RX 24 - Contribution Statements Can Help Clean Up Personal Data - Kurt Vogeler

Transcribed Content

All right. Welcome to the final session of the day. Please welcome Kurt Vogler to the stage. Are we there? Okay. Hello. How's everybody doing? Tired? Kind of a lot of stuff in one day real quick? It looks like it. Everybody kind looks like you're going, make this last session fast. Right? Is that what we're asking for? This will probably go really quickly because what I'm going to show you is a recipe that we did recently, but it was stemmed back from a situation that we needed to create easy way to get information out after we did contribution statements for the very first time electronically. So we'll go through this pretty quickly. Like I said, it'll be very fast. It's a recipe that I believe anybody can do. You might have to ask for a little bit of access because you will create some pages and do some blocks. But within the instructions and within everything, everything will be in the recipe, so you can just copy, paste, and be done with it. Okay? Alright. Still looks like everybody's kind of asleep there. So alright. I'm Kurt Vogler. I'm from Trinity Fellowship Church in Amarillo. And you're kinda probably wondering how does the HR director end up on a rock team. Well, that's I had some history back out after college where I was actually working for a software company for a few years, and then I did a little bit of programming and some web stuff for food companies. And after that, it was all over with. I spent about fifteen, twenty years in the corporate world in human resources. I came to work from a church, and they found out about that. And like anything in a church, guess what? You're reassigned to also assist with the Rock team and all these other things. So that's kinda how I ended up on the Rock team even though I'm really just the HR department of one for all of our campuses and everybody that we have. So what today, what we're gonna go through really quickly, like I said, we're gonna I'll give you a brief description of what it is, what what caused us to go ahead and do this, kind of the why, what general access and what you'll need to build this out, how you go about importing the workflow, creating the new page, adding the HTML blocks and some HTML. And then we'll kind of walk through a generic how we taught our people to use this button and how to actually interact with the members that were having an issue. Okay? And then we'll have some q and a time if you guys have some. It's self explanatory. Now I do see somebody in the back of the room by the name of Ben. Hey, buddy. And I wanna tell you guys, I think it was Ben's recipe that we used at first to create all of our buttons and everything that we use for our electronic statements. So kinda what happened was is we had been on different software. We did some custom stuff for a while. We had been on Shelby for our accounting for years. And over the years, our organization has always did a nice beautiful letter from the senior pastor that got drafted and printed on letterhead, gave everything that happened over the year, then we printed out the statements. Then we took thousands of those to the mass mail guys. They did all that stuff, charges to fortune. And we did that forever because that's how we always did it. So when we came on to ROC, one of the first processes that we said, hey. You know, we can we can show some really good fruit really fast by doing some of these quick recipes and getting more into the electronic age. So what we did was we used that recipe from Ben. We we did alter it a little bit. One of the things that we did on ours that it may have been changed in Ben's. I'm not sure. But the SQL statement that generates so that you know who has an email address and contributed so that you can generate your lists off of that for your data views. We altered that a little bit. We said as long as we have an adult in the family that has an email address, whether they're the the actual contributor themselves on the line items or not, We're gonna consider that as an adult in the family. We're gonna put that. We're gonna email them. So the first year we did that, we ended up with still probably about 500 families that didn't have an email or they were in we found out they were incomplete emails. Right? We had gmall@.somethingcom or, you know, yayayahoo and things like that. So, you know, we knew all those were bad, we kinda scrubbed them out of our system when we started up with Rock. But when we did that and we sent out our first round of that, our very first year, which we were all excited about, had this beautiful email that went out from our senior pastor. We had the link down at the bottom of it so they could click and just go into the my account page, download their statement themselves, view their family. You know, we had all these great illusions of grandeur that this is gonna be beautiful and work easily. And probably, like most of you guys, you find out, you know, you go you wait till about the January 30 to get all that information out. And about the February 3, you get about 200 calls. Hey. I didn't get my statement. Right? That's the first thing they ask. Hey. Did I where where's my statement? I never got one. Right? So what we found out was, number one, not only did we have bad email addresses or old ones, but a lot of them, they were just dead. They were no good, whatever the situation was. We had a lot of calls coming in that said, hey. How do I get my statement? And