Podcast Episode 14: Episode 204: v18 Just Released & 2026 Goal Setting

Description

Don't miss this conversational episode of Rock Cast as Jon, Emily, and Nick share three big updates: the v18 release, a conversation with a successful entrepreneur and goal setting ideas for your digital ministry in 2026.As many churches wrestle with "technical debt", they encourage listeners to use the prioritization framework to build an action plan for resolving this in the new year. The best way to set your digital ministry up for success is to remind yourself daily of true mission. Read the show notes to find a free printable resource you can leave on your desk to help guide you in your day-to-day decisions.

Transcribed Content

This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock sponsor, Wi Fi Presence, helping churches use technology to connect better with people, drive guest stickiness, and inform pastoral care. Connect with Wi Fi presence today at rockrms.com/sponsors. Welcome to this episode of Rockcast. I'm Emily Forman. Joining me are Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo, and we are excited to talk to you about all things Rock. In fact, today, we're not only gonna give you the version update you've been waiting for, we're gonna fill you in on a recent trip we had to visit a successful business entrepreneur, some of the things that we learned there, and we're gonna talk about setting twenty twenty six goals. Because if you haven't noticed, the calendar says it's definitely time to get going. Believe that. Yep. Cannot. I know. Where did this year go? Gets faster every year. It does. Twenty days till Christmas. Ah, Nick. Sorry. I am behind on my Christmas prop this year, so that did not help me feel better about it. I won't tell you how many shopping days there are then until Christmas. Shipping is a bigger problem this year than previously. So shopping days till Christmas might actually be a little bit tighter than what they're predicting. Alright. Let's just skip all of that because that's too too much. And Nick, tell us where are we with the latest updates on Rock? Well, hot off the press, 18.1 is released as beta, and we've been having our testers go through that. And as we talked about, I think last time, when you go to upgrade, because this will probably be turned around pretty quickly, eighteen point one, and it's going to go live in a week. So you, if you're coming from version 17 something, you'll be able to go straight to 18.1. You won't see an 18. 18.1 is everything. It's all the 18. And that's going to be kind of our probable new pattern going forward. As you get to 19, you'll probably go straight to 19.1. Yeah, we had a great amount of good testing on 18. Yeah. Although this is a very difficult upgrade because of all the styling changes. Every time you change a styling framework, you get a little And they're very minor, but . But what a great job the team has done in helping us work through those things before we get into production. Yep. Yep. So it should be a smooth update when the time comes. Although we are coming close to Christmas, so have plans about whether or not you're updating before Christmas, after Christmas with the right testing in place. Could be a pretty cool Christmas gift to your staff would be because it's going to look different. It does. We've been using it internally, of course, for a while. Every time I look at it, it's , Oh, this is so much better. Yes, every time I go backwards into a different Rock instance, I'm , Oh, wait, it used to look that? It's a big difference. It's going back to the settings page on an old old server. It's , oh, this is horrible. How did we live this? We're living animals. Living animals. So anybody who hasn't gotten to the new settings page Keep going. You're living an animal. Oh, yeah. And you don't even know it. You're living an animal. Oh gosh. I hope that we don't accidentally title this podcast Living An Animal. That'd a good one. Alright. So we actually just got back from a recent trip to visit a businessman that had some great insights for us and his team, and it was a time of encouragement and just a great time of learning. Yeah, and he took that from a family company to a multi billion dollar company. And just incredible business leader. And it was a privilege and honor to be able to talk with him and tell him what we're doing. But man, we learned a lot from him too. We sure did. And to be given that time was just a gift. There's more than you could pick up to learn in an afternoon. But the things that we could walk away with, one, it was very encouraging to hear how excited they are about our Rock Essentials. Oh, yeah. Man, he mean, this is a guy, he created a franchise. Right. And so the essentials is right up his alley. But just a validation that that was the right plan. And I think even the order of doing it, I think he was , This is the right way. Go get the large complex churches and then make it simple. I mean, was really excited about Essentials model. He really was. And , we talk a lot about how when you do