RX 24 - Lessons Learned After 8 Years On Rock - Frank Grand

Transcribed Content

Welcome to the last session, the first day of Rx. Today, we have Frank Grand here. He knows more about rock and has forgotten more about rock than I probably will ever know. He's gonna talk to us about the lessons he's learned over the last eight years. Frank? Thank you. If I haven't had a chance to meet you, my name is Frank Gran. I'm the technology product owner at NewSpring Church. I've been on staff there ten years. I got hired in 2014 to learn our previous church management system and lead our transition to Rock. So we've been on Rock since March of twenty sixteen. So thank you for the introduction. I think though I've had the incredible privilege of being at all 10 ROC conferences. And so I think once you've been to that many, they keep asking me to come up here and talk. And with the 04:00 session, I was kind of hoping there'd only be five people. So we might have to have a really extended Q and A. But what I did want to talk about and this is kind of the new to I think I put like all, you know this is all audiences. And I really appreciate someone came up and asked a question earlier that Hey, this is new to rock, but I've been to a couple of new to rock sessions that were super technical. This is not going to be super technical. So anyway, what I wanted to talk through is over the years, I've gotten the privilege to talk to lots of churches about Rock. And obviously, we've been on Rock since 2016. So what I want to just talk through are some things I've learned. If you're thinking well, real quick, how many people are like, still considering launching Rock or have been on Rock for less than a year or two? Okay, and how many have been on so is everybody else like three plus years on Rock? Okay, pressure's on. I got to actually try to say something meaningful. But the first section here is I want to kind of talk when I talk to churches about Rock or when people ask, it's usually in one of three phases. Hey, we're planning and trying to launch Rock. Okay, we've launched, but now we actually have, like, we got to implement and really run with this thing, and we got to figure out how to train our staff. And then, you know, for it looks like most of the room, like, hey, we've been on Rock. Like, do we keep this thing going? I'll spend it, since there's just a few that are new, when I talked to churches and, you know, everybody else was doing like AI images, so I had to I felt some FOMO, so I don't I'm not on the design team. But when I talk to churches and I'll honestly say it this way, which may be shocking. I've probably talked more churches out of going to rock over the last twelve months than I probably have in the previous five years. And it comes down to this question, and this is what I start with. It's like, you've got to know why you want a rock. Oh, I thought that was better than it was, I guess. A lot of times, you know, as a larger church we're I mean, we're I mean, there's plenty of churches in here a lot bigger than us, but a lot of times, churches will be like, Oh, well, you guys use rock. So it's like, We've got to use rock. And what I found is that's dangerous way to revamp your entire system of record. So I really try to talk to churches and try to get a feel for, Well, why do you want to move to rock? So some of the things I've learned through the years is a lot of times people want to move to a new system because like their current system stinks. And what I found is a new tool or a new platform is not going to fix a lack of strategy or all of your bad processes that probably got you to where you were in the first place. A quick story there. When I was learning our previous church management system, our lead pastor of operations, who I'm glad he's not in the room. But he sat me down. He's like, all right, Frank, the plan is to launch Rock. I need you in the next six months to learn every process we have as a church. I was like, Okay. And so I started doing a bunch of interviews at campuses. And I remember one in particular, I don't remember her name, but my kind of basic questions was like, All right, tell me how you use our current system. Like, what do you do? And I remember her going she was super proud of this. She's like, man, we run Monday mornings after service or after Sunday services, I run three reports in our system. I was like, oh, cool. Tell me what you do with those reports. She's like, the first report, I do this, and I do this thing. Great. She's like, The second report, I do this, and I do this other thing. And she stops, and I was like, Awesome. Like, Okay, so what about the third report? And you could just see in her face, she's like, I run this report every Monday, and I've never done anything with it. And so what I quickly realized and I would go these interview or these campus interviews, and they'd be like, This old system sucks. All right, cool. Tell me why it sucks. And they're like, Well, it doesn't do this, and it doesn't do this, and it doesn't do this. Again, after spending some time learning our old system, I was like, Oh, man, 99% of the time, our system our old system did