Rock U - Connections - Connections Types

Transcribed Video Content

Connection types in Rock are high level categories that we use to group things that we do connections with. , for example, volunteering or small groups or even guest next steps. There's unlimited things that you can use connections for. That's up for you to decide, but let's get into how you would configure a type right now. To see your connection types, you'll start by going to people, then you'll scroll and click on connections. And I've got quite a few connection types here. Out of the box, you'll get one called involvement. And let's look at how to edit or add a connection type. Just go to the settings cog over here, and you can easily add one by clicking this plus button. We're gonna review current type just so you can see what it looks . Click edit, and there's lots of different settings to configure here. Take note that we're looking in trailblazer mode right now, but start off by giving your type a really good name and make sure to provide a description so other people that see this type know what they're looking at and what opportunities might be below this type. It's also really helpful to pick a nice icon that makes sense for this type as you'll see it in different places throughout Rock's connections. Now some quick settings overview. First of all, you can pick your enabled views here. You may want to hide some views or have some listed. There's the connections list view, board, grid, then the operational snapshot, which is an overview of the connections data that you have. It's a nice way to see your metrics. You can also enable or disable different features from the connection type settings such as pick whether you can do future follow-up, which will put a request in a pause state until a later date that you pick. You can pick whether group placement is enabled, and that means that when someone is done with the connections process, when a request is done, They would be placed in a specific group that you configure. You can also pick whether reminders can be done from a connections view and connection celebrations, which is really nice thing we'll cover in another video. Also, this is where you would pick whether you want to have sequential status mode enabled or not. And that mode essentially locks you into moving people between statuses one by one rather than moving them. They wouldn't be able to skip a status, for example. So they would just go from the first to the second to the third, and they can move backwards one by one, but you can't skip a status. So this is really nice if you have a strict linear flow. Then we'll skip over some of these things, but another important setting, you can pick whether a placement group is required to complete a request. You can also pick whether you want to show the full activity list when you're looking at the details of a request. You can also enable request security. And this is helpful because this allows security to be applied to a singular connection request and the connectors will automatically be granted access to their own requests even if they do not have security to the connection opportunity or type. So this will impact performance when there's a large number of requests. So be careful with whether or not you wanna enable this. Now date settings. Due date is a really important thing when it comes to requests and you have many different options. You can pick from the start of a request, how long after you want certain due date things to come in such as, how long until the request is considered due soon or, what is the ultimate due date. And when you update this, if you had a different setting in the past for due date, you can pick whether you want all of your current requests to be recalculated. So think about that before you make that decision, but you can also pick fixed days from start on the opportunity level. So depending on the opportunity, your due dates will look a little bit different, or you can even do it per status. You can change how the due date is calculated per status, and I'll show you that in one moment. Now you can add type attributes. This is nice if you want to have an attribute that is determined for the entire type, and you can, pick defaults here. Opportunity attributes are really nice if you want an attribute that applies to every single opportunity that is under this connection type, and there will be each opportunity will store its own value for these attributes. So if you pick an attribute for one opportunity, it's not going to be automatically applied for every opportunity in the type just for that one opportunity. So we have some examples here such as days of the week or preference area. This will be up to you and your organization what attributes are helpful to add here. Then request attributes. This is at an even lower level. So when you get a request, say Ted Deckers made a request to be connected, we can pick attributes that we want to configure from that specific request such as orientation complete. Again, this is up to you what is helpful to add for request attributes. Now activity types. Activities are really helpful to record on connection requests what's going on really. So it tracks when something happens, if there's been progress in a relationship or if any follow-up is needed. We have some examples here. Pick some activities that really tell people who are looking at a request what's going on. Some really helpful stuff can be something a called activity or messaged so you can make sure that you are kept in the loop on what's happening with a request. Now, statuses. Statuses are something that you wanna think before you add a new status because these are those different ways that we track the progress of a connection request. And there's some default ones you'll see such as in progress. And when you look at these statuses, there's some configuration. You probably wanna include a description for these so that connectors know what each status means. Picking a nice distinct highlight color that makes sense depending on the status will really help you later. for example, in progress, you'd probably want something more a yellow that shows you you're not yet done with this request. It's kind of in a limbo state. It's in progress. Then if you had picked that due date is calculated for a specific status, here's where you'd mess with the date settings. You can also pick whether this is the default status when a new request is added. You can also require a note when a status is changed. That's helpful if you really want specific details on what's going on with a connection request. And you can also pick how long the future follow-up period is. Can also pick some automation so that when certain things happen, people will automatically be moved between statuses. I'm gonna exit here. And one thing you wanna know also is try not to have any statuses that are conflicting or overlapping so it's clear to people that are making connections where a request should be. Then sources. This is something that's really helpful if you wanna know for a request where it came from. This is something you can easily pick for a request and often there won't be many different places where the request might come from, but an example is you made a connection card, that's how this person's request was formed, or this came from a form on the website. There's plenty of different ways you can configure this. It's very easy to create a source. It's really just a name. Then workflows. These are different actions that we can kick off based on many, many different things. For example, you can make a manual trigger and there's so many different trigger events available that make connections very powerful because you can go from manually having to drag connection requests around and take actions depending on what's going on to having Rock take action for you. Then here's some additional settings. Something really nice here is when you're looking at the connection request detail, you additional can requests to show. Here's an example. Say we're looking at the involvement connection type and we click on someone who also has a connection request that's in the next steps connection type, we'd be able to see that request. You can even pick if you can see that person's family member requests and what states are shown. This is really nice to see where someone is at across your organization in terms of connection. If they're being connected in next steps and involvement, you can easily switch between those requests and see what's going on with that person. There's also some templates that you can configure here. And something here is the AI insights prompt. This is important, and this is the default insights prompt. If you have an AI provider set up for Rock, you can essentially use this prompt. And when you're looking at a connection request detail, you can ask for a summary. And that summary will tell you what's been going on with that request, what are some recent updates, but it's it's basically up to you to pick what information is coming out of that summary and you determine it here. And some more AI settings are whether you want this summary to come up automatically when you click on someone's request or whether you wanna trigger it yourself, and that will just keep the number of tokens you're using down. You can also pick how long that summary stays for, that AI summary, how long it's cached. Now this is it for the different connection type settings that you can set up. Now that your connections type is done, you're pretty close, but we've got a bit more configuration to do. That's on the connection opportunity. So let's look at that in the next video, but thank you for watching this video.