something for the first time, it's really hard. Things seem murky, you're trying to figure out, do we go this way or that way? Should it look this or that? And just to hear him say, oh yeah, this is the right way, is very confidence building in the middle of the discovery process. Yeah, and just, I mean, the Essentials model is not going to mean a change in innovation. Great mean, that's our bread and butter. That's what we love. You couldn't stop us. It's just hiding a few settings, one code base. Yes. Just hiding a few complaint. It won't be version 19 won't be essentials a 100%. Correct. But it'll be the start of essentials. And so we're excited about that. Was great to hear that validation, but also some business strategies he shared. He talked a lot about habits, personal strategies about habits. In his mind, that's the biggest thing that we all need to work on is our internal habits. I couldn't agree more. I just know in my life, there's some habits I need to create. It was cool just to kind of hear that and hear his methodology for that. Yes. And just to hear his team reiterate and say, yes, the state of our lives today is a culmination of the habits we've created so far. And where we end up in life will be the aggregate of the habits that we continue to bring in or remove. It's convicting and exciting because that means that we really have agency over what we're doing and where we're going. Mhmm. And just in terms of business strategy too, just working on things at scale. only focus on things at scale. I think that's really important now in our, where we are with Rock. In the beginning, you're working on getting your first church and then your second church and your third church. Now it's , okay, we're at that point where we have to work on scale. And we don't do that because we want to increase a number. We want to do essentials and everything we're doing is because there's untapped potential for what we already have. That's right. Even if we didn't do anything, if we didn't add, hiding the settings, just providing Rock to more churches, not every church, because every church is a Rock church and that's okay. But there's so many more churches that could get value from what we already have. And the kingdom is in a sense being held back because of, our marketing of that. Maybe not marketing is not the right term, but our voice in that. Right. I think it ties back to our core value of accessibility as well, which has never It's been the same since day one. We've come to understand it in different lights as we've moved through this journey. And one of those things that I've been seeing a lot this year personally as I talk with churches is churches that are kind of stuck. the software is either too small for them or too big for them. They're also working on trying to scale their ministries. They may not have the right people in the right places. And every time a church this has to go through the discovery process of trying to find software, and then the implementation process and potential data migration, it's distracting to their ministry, it's time consuming, it's costly. If we can help churches get those tools in their hands earlier in their developmental stages, they'll have fewer of those kinds of migrations they can do because the software is flexible enough to grow with them. Yeah, absolutely. And look forward to some stuff coming where you should see a new RockRMS website in the next month or so. And again, we never needed a RockRMS website really. We didn't market it. Was you the community that marketed and that's still gonna be the case, but we now need to also make it approachable for churches to find on their own. And honestly, rockrms.com is not a good website. And we recognize that. And so we're actively in development on that, design's done, development's starting. So excited about that. We definitely are. I think it's gonna present Rock in the way that you and our community know it is. It's gonna look more what it actually is. So that'll be a great front door. Right. And after that is done, then we'll start unpolishing up the community site too, which is for our family. That's right. Yes, our family room. So, but yeah, it's always good to get out, talk with people who are far ahead of us and they can share ideas, encouragement, but also sometimes just even get out of the office for a bit, kind of get you to reset your head. I agree with that. It's so easy to get in the trenches and just doing what you've been doing and trying to get ahead that you can It can be challenging to also look up and say, how has the landscape changed? Where do I need to be focused right now? Yeah, I know, we're supposed to be bigger people, right? But I just wanted to complain a little bit. There's so many people complain about how air quote, hot it is in Phoenix. Oh my goodness. We were in a place that was very cold. And what are you guys doing? Don't know. My fingers are still thawing out. Face was , for the whole trip. I do not enjoy the sensation of a frozen nose. Yeah. And literally I had to go into my closet, find