RX 24 - Connector Report with Unavailability

Transcribed Content

Please welcome Christine Ronk and Terry Townsend, and we're gonna be talking about connection request connector reports with unavailability. So let's give them a warm welcome and hear what they have to say. Hello. Thank you for having us. I am Terri Townsend, and we are both Christine Rock. She came onto our team at Trinity Fellowship Church about two and a half years ago. I was one of the originals that moved to Rock Four Years ago. We decided when COVID hit, we were gonna make a change. And so it was a great opportunity. We love Rock. It's made a lot of our church's dreams come true in being able to do things. We're really close to having all of our external software that we were using. How many of you were using multiple softwares before Rock? And then it has just brought everything down. It's awesome. But what we're gonna talk about today is 'm gonna tell a little bit more about our church and where we got to this that we're presenting today. So as I said, we were four about four years in. We just launched our mobile app a couple with Rock a couple of months ago. Triumph Tech is building it for us. It is it's and it'll change your world if you're not already in a mobile app, and especially in Rock. So our church has seven campuses. We are kinda unique, though, and our main campus or the original campus has over half of the attendees that go to that campus. So it's a lot larger than the other campuses. And so that kind of plays into what I'm going to talk about. When we first launched into ROC, and I'd love to talk to anybody that's in that process or doing that or getting started and how you're working through what to do and how to look at it and not feel overwhelmed because there's always more to add, more to do, more to come in. But get yourself, when you first go in, with what you were doing before, all the good things that you were doing before, get those started first, and then move into some of your dreams that Rock allows you to do that you might not have could have done before with a database not connected. And so our first thing we did after getting us into a place where we had all of our check-in going, you had a registration going, all the main things you have to do. And we didn't even have small groups in our app yet or anything, but we knew we wanted as a larger congregation in a church that everybody felt like we were that large church that people wouldn't go to because it's too big, you wouldn't know people, you wouldn't get connected, we wanted to do connection requests. We wanted to reach out to every single person that was new, make them feel welcome, make them have a reach out and a contact write off. And so we built all the on ramps into how people came into our database, and then we made it where our connection requests would be made for every one of those people over 12 years old, even our teenagers. We have our youth reaching out. So every person that gets added to the database gets a connection request call or text or a pastor or a staff member, And we're even having to move now into volunteers helping do that, like our leaders on the Dream Team and lay pastors and things like that. We'll make reach out phone calls because it's a high value to us that people get connected quickly. And when we started doing this, we saw the on ramp process of people getting into the church and getting that first step taken into activity or into whether they're getting their ERA in ROCK or things like that go from about four or five months to sometimes weeks, two or three weeks. It would make that big of a difference when they got that personal reach out. And people would say, I can't believe you called me. I can't believe I'm, you know, finding out or getting you know, it just would floor them. And then I have so many other stories about how important this is to a congregation when how God uses it and the timing of whenever you get in contact with people and the right people connecting. He just his hand's all over it. But anyway, that's not our talk today. Our talk today is what happened a little while after we it our connection request. They were a high priority for our church. We wanted to do that. And so we had about 100 connectors between all of our campuses and then our staff at our larger campus, and we had even our production team people. They're reaching out. They're making calls. We work at the ministry. The other thing that this is huge part of is when John was talking yesterday about ministry and admin, this is a little bit of both. Because whenever you're making or creating their platform to do these connections, that's ministry. This is supporting the ministry. This is actually ministry. You're reaching out. But we realized after doing this, we needed some admin part of it, managing that many connectors and getting them we do this not automated, and I'm going to get to that. I know the slide's a little later. But we don't do it automated for a reason. We want these to get assigned quickly, and we have a staff member on our Rock team that makes these assignments. And Sheila goes through every one of those new connection requests that come in because we want two things. We want to kind of see how they came in and make a connection there, but we also want a demographic thing to go on too. If it's a young person and they have kids, we want to try to match that up with a staff person that they could give them insights or say, hey, I lead this small group. Or if they had questions about kids ministry, there would be somebody that could answer it. So we wanted that to be available through a person seeing all of these going on with that connector and being able to get the right connector assigned to the person doing the request. But we started running into people not getting to them and things like that. And then the person that I found out was doing all the assigning had this big old spreadsheet of notes that they had written down to know who was what at each campus, all these things. And so we're like, we need some help here for that person looking. And then they would have to have, I think, five tabs open to see how many connections they already were doing, how many they had in follow-up, all of these things going on. And I was like, we can help this person a little bit and help streamline that process. And I think it may have happened one weekend after I had to do it myself, and you're going, this could be improved. But then we also had the thing is we would get text have you ever done this? You get a communication from a text message. We have Slack. We have email. There's probably three or four others out there of, oh, I'm not going to be here for two weeks. And then you have to make a note of that. Or I'm not going to be here in three months. And you have to remember and write that down, then remember it. So a cool thing, and you may also be thinking of other ways you can use this, we made an unavailability report and we made a report. And they all talked together for the person making the connections. Christine is going to explain all the details on how you do this. So we decided it's not that hard to make an unavailability report. So this is just a report that actually lives on our main page, a link to it on our main internal page that they can go to and click on. And if they're going to be logged in, it just puts their name in. They put the dates they're going to be gone. And then we have a reason code that's a defined type that we can populate that with. And so they can put that in, and they can put it in three or four months ahead of time if they knew