those things. We just never trained our staff well-to-do those things. So all of that to say, like, don't get me wrong, ROCCIZ was a much better solution. But if your reason for moving is because you really are in a system and you don't have a strategy on how you're using it or you've got tons of bad processes, like a new tool is not going to fix that. And what I've seen happen a ton of times is the church is like, well cool, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll move to this new system and we'll revamp all of our processes at the same time. And that's usually not successful. And what happens is a year into it, Rock or whatever new platform they're going to, Rock gets the bad rap for failing when, again, it had nothing to do with the platform. It was the strategies and processes in the first part. The second thing when I'm thinking about like launching Rock or trying to figure out how you're going to launch that is you've got to know your key stakeholders and the key functions of your church and make those win. The example we had is in 2011, NewSpring and this was before I was on staff, we tried to move to a new platform, a new church management system. And from the stories I heard, what literally happened was they were changing check-in code at like 4AM on the morning of launch. So needless to say, it didn't go well. For like six straight weeks, check-in was really, really spotty. And what we learned was we didn't do a good job with the finance team in getting all their reports run. What I quickly learned is when we were launching Rock, as long as my kids' team was happy and my finance team was happy, everybody else could just figure it out. So, like, you've got to figure out what are those key stakeholders, what are the key processes, and then everyone else can kind of just figure it out. And then lastly, in talking with lots of churches who are in the planning phase, the number one question I always got was like, well, okay, group structure. You know, how do you do your groups, and if we're multi site or not multi site? And if you've ever talked to me, I remember talking with, like, back when we launched, like, John Edmonson, like, was the only person to talk to. And so we talk I talk to him all time. I'm like, John, yeah, we're thinking through this. Like, how do I set up my groups? And he's like, Well, you could do it however you want. And I was like, Yeah, yeah, cool, but how do I set up my groups? He's like, You can do it however you want. And I remember being so frustrated, and then after lunch talking to churches and really understanding, You really can do it however you want. You've got to figure out, you know, what that thing might be. So, you know, a key learning. Rock has 10 ways to do everything. I call it the blessing and curse of Rock. It is so customizable, but you got to also be able to customize it. So talk to everyone. Like, you can't spend enough time if you're in that planning phase. Talk to as many people as possible. But don't just do something that somebody else does. Focus on the outcomes you're trying to achieve. So the big one that was kind of my shtick when people asked me about groups is, hey, what I learned was as long as again, the kiosk check-in, if we're talking about kids, kids check-in, like as long as the kiosk worked the way you want it to work and reporting works the way you want it to work, all the rest of it is kind of just on the admin side, so you've got some flexibility. So for me, it's like, hey, the outcome for me was it had to be a good kiosk experience and I had to get the reports I wanted. And then you've got lots of flexibility in there. So again, figure out what those key outcomes are, and then again, talk to as many people as you can. All right, so then kind of from the planning phase to launch phase. And this is it's been a long time. We launched in 2016. But when I think back, Rock was very, very it was a very successful launch for us. But there was a couple key things that when I talk to a lot of other churches, they don't have. Number one, don't make this a technology project. Make it a church wide project. So kind of my second bullet point there. This was coming from our executive leadership. And so like executive leadership essentially told our staff, Hey guys, you're moving to Rock. You know, we're moving to Rock. I didn't have to fight that battle. I talked to a lot of churches who the tech staff or, you know, whatever staff involved with church management systems comes to something like Rock Conference, and then they're going back to their churches, I go, Frank, how do convince my leadership that we need to move here? I'm like, man, it's going to be hard. And so I never had to fight that battle. But with that executive buy in, the I'll say lucky thing. I was going to say smart, but I don't remember being smart about it. It was just kind of a luck thing was not being technology product. I went to every ministry team in every campus and kind of created at the time, I think we called it a rock champion, but rock star is a much better thing to call it. But we created an internal rock star team. And the idea was, hey, this isn't technology