my jacket and literally dust my jacket off for this trip. So, , if you wanna make fun of how hot it is in Phoenix, that's fine. But , have a plank in your own eye. That's so good. That's an excellent point. At one point, this is a funny story. We were walking in downtown of city and we run across these kids they're obviously trying to sell something. I was trying to ignore them. Unfortunately, the light changed and so we had to stand there. Turns out they're just street evangelists. So we ended up talking to them for quite a while in the outside chilly weather. So cold. It was a great conversation. It was awesome to have it. But at one point I'm , dude, I'm from the desert. we're gonna have to Wrap this up. Right. , Jesus lived in the desert. I'm being Jesus. So Yeah. And I'm also freezing. Yes. So that was a funny Very funny. Alright. So we can take some of these things and put them into what we're doing as we look forward in 2026. But it is time to set those those goals for next year. Best to have that done before the calendar flips over. Yeah. So we could talk maybe about some ideas for that. Yeah. Let's do. There are definitely a lot of great ideas when it comes to 2026 goals for Rock, for your digital ministry, and for helping your ministry succeed with the tools that you have in front of you. So let's let's focus on that. Yeah. And I think the big thing, obviously, from this year, especially at the conference, was digital ministry. Mhmm. And think we need to keep that in front of us, especially for 2026. I think the one of the most important things you could do is print the six anchors for digital ministry. Because I think it is a great I keep using it for my own mental model. And sometimes I have to dust it off. Oh yeah, I forgot about that one. And so I think just putting that somewhere on your desk and looking at it, I'm not saying it's the perfect framework, but a good framework is better than no framework. So start with that. Now, one of the things I think we could look at, you need to think big, but sometimes you just need to think small too. One quick idea I would say for 2026, especially early on, The content library. Have a lot of new articles, more are coming. There's some really great newer articles in there though. Sun Valley here in Phoenix has donated several 100. Wow. And they're good. What a gift. Yeah, I would say, don't I know y'all are ambitious. Just find five articles and get them out. So whatever your channels are, you already have social media, maybe you have an email that goes out, just pepper one of those articles in every one of them for a few weeks, see how it goes. Sometimes we all wanna start big. Yes. Just get some of those out there and let's make some small wins. Yeah, I love how actionable that is. And I think theory is great, but just get something done, measure it, and then figure out, , how to go all in on it. It's a great plan of attack. Another easy thing you could do if you're not doing it already is to implement the prayer feature in Rock. It's so powerful. It's an incredible means of engagement, both for people requesting prayer and for people praying for others. And it's so easy to use in Rock. And prayer is the best content right now for digital ministry because it's evergreen. There's always more prayer requests and there's always people who want to pray. That's right. And I think again, you're gonna go , Oh, this is gonna be a big project. doesn't have to be, just start small. Get people to put some prayer requests in. There's AI tools you could bring to on there polish it and to do other things. I think a lot of churches too, who maybe aren't using the prayer features, get maybe hung up a little bit too much on what are people gonna put in there? Am I gonna have problems? We work with a lot of churches who use the prayer system. And I have not heard one example of someone having a problem. Don't let fear hold you back. That's right. And respond to it when it happens. If, when, if it happens, respond, but don't throw all that value out over one little thing. One potential little thing that really we're not seeing evidence of happening. Yeah. So get it, whatever medium you have, web, mobile, whatever, just get prayer going. That's right. The feature set is very easy to use. Speaking of mobile, I think if you're not on Rock Mobile, 2026 might be the year. And again, this does not have to be a hard thing. Nope. There are several partners who have starter apps that can get you from zero to 60 very, very Just simple templated apps and there are choices out there. So pick one, try it out. The cost to entry is pretty low now, and it can be a very powerful tool. Yeah. One tip on that. If you do something a mobile app, make sure that you have some form of dashboard to measure what your success looks . There's a free plugin that can look at site analytics in mobile apps or sites. Again, you don't have to go crazy. Just measure, be data informed, which is one of the pillars. Speaking of, and conveniently, we have created a desktop little version of the six pillars. So, don't