Rock U - Connections - Connections Overview

Transcribed Video Content

Connections help make sure that nobody falls through the cracks. Anyone who's willing to serve at your organization deserves attention, and Rock's Connections features help you connect that person with a serving opportunity at your organization quickly and easily. So let's take a look at Connections and how they work. we said, connections help to make sure that nobody falls through the cracks. If someone is reaching out to your organization and they might be interested in serving or becoming involved in some way, we don't want to lose that person. And we got to make sure that there's that there's follow-up and that they get plugged in to where they need to be. Because if anybody is raising their hand or raising their voice and saying, I would to do something, that's important and that's meaningful, and we want to be able to jump on that and track it. And that's what Connections allows us to do. So the person can go to your external website, and under the connect options, they can choose to serve. And when they serve, they can do a search. They can look for which campus, what if they have an area that they prefer, what days of the week, if they wanna be more upfront or more behind the scenes. And they can search using those filters through all of the options that your organization has. And then they can click on any individual opportunity and say, oh, okay, the children's. I'm interested in that. And then down near the bottom of the page in the middle there, can see the connect button. And that's all the person has to do is click connect to express that their interest, in this case, in serving the children's ministry. So what the person is actually doing is making a connection request. And that connection request is part of a structure related to connections. And so it starts with the connection type. What type of connection are we trying to do here? And in this case, it's involvement. The person wants to get involved. That's the type of connection that we're looking for. Okay. So how do they wanna get involved? Well, for that, we have different connection opportunities. Maybe they wanna be involved as an usher. Maybe they wanna be involved as a greeter. Maybe they wanna be involved in the children's ministry. There's these different opportunities for involvement. Those are the connection opportunities. Then you have the connection requests themselves, which are the individual who has said, I am interested in serving as an usher and I wish to be involved in that way. And so when they hit that connect button that we just showed you on the external website, it creates a request to be connected into an opportunity. And then last but not least, you have the opportunity, connect doors. And this would be somebody at your organization who makes that link, , who plugs the person in, hey, this person expressed an interest in serving as an usher. I'm going to assign them to ushers for our noon service, and we can get them connected into that serving role. So for a little bit of detail, how does that happen? Step one, Sarah initiates a connection request. She does that from the external website. At step two, Alicia gets tagged as the connector. The status for the connection request is changed to in process, and we get an activity added. So, we can add an activity to that connection request to say that Alicia called Sarah, but there wasn't an answer. That happened on October 12, and we can track that. Step three, Sarah comes back and says, what? I did wanna sign up for this, but I forgot that I've got this thing with my kid, and I can't start for another four weeks. Alicia can track that in the system and say, Sarah still wants to serve, but not for the next four weeks. So we're gonna need to follow-up with her in four weeks, and we have that recorded in the system for tracking. Then the final step in the process is that Sarah gets connected. So four weeks after the initial call, Alicia will come back into the system. She's going to ask Sarah specifically about where she wants to serve and things that. , they'll have a conversation. And then Alicia will get connected, in this case, to the ushers opportunity. And she'll be serving, at the service at noon. You'll also notice there's our little, workflow icon there, send training. So Sarah probably might need some training materials so that she knows what to do and what the rules are. And with each connection request at various points in the process, you can have a workflow launch automatically. And so the connections process can see, oh, Sarah got connected to Usher's. Automatically, we can do something send Sarah an email with training materials. And it all happens from the staff side from the connections page, which we're gonna look at right now. After a request to serve has been submitted through your external website we showed a couple minutes ago, your staff and volunteers will come into Rock to manage that request. And you'll do that from under people and under engagement and connections. When you come to the connections page, you're gonna see each connection type, involvement. And then under each connection type, you're gonna see the connection opportunities. And so we have three connection opportunities for the involvement connection type. We have children's, greeter, and usher opportunities. You can see at a glance the number of requests that are in different statuses, and you can see what those statuses mean by hovering over these items over here. So we can tell that we have two requests in the children's opportunity that are unassigned and maybe in a critical status. They haven't been looked at in a while, we're not sure. We can take a look at them right now by clicking on children's. This brings us to the connections board. Here we can see a a listing of connection requests that have been submitted or created by staff. Before we start looking at the individual requests, let's take a look at the board itself. First of all, we're looking at the children's opportunity right