coming to change everything that you do. You've got a ministry representative or a campus representative. That was the smartest thing I did. Because it also gives you a primary layer of like protection for when you're trying to support Rock when you first launch. Also have clear goals. Don't try to do too much. For us, we didn't do this well. And it's why when people ask me, well, how long does it take? It took us over two years to launch rock. Not because of Rock, because we tried to constantly at the end like and again, this was the early days of Rock. So it's like we were trying to launch like on version three. And then like with version four, they had some new features that executive team wanted. And so it's like, hey, yeah, yeah, I know we're like four weeks away from launch, but now we want this new feature. So I mean, was this constant scope creep. But have clear goals. Don't try to do too much. The thing that we tried to do was start with just replicate your existing functionality, especially those key pieces, those key wins that I talked about on the other slide. And then after that, you can expand. And then the last one around training, like spend as much time on training as possible, but no, it probably will never be enough. The way we kind of did training was we we have all staff meetings. And so we picked a full day all staff training where we did like the very highest level of rock training. So we did person profile, we did check-in, and I think we did like group management. So that was a church wide, all staff, six hours where we did vision for a couple hours. We had lunch and then we had like worksheets with our dev environment and we're like, you know, create a profile and add a baptism attribute. So we did that kind of thing as a whole, and then two weeks later and we gave them like a almost like a workbook, like, Hey, over the next two weeks, just get used to creating a group, adding an attribute. And then we followed up more individually after that with like ministry specific. So then we went to them. We did regional tours for all of our campuses at a time, and that ministry rock star team was with us. And so guest services went with guest services. That was how we launched, and it worked really well. And we'll do hopefully I'll get through this quick and we can have any questions at the end. So once you get past launch and kind of initial implementation, like how do you keep rock rolling? Again, I thought that was better than it sounded when I said it out loud. But through the years, what I've learned is you've to focus on projects that actually help your staff and volunteers, like shepherd your people. You know, so you have to understand what your people do and how they work. I've got two stories here. The first is a really recent story. We've got a very long tenured guest services director at our largest campus. She's been there for twenty years. And randomly, we were serving this was in January. We were serving our twenty one days of prayer together. And I said, hey, Sherry, like, how do you use rock in your day to day? And like, think she got really nervous. And she's like, well, you know, I'm not the best at using rock. I was like, yeah, know. But what she said was, she said, hey, actually this new thing we're doing, we're doing a connection campaign on volunteers that haven't served in thirty days. So all your volunteers that are on roster, if they haven't served in thirty days, we create a connection request, and they just got to follow-up with them. And so she said, Yeah, this new thing is the best I mean, it's my favorite thing in rock. And I perked my ears up, and I said, Okay, well, tell me about that. And she's like, Yeah, you know, at first I thought it was just another thing you guys were asking us to do. She's like, But, you know, but my campus pastor was holding me accountable to it. So she said, When I first started doing it, she's like, If I had 10 requests a week, she goes, I knew five of them. She's like, I knew why these five weren't serving, it was totally fine. She's like, But the other five, I didn't know. And she's like, It actually feels like this is actually helping me do my job. And that really stuck with me. You know, I kind of gave her a high five, but then like that night, was like, Man, how much what processes are we asking our staff to do that don't feel like they're helping them do their job? That was in January, and I mean, I sleep really good and don't up at night, if there was something to keep me up at night, it's that thought. Like, how like, our church management system needs to help our staff feel like they're you know, it's helping them do their job. Second part of that story, which is kind of the ideal case, so we were still talking, Okay, you know, what else do you do during the week? She's like, Well, I spend a lot of time doing lunches and having coffees. And I said, Well, okay, how do you keep track of, like, which volunteers to meet with, and when was the last time you met with them? In her eyes, she's like, Wait, can Rock help me do that? No, I didn't build that process for her. But that idea is what, like, I think hopefully it's what we