even have to create it yourself. Use it. Even if that for some reason you don't want that, somehow get it on your desk. There you go. You have to , even if you have to scribble on a post it, because it's too big or whatever. And speaking of engagement, what about next steps, John? Well, steps is something every church wants. So I would find one next step and push it. Push it forward. how do we measure it? Make sure it's measured and accurately measured. And then how do people get engaged in it? Don't try to do all the steps. It's funny when we were talking to this business leader, we were talking about next steps. And I said something , The problem with next steps is no one's ever happy with theirs next steps and they're never done. And what I tell people is, Don't matter, just go, go, go. you can always adjust them. And he was , Absolutely. I can't tell you, he has a lot of franchisees, I mentioned, all of them are not happy with their marketing plans. All of them are not happy with He's their , I just tell him, Go, do it. You can always, don't wait, just do it. And so that was great, great validation. Pick one, move it forward, get it to go another inch or two forward. And often that's when you learn the most about what you wanna do that can help you get some certain things move forward or finalized or dialed in. So when you're setting up that one step, make sure you're also setting up the reporting dashboards that you need to measure the data associated with it. That's gonna give you the information you need to potentially move on to another next step or to show your executive team so they can get excited about it and authorize, , additional resourcing or whatever it is for you that might help you move a lot of things forward in 2026. Start with one, measure it, and then use that to make further decisions. Yeah. And all these things that we're talking about, don't wait for someone to come ask for it. , if you want to be the person who leads digital ministry or charts that course, you just have to start. Mhmm. And it doesn't mean you go invest tons and tons of time. Just listen to what the senior leaders want, get behind it and push. And I can't imagine they're gonna be , stop that. Stop pushing what I care about forward. Right. But again, don't do a big, huge grandiose thing. Just do one little thing. Hey, I thought the other day I had this idea, made this mean, it's probably throwaway, but look at this. You'll find that you'll eventually get sucked in to more and more. It's what I call leadership gravity. You have to create mass. Gravity is created from mass. You have to create mass. You start with a little bit of mass that creates a little gravity that pull Then you start Bit part pulls in those opportunities. And then that creates even more mass, which creates more opportunities. Soon, you have so much mass that you have too much stuff coming your way. That's it. And it's the good stuff. You might say, We already have too much stuff. It's probably not very, I mean, for all being honest, it's probably not the stuff you want to work on. I'm sure you're busy. Yep. But the leadership gravity will bring you the stuff that moves mountains. That's right. So there are two potential strategies. Some people look at how do I fight for a seat at the table? I would say scrap that. Look for how do I deliver the maximum impact to the direction that we're already going. Yeah, if you serve those who are at the table, you'll find you'll soon be at the table. That's exactly right. But don't do it for the table's sake. that's not the point. The point is we do it so that we can impact lives. That's it. And so don't do the table for the table sake. In fact, podcast I wanna do next year is about Thrones. Wanted the concept of Thrones. So we'll hint coming in 2026. There you go. That'll go well with an article I think you're publishing soon. Maybe. But it's more of a leadership concept. Don't what throne are you trying, And who should be on the throne? That's a great point. I think we all know who should be on the throne. That's true. But we are in a a culture that confuses that right now. Yep. Alright. Well, let's to our topic today. So setting our 2026 goals, what about technical debt? Yes, that's a really good one. We all have technical debt. Whether it or not, you have technical debt. Well, technical debt is the extra costs that you have to pay in the future because of the shortcuts and constraints of what you did today. Ouch. Yeah. So technical debt is the extra cost you'll have to pay in the future because of the shortcuts and constraints of of what you did today. Now, you might be thinking, we should never have technical debt. And I would say, no, you should have technical debt. It's not always bad. Sometimes it's just a strategic choice you have to make. Hey, I need this by Easter, well, I'm gonna have to do this. Yeah. I think the purest and often the more technical you are, the more purest you wanna be. They think you should never have technical debt. And I would say if you do that, you're just never gonna get