Rock U - People - Following

Transcribed Video Content

When you're responsible for a person's care and development or you simply wanna know what's going on in their life, following really helps you with that in Rock. This is a super powerful feature that you should start thinking about ways you can use it because it'll really change your ministry. Now you can pick different kinds of events to follow. So for example, for a person, you could pick to follow them and be updated when their birthday comes up or an important anniversary, or it can be even more complex than that. In fact, you can also follow groups, which is really helpful to see how things are changing or progressing in a group that is important to you. So let's look up how to set up following, start following people and set up following events in Rock right now. To get started with following, let's actually follow someone. So we're on Ted Decker's profile, simply click follow and there you go. Now, if we wanna see who we're following and some more detail, just go to your profile, then my settings, and we're gonna click on following settings first. So this lists a set of events that you'll be notified about for the people that you're following. So these are all person events. For example, we could say when people were following get baptized or get a specific note type added to their record or have a prayer request and much more. You can even be notified for things that aren't happening just yet, upcoming anniversaries or birthdays, then you would just save based on your preferences. In addition, you can click following here and see exactly who you're following. So we have that list right here. You can see we just followed Ted Decker. You can easily unfollow people from here or take some bulk action. Now you may have guessed that the only people that you can or the only thing that you can follow is people, but if you actually go to any group, you can follow groups as well. And that's really nice because if there's a group that you want to know about as things change, all you have to do, come to the group, click the star icon, and we followed the group. Now I'm gonna show you something. Once you follow people, this is something you are gonna get. So we have a job that will send out following events. And in this case, Ted, who's receiving this email has quite a few events checked upcoming birthdays, birthdays, upcoming anniversaries, baptisms, and began serving. And this is awesome. It's a really helpful way to keep up on what's going on around you and keep you in the loop. But back here, we're going to look at some settings that you can configure. So we already know how to follow people and pick our following events, but if you go to admin tools and settings, start typing in following, here's actually how we create those events that we saw. These come out of the box. And just one thing to note, if we click here, for example, you may have noticed that the birthdays following event was required. That's because we've picked notice required here. But these events are really simple. You just add a name and a description, then you pick the event type here and there's all these event types out of the box. Then you pick lead days, meaning how many days before this event actually happens do we want to get notified about it. Then you can pick whether you want weekend notices to be sent on a Friday, meaning if someone has a birthday on Saturday, you'll hear about it on Friday. Then here is the notification format. And this is simply that email you saw. It's the HTML and the lava that we use to populate that email. And since there's a lot of nice ones out of the box, I suggest if you're gonna create a new following event, just go ahead and copy one of these notification formats and just change it to get the information that you need. But you can populate so much from the database very easily in the notifications that you send for a following event. Now let's go back to system and we're going to look at following suggestions. So it's pretty easy to have in your mind a list of people that you wanna go follow when you start and just go find those people, click follow on their profile. But there's probably some scenarios in which you wanna be told who we suggest you follow. So out of the box, there's some different following suggestions and these actually aren't gonna run without you enabling the job. I'll show you that in just a moment, but you can add new suggestions and you can either do in followed group or in group together. So following groups is really helpful for figuring out who to follow as I showed you how to follow a group earlier or you can pick in a group together. But let's look at an out of the box example so you can get this idea. Family members. All we did here is we have family members as the following suggestion. We've picked the suggestion type and we picked a group type of family. Meaning, if we have this enabled, then you'll be suggested to follow anyone who's in your family, which is just a group type under the hood. So there's really a lot of different following suggestions you can put together as so many things are simply a group. You can even pick if you should be auto following anyone who's in that group, and you can really pare down who within the group is worth suggesting to follow, a specific group in the group type, a security role, or just a role in general. Then again, you can put together the notification format for the email that will be sent for a following suggestion. Also, for all the things that you mark active, these will all be considered following suggestions when the job is run. So fellow small group members, staff members, known relationships, or serving team members. But here we go. We're looking at the jobs administration and specifically the send following suggestion notification job. If you actually want this to run, all you have to do is click active on the job and make sure you have the right eligible followers. So you probably don't want this to send to everyone in your database. Out of the box by default, it just sends to staff workers, but you can pick whoever you'd , then you save, and now you'll be getting following suggestions. Great. Now you're in the loop and what's going on with the people and the groups that are relevant to you. Thanks for watching this video and have a great day.