all want for our staff. Like, I want my staff bringing us projects that, like, are going to help them do your job. The only way to know to do that is do the work to understand what your campus staff and, you know, all your staff are asked to do. The other story is and I think I've got another section on this, but it's how you talk to ministry staff. So I very intentionally use those words like, How do you help your staff and volunteers shepherd your people? Because I think that's what our that's why Rock isn't they don't bill themselves as a church management system, they bill it as a relationship management system. So I've got no story on that. I'll save it because I think I put it on another slide. Another thing I've learned is you've got to define wins before starting a project. So recognize a lot of faces in the room. I've probably I'm getting old. I tell the same stories all the time. But the thing with this is a couple years ago, when I was doing a lot more of the day to day I sit in a lot of meetings now and pretend to try to do strategy, and sometimes it works. But when ministries brought us projects, I asked three questions, and it was really telling about our organization. The first one was, Hey, give me an elevator pitch for your project. As I would assume most of our churches I mean, we were very heavy on vision. Our staff had no problem giving me the elevator pitch for what they wanted us to do. The second question was and I can't remember how I phrased it, but in the software world they call them user stories. I basically was like, hey, who are we doing this for, and what problems are we solving for them, right? And like, let's write some sentences, like the volunteer team, you know, whatever. With a little bit of coaching, that went fine. But the third question across the board, people never were able to answer. And the third question was, hey, six weeks after launch, how are we going to define this was successful? And again, what our team did was like, well, you guys are the smart guys. You figure out the metrics. And after very quickly, what I started saying is, Hey, listen, if you as the stakeholder bring if you can't define success, I don't want to touch this project with a 10 foot pole, because you're going to get to the end and then tell me, Oh, well, we actually this is what we really were trying to measure. And it's like, Well, man, if I'd have known that, I'd have built this thing totally different. So that's still a struggle for us, and I don't know, maybe we're alone. But it's like people are full of vision, but then when we're really trying to say like, well, what are we actually trying to do, like, and how are we going to measure that? It's, oh, I don't know. So again, more of a thought. I don't really have a solution other than like you got to drive to like outcomes and defining that before you start something. The last thing, and be careful with automation. You're going to sit in a lot of sessions you probably already have where they're going to tell you how powerful automation is, and it's powerful. But I don't know about you guys, but what we found is automation is great when all of your processes are super structured, very standard, and all of your staff do exactly what they're supposed to do. That doesn't happen a whole lot with us. And so what we've learned over time is automation is great, there's plenty of spots where you can utilize that. But man, ministry is messy, and our processes are messy, even though they're not supposed to be. So be really careful with automation, because it sounds great, but the first time the wrong person gets an email for something or because they didn't follow the right process, it's like, well, why did we automate that? And it's like, well, because you asked me to. So over I'm much slower to suggest automation now than I ever was, just because, like I said, things are messy. Long term success. So again, we've been on Rock eight years. We're the last year or two, I think I talked about when I first got hired, I overwhelmingly heard, Man, our previous it sucks. It doesn't do anything. And then I told you I had all these interviews where I'm like, Hey, we it's a lot better than we think. We haven't trained well. For the last couple years, it's the first time I've started hearing that with Rock. It's like, for the first time, it's like, well, wait a second, you know, how are we going to keep this thing going long term? One of the biggest points that's very recent for me is how technical staff talk to ministry staff and leadership is important. Here's the story. We were every couple years we do this. We call it Year of the Bible, and we do a daily devotional in our app. And I fought really hard to try to do this in our own platforms so that we can have the data to kind of help shepherd our people and know what they're reading and things like that. And we were sitting in year end review, and after the meeting, and it was like 20 people, and the comms director at the end finally and there was tension, right, because it's like, Why don't we just use uVersion? And I was like, Or like, Oh, if we're going to use our app, it's like, We to match uVersion. I