, get them all in the right buckets and get everybody But they're doing a great job. And so props to our dev team. But after we get to 18, then we want to have a time where we can roll out some ideas of how we might wanna change it even further. And I'm excited about that, but we gotta kind of pause until after eighteen. So we don't wanna confuse. Yeah, don't change things midstream. Yeah, that said, our release process is, we're trying to change that. We want to have two major releases a year, a spring and a fall. I can tell you the hardest thing about doing that though, is getting it started. Cause we're technically already behind because we came out, , when you want to get into a new cadence, the hardest part is getting into that new cadence, right? It's kind of jumping on the treadmill and you're running at one pace and you want to get to an extremely different pace. you'd want to warm it up, right? But when you're doing release cycles, you can't. At a certain point, boom, it has to happen. And that first 19 is a struggle because we were behind on their designs. So what that means is we're probably trying to make 19 a little smaller, because we want to get on this pace. So, , bear with us on that. We also want to move to where major releases are the only releases that have new features. And minor releases are only bug fixes. And we've talked a little bit about that on Rocket Chat a little bit. And I think everybody has the same reaction that we had predicted, and we all know, one's coy about that, is that that sounds great until it's my future. Yep. And we get that. But that's gonna be a change in culture. But we want these dot releases to be very safe, predictable to get your bug fixes and security patches. And sometimes in the past, a security patch could be kind of somewhat blocked by, Hey, there's a feature in between there that has a whole bunch of features that we're uncertain and don't have maybe time to test. So we want to make that testability. And so there should be , hopefully, and our goal is that there'd be no stress in updating to a dot release. And hopefully no stress in going to a major release, because we're going to slow down the alpha testing and have a different type of beta, which we'll talk about at some point. But we're also working on, , even within our team, how do we restructure our dev team and just kind of reimagine that. So lots of good stuff. Outside of dev, we're working on initiative that we call internally, ReSpark. Mhmm. Where we're trying to re spark energy around essential churches. And so that means, , making a new website. I think the rockrms.com website is honestly really bad. And it's because we never really needed that, right? We never had marketing. It was just churches tell churches and that site was a very much a tool to go put your donation in, right? But as we move into an essentials model, we know we need to have a little bit more vision casting done there. And so we're working on that. The Essentials model really is I think a key model because I feel the big C church is being held back because some of them don't have access to Rock, or they don't know they have access to Rock. And so we want to fix that. That said, Rock is not the solution for every church. we want to make sure that we're not pushing Rock into places that maybe aren't ready for it, or it's not ready for them. So I think that missing target is still wide and huge, but it doesn't mean that it's for everybody. , we believe tools PCO actually are great tools for some churches too. We don't wanna push that Rock someplace where it's not needed. But that said, I think we're hindering that right now. So that's been really fun too. Because I think the development team changes we want to make, and these ReSpark, we're able to bring in a lot of younger leaders. Yep. And it's been fun to give them literally in some cases, Hey, go try to figure something out and give us some ideas. And it's given us the opportunity, I think, to share some of the wisdom that we had and how we got here. Not to say that that's always still the right answer, but understanding the why is so much more important than the how sometimes. Mhmm. And so I think this is a great opportunity to build up that next level so that when our generation is no longer providing value through our ranges that this is continuing. So I think it's a good opportunity. It is. And it's been very intentional that we try to provide opportunity and the responsibility that goes along with that. And just a shared approach. It's very exciting to be a part of. Yeah, sometimes I'll bring an idea and , in the past we thought about that. But we always were thinking about this, this and this. And again, it's not always that those why still are germane, but at least they're hearing about the history. Or sometimes we're telling stories about how we got to certain places that there wasn't an opportunity to think through that, right? That's right. Hindsight, it's , why didn't someone tell them about that? Oh, well, in hindsight, of course, it makes But in the moment, in that day, what day would that have made sense to talk about? So that's been kind of fun too, I think. But again, this doesn't, I heard some feedback that, well, essential thing is not a good idea, because you're changing focus off of what's going well. And I would disagree a 100%. we are not changing our minds on who we're trying to serve. I think we're providing more context to our top core value, which has been the same core values since day one, which is All churches deserve access to the best technology. And I was even talking this week, someone was asking more about how this is going to work. And it's always going be one code base. we're not going to have two code bases. That's right. That would be a recipe for inefficiency. It's just a matter of sometimes hiding things from essential structures that they don't need to know about. That's a feature or a function they don't need to know about. So in a sense, I think it's going to be more helpful. Because what I'm hearing, especially from this week, is a lot of the pastors that are using Rock are the same technical ability across the board, whether you're a small church or big church. So Interesting. The technology departments might be vastly different in their abilities and skill sets, but the staff that we're serving are all the And so if we have a front end that's mainly pastor specific, then it doesn't really matter. And all we're doing is hiding the complexity on the administrators. So, yeah. And I think most people in the community are super excited about the essentials, because we're all in this together, and we all want the big C church to win. And I think