now. So these are two requests from Lorraine and Bob Griggs that have come in requesting to serve on the children's team. We can change to a different serving opportunity by clicking the opportunities button, and we can look instead at maybe greeters or ushers. But for now, we'll stick with the children's connection opportunity. Now, from here, if we need to, we can manually add a new connection request. So, if the person is calling on the phone, or maybe talking to you in person, or doesn't do it online for whatever reason, you can enter in a request on their behalf from here. Right now, we're looking at requests across all connectors. And so the connectors would be your staff and volunteers and people that. So we're looking at requests that may be assigned to anybody or maybe request that are currently not assigned to a person, you can change that to look only at the ones that are assigned to you. In this case, I don't have any assigned to me, and so when I do that, I don't see any. So we're gonna change that back. We're gonna look at all connectors. And then aside from that, you also have some options for sorting and filtering. You can change, which campus that you're looking at, and you can also flip from this sort of card view into a list view of the requests, which gives you similar information but a little bit different. You get some of the grid options here when you're looking at the list view. But aside from that, it's the same information. We're gonna stick with the board view for right now though. So looking at our board for the children's opportunity, we can see that we have these two requests that have had no contact. And I'm gonna work on these. In fact, I'm gonna work on both of these. I'm just gonna click and drag them into in progress to show that they're being worked on. It's as easy as that. And then I'm gonna pull up Lorraine's request. And then here we can take a look at the request itself. Here we have Lorraine's contact information. Over here, we've got a little note that she put in when she made the request. We can also launch a workflow immediately by clicking this button. After all, if we're gonna have somebody serving, maybe we wanna have a photo request sent to them. But maybe we want that done manually because some people have photos and some don't. So a photo request might not be something that you automatically send out to every person. But if you need to do it, you can do it right from here. We also have the connector, which right now it's unassigned. But since I'm working on it, I'm gonna go ahead and assign it to me. I'm Alicia Marble for now. And as soon as I assign it to me, you'll notice that an activity gets added down here. This list of activities will build up over time as this request gets worked on. And it shows sort of the history of the request so that you or anybody else on your team can pick this up or look at it if needed and know what's been going on. So we know that Lorraine just got assigned a connector, which is Alicia Marble. And let's say, okay, I'm working on this request. Lorraine wants to serve on the serving team. I'm gonna give her a call. And maybe I do, and I leave her a voice mail. Hey, we heard you were interested in serving. We'd to touch base. So if I make that phone call, I'm gonna add an activity, and I'm gonna say, oh, look, it's the first one that came up, that I called and left a message. But you can also have other types of activities, , I called and there was no answer, or you'll see some of these other statuses, play out. You can add to that list if you want. Okay. So if you were to make that phone call, you would come here and add an activity. And it just happens to be the first one that popped up called and left a message, which is true. But you could also say, oh, I called and there was no answer, things that. And you can customize the list of activities, which we'll show you how to do in another video. You can also add a note if you need to. No answer. No voice mail. And I'm gonna save that. And so now that's added into the list of activities, and so we can see that this happened. the example that we looked at a few minutes ago, maybe we do call Lorraine and get ahold of her, and she says that she's going on vacation for a couple weeks and she can't serve right away. So we can record that in here by clicking edit. And we're gonna change the state of the connection request from active to future follow-up because we wanna follow-up with Lorraine in two weeks. And so I'm gonna pick two weeks out and save. And so we can see already up at the top here that she's tagged for future follow-up on May 28. And this this request will basically sit there until then because we know that she's not gonna be doing anything with this for a couple weeks. So I'm gonna close out of this. Last but not least, we can pull up Bob's request. And let's say that we're gonna get Bob connected to, our children's team. And so to do that, I'm gonna click edit, and I'm gonna place him into the children's group at main campus. Now this is configured elsewhere, and we'll show you how to do that in other Rock U videos. But we're gonna put him into the children's group, and I'm gonna hit save. And we know that that's his placement group now. We've got that configured. And then as soon as I hit connect, he's connected. We get that activity showing that he got connected. He's now in a connected status. And I'm gonna come out here, and you'll notice that his card also disappears because we really don't wanna see future follow-up or connected people. We might only wanna see active or inactive. And we can see that there aren't any, which probably means that we're all caught up on our connection requests. Connections are critical for any organization. We hope this video helped show you how Rock's tools can help you ensure that nobody falls through the cracks when they speak up asking to serve. For more information, be sure to check out the other Rock U videos on connections, as well as our engagement manual posted to the Rock Community website. Thank you.