was like, Well, can you give me the budget uVersion has, and then we can talk. But otherwise, it was so this conversation was that, you know, the comms director finally at the end, she's like, Hey, Frank, I finally understand what you've been saying. Like, if we do an experience that's good enough in our own app and have all that data, that gives us the best opportunity to shepherd and disciple our people in this area. And I'm like, Yeah, that's what I've been saying this whole time. She said, No, you've been saying, Data, data, app, app, app. And that was an absolute light bulb moment for me. And you have to believe this. You can't fake it. But the change in my language is I do believe that our platforms and I'm not saying, I mean, YouVersion's great. I mean, you can use YouVersion, but our strategy was, Hey, we want this data, right? So changing my language to, Hey, guys, here's the reason, and it's about shepherding, and it's about discipleship, has really leveled up my influence in the organization. Because again, I think a lot of times your ministry staff because I assume lots of things about my ministry staff. I I think a lot of times the ministry staff will assume, man, we're just the, you know, behind the keyboards tapping things and, you know, we're all in this fight together. And so making sure you're clear on what your goals are aligned, and I think, again, discipleship and shepherding should be what we're all about, that's been really, really important. And then the other thing in just talking to lots of churches for years, realize that we're all trying to solve the same problem. So you hopefully you already know this because you're here and you've experienced the community of Rock, but you're not in this by yourself. I don't care if you're a church of 50 or you're a church of 50,000, like we're solving the same problems. Now scale does matter, but utilize peer groups in the Rock community to make your job easier. You know, I think Emily talked about it this morning. There's lots of local Rx groups, there's Rocket Chat, there's the community site with, you know, Ask Chip, and there's the manuals. So long term success is, man, please, hopefully talk to everyone when you launch. Talk to as many people as you can when you implement. Talk to as many people as you can forever because, again, everyone's going to be doing things that you can learn from. The last slide was just kind of random thoughts and ideas I've been exploring. So I'm not sure these are lessons learned, but I wanted to burn a little bit more time. How can you move your church from decisions made by preference to data supported outcomes? We were at Life Church a couple times, and hearing them talk about think it sounds like they do this really well. I don't know if it's just, you know, when they talk to other churches or if they actually do this, but I don't know if you've ever been there, but we'll sit and it goes to some of my other points. We'll do a project, and the feedback afterwards is, Hey, the senior pastor's wife got the wrong email. This was a disaster. Or, Man, this project was amazing. I talked to Bob, and, like, he got saved because of this thing. And we're constantly going back and forth with, like, one person or a couple people's preferences or experiences define the whole success or failure of a project. Now, I'm not saying those individual data points aren't worth looking into, but going back to what I said before, if you don't define your win and your outcomes that you're looking for ahead of time, the only thing you can evaluate on is preferences or stories you heard. The story I think this was the same meeting where the comms director, Deanne, told me she understood what I was saying, but the way that meeting started was we were evaluating this Year Bible, and our discipleship director came in. He's not there anymore, so I can talk about him like that. But he's like, Man, Year of the Bible was a it was an amazing success, and all of our data said, you know, 40% less people did it that year than the year before. And so I shouldn't have done it in this way, but if you guys know me, a lot of you do, like I tend to run a little bit hot. I'm still working on that. But I said, Okay, how are you defining that? How are you defining this wildly successful project? And they said, Well, man, my team just met, and look, there were three stories about this, you know, about how people are reading the Bible for the first time. And I'm like, Hey, that's amazing. But if we're just collecting stories, I bet you can collect more of people who hated it. And again, and unfortunately, probably said it just like that in a meeting of like 20. And so I'm still learning, but it's that idea. Like, so some things we're trying. Design thinking as a whole I mean, it's a whole you can Google it. There's a million resources out there. But we're trying to be more innovative as a church, and we're trying to use these innovation ideas through these processes called design thinking. I think I even did a session on it maybe last year or year before, but that's been a big thing. And then the second thing is OST stands for Opportunity Solutions Tree. This