it was funny. After a while, we started tracking. We one of the things we realized was because this was the first time that we had done it, they read the senior pastor's message and said, oh, this is great. How many baptisms? How many lives we've touched this year? All this good stuff in the letter, and then they deleted the email. They never even got to the bottom that said, for your annual contribution statement, click here. Right? Because we put that at the bottom of the letter, we didn't wanna interrupt our senior pastor's letter to everybody. So what we found out was somewhere in the neighborhood of about half of our calls, not counting our 500 or so people, so our business department was just inundated with I think we logged we we kinda quit logging somewhere around 800 or 900 phone calls of people saying, I didn't get my contribution statement. Well, that was a half truth because they didn't finish reading and click on the button so they could get it, or we did have some bad emails. So we had to find a really quick way for our business department and some of our folks that were covering that to be able to go in there, verify some information, get it updated, and then resend the link to them as quickly as possible. So that's what kind of stemmed this whole idea of this button and everything being out there. So when you go to build this thing, here's what you're gonna need be able to do. You're gonna have to have access to import a workflow and do a little bit of editing on there because you don't want it to say Trinity Fellowship. Right? You want it to say your church name. You're gonna have to create a page and put a block on it. Okay? You're also gonna have to have the ability to change security. Now that's dependent on your organization. Now the way the recipe is written, if you create the page and the blocks in the manner that it's done in the recipe, it will automatically inherit what's above it. And when you do that, where you'll see where we place that page. It it is actually a very low secure area that most of your staff probably has access to anyway. But the button itself that invokes this will only be accessible to where you want to put it. And like I said, we'll cover that here in a little bit. But but you got to understand that I know everybody's got different requirements around security and how much they allow their staff to do or not do. So again, this is a button you can put anywhere on any person page, and it'll work without you having to make any changes. The other thing is you've got to have active communication transport. Right? You've to be emailing out of your Rock instance. So you have to have that set up. And then you need the ability to either verify or maybe edit one or two of your global attributes. So when you import that, you're gonna import it. It's gonna go right into under data integrity category. So the reason we put it there is because if you ever look at your person, excuse me, at your person profile, and you know you've got that little drop down box. If you guys use, like, background checks or different things where request a photo and stuff like that, it's on that main page. That is under the data integrity. So it inherits that so that that when it brings that workflow in, the security is already set very light so that when it gets invoked on a page, it won't kill somebody so that they can't use the button or the workflow. Okay? Now we'll come back to where the button lives because that's really where your security is gonna end up living at. But once you get that imported and set up there, there's a few changes that you've gotta make to it. You gotta be able to go over and edit it, and you're gonna look for the area that says send to person email or send all emails. And then you got a drop down, and you're looking for the activity that says send email because that's where you open that up, and that's where you set your from email address. You're gonna set the subject line of what you want that email subject line to be when it hits the person that it goes to. I think ours right now might say Trinity fellowship contribution info, and, you know, it's from our TFC contribution email address. We have one that's set up just specifically for that. Then you're gonna have to this is where you gotta be able to verify some global attributes. You just wanna look and make sure that they exist on your system. They should be there. They're they're rock core items. And you may have done them up or changed them just a little bit. So you want to make sure that the global attribute with organization name has your organization in it because that will get used in the email. And then you're going to have an email header and an email footer. Now you can use templates and things like that. This workflow doesn't use them, so you might have to know how to do a little bit of Lava to use that template. But if you've got a just a generic email header that's set up for your organization and a generic email footer that's set up, the workflow will take care of building that email for you. Okay? The only thing it's gonna do is it's gonna pull those two global attributes, and then within it, it's gonna build the body that we'll we'll see the email in just a little bit, but it's just a very generic statement that says, you know, please click here. Thank you for supporting our ministry kinda thing. So where does the new page live? So if you kinda look at the tree on the left over there, you'll see it lives under the under the people. So if