they're gonna be on vacation or a couple of weeks. The other thing that is available through this is you can actually do it for someone. If somebody forgets, if one of the staff members or connector forgets, you can go in and it is a dropdown that you could select them and do it for them. And then it feeds a report that she's going to get detailed into showing. It can filter by campus, gender, and this is what helps the filters up there. Whenever you're looking, you can run the filters and see all the people that fit that criteria. And then Christine is really good at her reports and how they look and you'll see it more. She even made little icons for gender and how many kids they have and what genders they are, their ages, everything like that. So this is what has solved a huge problem for us. And the other cool part is this unavailability report feeds over into the notes section on the report, and you can see when they're going to be gone. And it grays them out when they're going to be gone. Isn't that cool? Yeah. So you can do all these cool things. And so it's just a matter of an admin tool then that helps your ministry tools help that work better. So I'm going to turn it over to Christine, and she's going to tell you how she made this happen. So I'll go ahead and pick up here. If you all are familiar with connection requests, you know you have to have a connector group. We house all of our people in that first group and I think there was a screenshot a couple slides ago. We do have multiple ones and I do want to say we're not against automation, we do automate some of our other buckets and that's been really helpful. But for this use case, we love that personal connection. But we have these connector groups where we house our people. That first page you saw, the quick little one line form is just a workflow form. We utilize delays to take them in and out of that connector group, really just make them inactive so they're not able to be assigned. And that workflow also pushes that note to the group telling us why they're going to be out. And then the third part was that second screenshot you saw of the report. And that one really houses all of our demographic data. We'll have the work sorry, the recipe is already out there. So you can actually import this workflow into your instance and kind of modify and go through there. But we capture kind of the bare minimum information, and the connectors auto populated on the current person. But like Pasteur Terri said, we can select other people there, like a team member if maybe your spouse is on staff. And then the dates you're unavailable. The time off reason, we have just a drop down that we've populated with, like, vacation, sabbatical, maternity leave, things like that. The workflow really is very simple. It just kind of updates that group, and it uses delays to make them inactive or active, add the note, and then remove the note when their time off is complete. So this is just another screenshot of what that looks like. I see pastor Terry's taken off week in July. I'm just gonna select vacation, and that group's just looking at our main connector group, that first drop down. This is what our report looks like. I think pastor Terry went over it pretty well. It might seem like too much information, but when we're trying to make a really direct connection, it's it's helpful to know kind of where our new people are at, like in their stage of life, if they have kids, married. Then we also have a column for department, which is really helpful sometimes. And then the two columns for the request, we have active requests and requests and follow-up. For this purpose, we only included our new connections bucket. So it's not going to include some of our other ones that we've specified. But you can kind of get an idea of workload. And if somebody is behind or not able to take them, we probably don't want to overload them. I'll go ahead and demo it in a second, but really, it's pretty simple. Just make the workflow. We've put it on our dashboard to be able to use, but once it's all there and populated and working, our database admin really has really good tool to use to assign, and she feels pretty confident about doing that. Let's go ahead and demo, maybe. So like we said, we made a little quick link on our page. It's just a real simple form. It auto populated myself. But you'll see there's other people in there as well. Let's say, I probably should have done this before I went to the Rock Conference, but I am not available this week. And we'll call it an event. But these, we just did a single select with options there. You could do it as a defined type or something else there, but we felt that was good enough. Are we okay? Okay. So the event camps, like, we'll have people like our generations ministry. They're so involved all summer long in camps and stuff, and we don't wanna assign them a bunch of connection requests because they're doing so busy on things other things. And so they could choose that and just make themselves unavailable. They're still working, but they just don't need to take on more is what that's for. Yeah. They're pretty swamped at that stage. I'm gonna submit it, and then what it'll do here is I should have left it earlier, but it grayed me out, and it also makes it to where you can't assign me. And this part's pretty cool. We've just done some page parameter filters. We've specified these things. We've talked about doing other filters, and I think that'll probably be a next stage thing. But it's been working for now. Yeah. And what happens when it grays them out? It makes them inactive in the connector group. So you're not able they don't show up to be assigned. That's great. And then this column's pretty cute, I think. It's fun to kinda see. I don't know if this is if you can see that at all, but when you hover, it tells them, like, the first name of the child and how old they are, and then you can see they're blue or pink for boy or girl. And I think this has been really helpful to kinda see at a glance. A lot of our leads come in from generations check-in, so check-in over the weekend, people checking in their kids. We don't just assign those to our children's pastors, and we like to spread them out, which has been really helpful. So you can kinda see people in a similar stage of life, and they can touch base, and they really have a good point of connection. Found that it's really helped help people get connected and feel like they're seen. So I think that's about it. Yeah. And you can see, like, that one that says Tyler Willow Creek fifty. He was on sabbatical, and then he came back in and got a bunch. Well, this is our test site too, so it's not complete Oh, it's our test like, what? No. And correct me, like the active requests, they won't be just new. It shows like all of their active requests they have for everything, doesn't it? I think I've specified just the Because you wanna know really what their load is, their total load. And that's why we also did the request and follow ups because they may all of sudden next week have a ton come back in. And so you want to see both of those. I think that's it. Okay, well this has helped us a lot, and it's a management tool, but it really wasn't that hard to build if you can do all her fun little stuff in the report. But the recipe is out there that kind of makes this all happen, but it helped our team a lot. You just have to remind them to do their own availability when it comes in and all that. So that's kind of our presentation. Are totally open to, hey, is there a better way always in doing things? So we want to open it up for questions.