was a specific tool that I heard about from Life Church. And ProductTalk.org, that's a blog that talks a lot about this. But it's just the idea of how do you set your outcomes? How do you really I mean, it's a tool that just allows you to say, how can you be outcome focused and then identify opportunities that maybe multiple teams can all attack at the same time to try to get to data driven ways of, like, proving your outcome. So I probably I'm not an OST spokesman. But the idea, is how do we focus on outcomes and help data help us make decisions instead of just relying on stories. The last thing or the second thing, just these random ideas, and it's a big project I'm working on right now, is around metrics and dashboards. Also lead our data team. Data team's a strong word. We have one data analyst that'll lead. But I'm really on this mission to try to shift our church away from scoreboards to actionable data. And again, if you've been around our Rock Conferences, think I did a talk on this two years ago, so we're still working on it. But here was my experience sitting in meetings and using dashboards. We'd sit down, put the dashboard up, we'd look at the numbers, and we'd either high five or we'd kind of go, ah. And then next month, we'd just do that again. And I just got to think, I was like, there's got to be a better way. Like, number one, like we're usually looking at these dashboards weekly, and I finally one day asked the question. I was like, Okay, this number's down. Are we going to do anything about it by next week? And everyone's like, no. So why are we looking at this number every week? Maybe we should look at this number every month or maybe every quarter and then make that actionable. But the big idea for me is how do I mean, wish we could get away from dashboards. We're not going to get away from dashboards. But connection requests so people ask me like, what's your best feature what's your most favorite feature of Rock? Connections. If you guys are not using them, start yesterday. But we are I'm trying to shift from can we have any staff member at Newspring, can they have three to five metrics that they know they're going to be accountable to? And then can we actually, instead of just having a scoreboard with that metric on it, can we create actionable people like use data to create actionable ways to disciple or shepherd or follow-up with people to affect that metric? Quick example, we started with our youth ministry and we said, Okay, what are your three to five metrics? They said, well, we want our Wednesday gathering numbers to grow. We want our FUSE our FUSE is what we call our youth ministry we want our group's attendance to grow, and we want our volunteers to grow. So great. Three metrics, very easy to calculate. But Okay, so what are these actionable pieces to it? Well, for the Fuse groups, it was like, well, who are the people attending Fuse that aren't in a group? And I'm not making fun, but they were literally like, wait, we can pull that? I was like, yeah, I mean, we got attendance data. But all I have to say, what I found was a lot of times we had these reports, but what it would take is a staff person remembering where the report was, clicking on the report, then most likely exporting that to a Google spreadsheet so that they can then share it with their other volunteers who are going to help them follow-up. Connection requests and connection campaigns make it so much easier, not only for the staff person to action on whatever process, but it also makes it really easy to hold them accountable. I mean, you know, those little numbers that pop up on how long have they been in there, when did they get created. So I'm on this mission it's one of my soapboxes, I have a lot of them but to try to shift us, like, hey, number one, let's look at dashboards and let's create dashboards in the time frames that are actually actionable. And then secondly, like, let's again, the number's there. Who are the people we need to be reaching out to and following up with that are going to move those metrics? So anyway, I could talk for hours on that. And the last thing, this really is a thought I mean, an ill formed thought is, I guess, what I should say is I don't know about you guys, but we get lots of vendor cold calls and talk to lots of churches, and like everyone is trying to sell me I'll say me, probably you too but these digital strategy ideas, right? They're like, Hey, digital strategy and personalization and, you know, it's like synergy or something. There's all these words out there, and it's like, Why and I talk to a lot of churches, and they're like, Yeah, you know, we're trying to figure this out, too, and NewSpring's still in the middle of trying to figure this out. So again, this is kind of a question like, Why does no one think they have a good one? Like, I don't and I know that's not globally true. Many of you probably think you have a good one. But there's just this thought in my head, like, It feels like we're making this harder than it is, and I don't like I said, it's a really ill formed thought, but it's just it's something I'm thinking through. So I think we've got about 10.