most people understand what we're doing. I think some of the people who don't understand are the ones who are the naysayers. And again, I've only heard that really from one organization. So it's definitely not a prevailing worry, but anyways, I'm excited about it. That said, it's probably not getting as much focus as I would it to have, just be simply because we have limited resources. So we're we're not putting all the resources onto this. That's right. Simply because we can't. No. And you've just run through a very extensive list of things that are all moving forward with those same resources at the same time. And I think it's just interesting to note, we always have many, many streams under the surface that are running, moving toward things that will eventually bubble up a little brook above the surface. And so Mhmm. We're able to talk about these once we have a little more definition around them. If we go back to the AI topic that you were talking about, the amount of research, r and d, trying one thing and moving to another that goes into coming to the surface with something that is just really incredible. There's just a lot of depth there. So it's exciting to have a podcast episode this where we can share many different things that are all starting to come to the surface level. Yeah. And again, it's , we're not over here with a 100 people doing this. No. The core team, the team that's working on just the things I've listed is, I mean, it's Small. Small, it's high teens at the biggest. Mean, that's And probably mid teens, I think that's another thing that I was talking about this week too, I think sometimes when we go and see what's happening in the marketplace, oh, I just said marketplace, it's really the church space, but I think it is more the marketplace more and more. You start to see investments of a $100,000,000 I mean, that's actually a small number, sometimes it's $200,000,000 invested. And I think a lot of church leaders are , This is great, because this is a level of infusion of capital that we need to make sure that church has the best tech. And I strongly disagree. You do not need that kind of money to have innovation. In fact, I think it hurts. If someone gave us a $100,000,000 in the beginning, I don't know if there would be a Rock. That's a great point. I mean, we've never had anything close to that over the fourteen If you summed all the donations over fourteen years, it's a fraction of that. Yeah. Well, that's hard to disagree with. I think some of the biggest innovations of all time have come out of systems that have constraint. Mhmm. If you infuse too much capital into an organization, you are at risk of diffusing leadership and vision. Right. And I think if you have people who have technical leadership, they don't need that much. And I feel if you give them that much, you can actually do more harm than good. And just realize when someone gives you a $100,000,000 investment, especially from the outside secular world, which was where a lot of this is coming from, not You all just got put, you just bought a slave collar. That's right, you became a puppet. And that money has to come back. Yep. No one gives you money, investment is not given, it's not a donation. It's not a gift. It's expected to return. So I don't think it's always about you need these huge amounts. And I think when you see that it sounds logical, but it's not. It's not the story of the most highly successful church tech. I think you could say the same thing about PCO. No one ever donated $200,000,000 or invested $200,000,000 There's just a lot of grind to bootstrap their way to where they are. And I mean, I think they're doing really well in servicing the church. And I can point back to a majority of the ones who've gotten, almost all the ones who've gotten heavy investment are no longer around, or they're not innovating at all. Have become maybe irrelevant. I mean, when you have less funding, it requires that you stay in touch with the needs of the people you're serving. It's essential. I mean, certainly don't wanna give names, but there are some that have not innovated in their space in a decade. And they still have this access to this money and it's , Oh, where's the money going? So anyways, that's probably another whole podcast too. That probably is. We have our podcast agenda for next year. And I know it seems contrarian because it is, but I also think it is the truth. I mean, we saw even this week, there's another announcement of an IPO for valuing it at a 100,000,000. I don't see a 100,000,000 there, but I do see, again, a shackle. And one of the things that I think spark is not shackled. If anything, we're shackled to the church we're a nonprofit, we're open source. If we don't do it right, the church has all the power in our relationship. And that's the way it should be. And, , I think PCO can do things because they have no shackle. they're shackled by their vision and their heart. And I think that's what where the growth is. Wow, there's just a lot to think about and unpack there. Some really great wisdom on that front. When it comes to the community, we are. We're kind of in a three legged race. We are running things together and have to do that in sync. And I think that's been some of what has led to the ministry innovations and the partnerships that we have right now, which is incredibly powerful. But don't you think that's the model God I would want us to be do believe that's what's intended. A little harder, but it keeps you grounded. Yep. Lot harder, I'm sure. But the grounding's important, otherwise you can get completely off track. And that was the biggest fear from day one. We said we have to protect ourselves from future selves. And that was so true in hindsight because we don't have temptations. Right. Because we removed them from the beginning. We can just stay focused on what needs to happen. Well, we've had a lot of interesting developments on the community side. I just wanna mention a few of those here today too. One that you may have seen come out or may not is that we surveyed the background check providers that have an integration with Rock. Similarly to how we did with the giving vendors, just asking, tell us more about yourself, your organization, your services. We did that because there are so many integrations we've heard from churches that it can be confusing to step through and try to understand what might be the best fit. And, , we strongly believe that not one solution will be the best fit for every church out there. So we've created this open platform, but one of the complications is then trying to figure out the best option on several vendor fronts. So to that end, we did survey the background