anywhere. And sometimes if you're technical, you care more about how it feels versus what it does. And you have to be balanced there. However, it's equally a problem when you never pay it back. And so you have to pay it back by refactoring, cleaning things up. So you have to pay back the technical debt. That said, should never be at zero. The goal is not to be at zero. The goal is to pay back what is. Now, technical debt is, you made a conscious decision for it, right? You didn't just willy nilly. You should also document your technical debt. Let's highlight that key point. Right? You won't remember it. Right. So when you make the decision to make a little bit of a mess, and you strategically made that decision, document it and make up some form of a plan. Now it doesn't have to be for every item, don't make a plan, because honestly that plan will never be accurate. But you probably should make a plan , this is how we're going to achieve technical debt or clean up a technical debt. Now we talked about the conference a little bit, our intentional prioritization framework. And there's lots of different measures. we showed sliders of our feature types, right? Well, there's lots of different types of sliders that we create. It might be that you have seasons of sliders and one of the sliders is technical debt. How much technical debt are you gonna be paying back? And maybe in some seasons, leading up to Easter, there's zero technical debt being paid back. Maybe a little bit in the summer, after camp's over, you can push up that technical debt a little higher. So you just need to have a plan. That's what the plan is. It's Bad not for every technical debt is accidental. Oops, we didn't even know it. We made technical debt. Ignored and discovered only when something breaks. Oh, that's tough. And that's life a little bit, but that's a smell that says something's not right. We call that code smell sometimes. That's technical debt smell. you have a problem when you're , Oh, that broke and we even know that. So those are some of , what is technical debt? Now technical debt within Rock could be some lava you wrote. You wrote some lava, you had to get it out, or maybe you needed a feature that was coming and you had to go do it a different way. You had to kind of make a patch, of temporary, but okay, document that. You got to come back to it. It's somewhat technically it's kind of a loan. And you got to pay interest on that loan until you pay it off. And so now you got to come back to that. It could be something maybe you did with check-in, a configuration in check-in. Sometimes again, here in check-in, it might be an accidental death that you didn't really understand. The configuration when you started, I hear that a lot with churches. they're just trying to rush to get Rock in. They didn't fully understand check-in and often they made it too complex. I've never heard someone say, I made it too simple. That's a great point. It was too complex. And so that's a technical debt you need to go back and pay off. And I think you might know when you did it wrong. Most people I've talked to kind of, Yeah, I need to go back and fix that. Workflows are another thing that often become technical debt, that you made something, again, maybe not understanding the bone and muscles concept, which if that doesn't make sense to you, there's videos, look for those, on how workflow should be muscles that move things, but they're not bones and structure that that make an app. And if again, most people in the beginning make that mistake. They get very complex workflows, and then that becomes a problem. Sometimes creating data views oftentimes You becomes didn't create the strategic data views. You just did willy nilly. It's very tempting. And I think everybody's done that to a certain extent, but some people have done it to a vast, huge extent. And it could be that you just need that data view because the pastor needs it today. Okay, create the data view, get your job done, put that in the technical debt. I got to come fix this and get this more strategically so that can be built off of in the future. Again, if that concept just seems kind of strange to you, masterclass. That's right. We go through that in masterclass really, really well. In fact, I can't tell you how many people have gone to masterclass and said, I didn't do what master class said, now I have a mess. I've heard that too. So many times. Another one is, and this was a big one for some churches, is customization of core blocks. That is a 100% technical debt. You will always pay for that. Yes. And sometimes again, I need it because of this thing. First of all, validate that. , do you , that, are we trying to solve? I think sometimes, and again, it's gonna be another podcast coming up in 2026. Are we solving a bad process? Poor training? Sometimes that's the case. So we're trying to tweak things to wrangle it around a bad process or bad training. But sometimes there are other reasons, but that's technical debt that has to be paid off. And that one should be the first thing you pay off. That's