you're looking navigating from your menu or if you're just going in to create the page, for the people, person pages, and then under person profile. If you notice those pages that are underneath there, they're not normal pages that show up, but they're all have very light access so that if anybody has the ability to view the person, the main profile, they have the access to view this page if they can get to it. Now that's that's the secret because the button is what allows them to get to it. So on that page, we're gonna make a few changes. We're obviously gonna change the URL so that we've got send to my account link as kind of the short on there. And we're gonna look at a couple of things because within this page, then we're gonna scroll down and we're gonna add a workflow block, workflow entry block. And what that block is gonna be is that workflow that we just put in and and and edited. Okay? We're gonna set that on there. Your page is complete. You're done. So there's nothing else that you have to do in terms of settings or anything like that. So once that page has been created, we do have to go to another page. So we've gotta scroll down. If you look on your tree over there at the left, we're gonna move down just a little bit. We put it under contributions because we just wanted our contributions people. They're the ones that were receiving the calls. Right? We have a central business services the way we run our organization. We have multiple campuses around, but whenever it comes to contributions and things like that, we process all out of our business office. So our business office is the one that all those calls got transferred to. So we wanna make sure that all of them who have access to the contributions tab or the contributions page underneath a person profile, it was living right there because that way they could do a couple of things. They could make sure that, you know, sometimes you get that phone call and they say, hey. I didn't get a contribution statement. And then you get over there and you go, hey. We didn't have contributions from you last year. Right? Whoops. That might be that might be one reason why we didn't get it, but or am I looking at the right person? Right? But what we found out was because of our email situation that we viewed this as an opportunity to update some data really quickly in our system. Right? Because this was our, really our first year on Rock. So once we go down there and you get to that contributions, we're gonna add an HTML block. And this is what that HTML block code looks like. And this is why I was saying, you can paste this and put this code on any one of your person pages that are out there, whether it's a groups page, if you want your groups people to be able to use the same kind of format to verify info, or whatever, wherever you want because it's using global attributes with just a very little bit of line on there so that's gonna get them to that page and that workflow so they can send that email out. So here's kinda what it looks like on our page. So when you come into that contributions page, it just creates a whole new panel right there that just says send my account email link. It has the button there, and that's it. Pretty simple. It just lives right there. And here's how we actually treat it. In just a minute, I'll show you the screen that pulls up from the from there. But so what happens normally is when we get those calls, you know, Bob Jones calls in and says, hey. I didn't get my contribution statement, or I need one because, you know, maybe maybe he's got a business, maybe he's got something going on, and he wants to get a midyear one or anything like that. We will also do this very same thing throughout the year for anybody that asks whether they need, like, a quarterly or a semiannual statement. So what happens is our our team will get in there and they'll say, okay. They'll actually start on the first profile page, and they verify the address. So they will ask that person, one, to make sure we got the right Bob Jones. Right? So they'll verify that address with him. And then they'll come back over here. They'll make sure they got contributions. If not, they have a little bit different conversation with them. If they do, then they go, okay. Great. Let me click that button, and they get this page. This is the page that we just created, and this is what the workflow is gonna do. So behind the scenes, what is happening is it says, you selected well, in this case, I selected myself. Right? Kurt Vogler. So I was the person they were looking at. I clicked the button. It takes me, and then in the background, one of the steps in the workflow, the SQL goes out really quick and grabs all adults over the age of 18. It creates a quick little list of those ID numbers. And then there is a step within the workflow that just builds out these little these little blocks right there, the little tiles so that you can see what's on there. Right? So with that, what our group does is they say, okay, Kurt, I've got your email address as, you know, x y z here. I've got your cell phone. And, you know, we put on there whether they have, you know, given us a stop on their cell phone or anything like that. We kinda verify a few things. Here's here's where you guys have a lot of flexibility. If you're very familiar with doing some lava on person properties or attributes, you can go back to that workflow, and you'll see one of the activities is called, you know, create HTML. What it's doing is just creating that