check providers that have those integrations, and we're really pleased to have such a high response rate. Nearly all of them responded with the information that we had asked, and so we created a grid of comparison for the community. So if you go to rockrms.com/sponsors, at the top, you'll see a link to our provider survey that we do annually. And under the background checks there, you'll have the ability to see either per provider what their answers were or altogether in a big grid. We hope this is really helpful to you. And in any area where we begin to see, , quite a long list of optional vendors to choose from, we'll look to potentially provide additional information this way to help you make a really good decision. And, of course, it's tied to the community ratings and responses. So you can see both what the vendor says about themselves as well as feedback from those who've used their services. So we hope that's a really helpful tool for the community. That's helpful for me. People ask me all the time, who should I use? I'm , I literally don't have a recommendation because you said, there's a new one all the time. That's it. And I hear things from churches, but I don't have enough feedback to actually give a recommendation. So that's awesome. So it's a great spot to go. And if you're talking to a church that's moving to Rock, one of the original things they're trying to figure out are some things , who am I going to use to provide these integrated services. Right? One might be giving, another could be background checks, and there are many others. But now you have a place that you can point them to as well because it's likely you have familiarity with one, maybe two providers, but really not enough information to answer all of that yourself as well. So, hopefully, that's a great tool for you. Additionally, you may remember that our commitment, update time is coming up in January 2026. So we are raising the recommended donation rate from $4.10 per average weekend attendee up to $4.45 per average weekend attendee. We're excited about this because we are going to continue fueling the ministry that we're doing with our small team here. A lot of costs have gone up over time, and this helps us stay positioned to deliver exactly what's needed when needed. We're also excited because we've been able to to crunch some costs and do what we need to do to make that a smaller rate increase than we had originally predicted. So please help us do our planning for next year and go ahead and make your commitment update. You can do that from your community profile page by going to your organization's list. If you can just set that for us, that will really help us. You'll probably see some communications about that, especially if you haven't updated yet. Just to note, there is a start date. So when you update it, if you need to delay that start for a month or two to get your budget in alignment, that's totally fine. Our goal is that we don't leave anyone behind, and your responsiveness or communication about, exceptions will be really helpful to us in that planning. So help us out, get that set before we hit into the holidays with your start date, and that will be really valuable to all of us. All right. We have barely wrapped up Rx twenty five, and we are already hard at work on next year's conference as well. So a few updates on that front. We're very close to having a contracted space, and we can have more information about dates and locations at that time. It just goes it's amazing how much work goes into trying to coordinate all of that and make sure that there are hotel rooms nearby at the places we need, that the space has the right availability in the right areas, and there's just a lot that goes into that. So that's coming very soon. We are also working on the strategy of the event already, have reached out to potential keynote speakers, have reached out to some potential conference speakers who've spoken in the past. If that's something you're interested in, we are taking speaker pitch videos. We're really trying to increase the quality and the helpfulness of the sessions that we put out next year, making them really tailored to audiences. We're hoping to increase our attendance again significantly this coming year. And as we announce the dates, we'll also let a great time to to travel around those dates to make sure that you can maximize your time there. So if you're interested in speaking, please do reach out to us and let us know. We'll help get you into that process. In addition to session topics that you may have interest in speaking on, we're going to have some topics that we know the community needs to hear as well. So if you are interested in speaking but don't know what about, we also want to hear from you because we need those speakers as well. Alright. Well, we are very excited about 2026. In addition to to the conference, of course, we have our classes. You'll see our classes starting to hit the calendars soon. The first class of next year is going to be SQL. So if that's, something that you've been prepping for and you're ready to go, join us January. And additionally, our masterclass, we actually have one coming up here in a probably about a week after we post this. It's a virtual class. Don't forget, masterclass may seem something we always talk about, but we know you have new people transitioning on and off your teams. Masterclass is a really important step in their training. So don't forget about that. We try to make that accessible through both on-site classes and virtual. And finally, if you're able to help host a roadshow next year to help spread the word about Rock, let us know. We'll be starting to plan for next year's events on that front as well. Okay. We have covered a significant amount of information here in our podcast today, so we hope everyone can go away with a little something. Don't forget to print out that digital ministry anchors tool from our blog post. And we would appreciate it if you will follow our podcast so you can get the next episodes as we deliver them. Thanks so much for listening. We appreciate our community, and we're very happy to be able to communicate with you through this podcast series. Join us next time where we will hit episode two zero three. We're well into the two hundreds now. This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock sponsor, eSpace, a comprehensive facility management software designed to help churches and organizations streamline event scheduling, work order management, and asset tracking. With automation options and a plug in in the Rock Shop, eSpace ensures your facilities run smoothly and efficiently. Connect with eSpace today at rockrms.com/sponsors.