a critical one. It's kind of Dave Ramsey, know, he always tells you what credit card should you start with? Mhmm. In his mind, it's the smallest balance. And this one, I would say, if you change core blocks, that's the first one you pay off, because that one will bite you and they'll bite you hard. That's the riskiest. So there's a lot of different things some SQL maybe you wrote, or where you use SQL, could be a technical debt. So there's a lot of those kinds of things when we talk about technical debt. And that's something in 2026, you should have a plan for technical debt. Right, and make a list, would say. start with some of the things. They might be very large. They might be very small. It could be that you got a little bit chaotic with your security roles. How many Here's a question. How many blocks have or pages or all the things that you can secure have somebody's name or profile attached to them? Yep. That shouldn't be the case. You should have security roles. But you can also over engineer your security roles. Yeah. So I think that's an easy one to miss configure early on as well when you think you need all this granular security setup. Well, I'm guilty of that too in the moment. I just gotta get this person needs access. There's looking right at me. Don't have time to go create a role. I'm not even sure what the right role would be. So I'll give them access. Well, that's gotta be , I would put that on one to finish FinFix before the end of the week. Yeah, that's right. I've done that in the past too. And I learned the first couple times around, if that is absolutely critical for whatever reason, make myself a task with a date to remove that security because otherwise it will It's so hard to find. And you might think that that exact case is a messy, that just cleans mess, but it's not. It's actually a security problem. When that person leaves staff, guess what? They still have access and you don't know it. Hopefully there's some other security around, they can't get access to the portal or the site, but don't bank on that. And so, yeah. I think though, as you think about these collection of lists, find that sometimes we go a little overboard too, and we create lists that we have no intention of ever going back to. Oh, that's a great point. So that's why I to My whole mantra right now is touch it as few times as possible. Hopefully it's once. Just handle it. So again, on that one, I would fix it before the end of the week, so you never have to think about it again. If you make a list with all these thousands of things, you're never going get any of them done. It's overwhelming. Cognitive overload. Just clean it before the end of the day or the end of the week, if you can, if they're small, easy things that. And you have to treat technical debt as something that you're probably always going to be dealing with. So deal with a function of it quickly, handle it, but don't say I never have to do that again. Right. And as you mentioned, John, things reporting workflows, of course, any blocks that you've cloned, core blocks, that as things move to Obsidian, you're going to get stuck. So make sure those are top of the list. And then just prioritize. Yeah, I think hopefully with Helix, the age of clone blocks, there's really no reason for it anymore. That's right. You can make something very similar in Helix to feel that itch. But again, even though Helix is there, don't ever go down that path if you can convince yourself not to. If you can do something simply, don't do it more complex. First step. But also there is, if you absolutely need something, there is a core request process that's available, and that's the way to go. Yeah, and people would do that, and we get that out as soon as we can. That's right. So I don't think we're in short supply for setting goals for 2026. There's plenty to choose from. And don't forget that digital ministry should be a huge component of that. It's probably something that may be primarily in your court and may not be something that the rest of the organization is thinking of or may not have quite as much understanding of what's involved. So that's something that you can really speak into and help but deliver something small in order to measure and move on to something larger. Certainly. Well, thank you so much for tuning into this ROTCast. And we hope that you have a great wrap up as your year progresses and you have an excellent start to 2026. Make sure you subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts, and we will be back in touch here in a couple of weeks just before the end of the year. Are you looking to connect with fellow RockRMS enthusiasts in your area? Connect with a regional hub in your today. These hubs unite individuals in the same geographic area to collaborate, share insights, and build local connections. With over 25 active regional hubs, there's a community waiting for you. If you don't see a group in your region, start your own and foster local collaboration. See what's happening in your community at community.rockrms.com under community hubs.