HTML that's just gonna be built and displayed right there off of that list that it got from SQL on the adults in the family. If you expand that out, you'll be able to get in there. All that is is just a very simple HTML list. Okay? It's a unordered list, a little u l or l I. If you're familiar with that, look for that in that code. You can come in there, and you can just use some lava and add as much as you want. That little card will just continue to expand down, down, down. I mean, if you want 15 attributes in there or properties, you can continue to add them in there as much as you want them to verify or see. The biggest request that we've had so far is for date of birth. We have a lot of times that we don't have either old members or members that don't have kids. They haven't registered for anything. And so they our our team has said, hey. Can you put date of birth on here? Which would be you know, probably take us less than about five minutes to get that on there, and it'll show up. So like I said, that is that is something that you can go in there and edit super quick and easy to get it. So once all that information is verified, our team just says, hey. You know, would you like that emailed to you or to you and your spouse, I'm assuming, which is Cherry. Right? And, you know, they hit the button. They're done. They let them know. They did go through a little process of letting them know that it is a link to our website that is secure because I don't know about you guys, but, you know, there's a certain age demographic that I'm a part of that is kinda gray haired. And some of us folks, they go, hey. Wait a minute. What do you mean? You're just gonna send me a link to all this stuff. Isn't it secure? Well, our our team says, hey. This is a secured link for only It's gonna bring you to a spot on the screen where you can verify your family data and then also download your contribution statement. Okay? So they'd say, oh, that sounds great. Send me the link. And here's our generic email. Like I said, it is very basic, very simple. There's nothing to it. Just says, you know, hey. Use the following information. We thank you for supporting the ministries. And that link right there is gonna take them to your external my account page. K? That's native to Rock. It's already in there, but this this is set up to be tokenized and auto log them into it, but it also is set to last for thirty days. Okay? We picked thirty days because when this was happening, statements had just gone out. We got a whole bunch of phone calls. We knew when we send the email that a lot of them would look at it and make sure they could get it, but we also found out that a lot of them don't download it right then. They just go, oh, that's great. I'll save this email. And when my accountant asks for the rest of my stuff at the February or sometime, I'll go back and I'll get the statement. Right? I'll get it all gathered up. So we wanted to do, you know, three to five days, and then we, you know, actually had somebody bring it to our light if that's what normally happened. So it's set for thirty days. Again, that's something you can change in the workflow. Workflow. If you only want it to be a link that's valid for seven days, you can go in there, just look up how to do tokenized links. There's a little item in the Lava manual that will tell you where you go change that number at that says how many minutes or how many days it will actually be available out there. Okay? So once again, they click that. Everything's good. Life's happy. Right? They come out there. They get to view the My Account page. Depending on what you guys have set up on your account page, you know, it's we have things, you know, of course, the give now button, then we've got the statements. I'm on the preschool list, so I don't have preschoolers, but I'm on the preschool list, and we do a lot of our, enrollments and stuff all through Rock. And our preschool people can actually use a pay button here if they have preschool that they need to pay for. Gives us in the groups and everything, but then also you can edit their information. Again, remember, these are all block settings that you can set. It depends on what you allow your folks to do. We used to be set to only allow where they could put in a request for it. Now that creates a whole another set of data nightmares because somebody's gotta monitor that and then review those requests and either make them or see if they're actually valid or not and do that. Once we went live with the app because the app allows them to do it, we also had changed the settings here, which will allow them to do most of the updates. If you haven't seen this page before, it's a great page to get your your folks used to going to because they'll look at it. They'll see their groups. If they have children, thing like that, all the children will be out there. There is a lot of stuff they can do here that will save your data team a ton of time. And like I said, that's why we use this, and that's why we have a script for our folks to kinda walk through, verify some information, talk them through the process of what the link is gonna give to them and what they can do once they receive it. And then we send it on, and, hopefully, we're done. Like I said, they'll update it. Most of them will update information if it's missing. And it was a really simple, quick thing, but the necessity of it was because of our super high number the very first time we went on to the e statements like that. So that was quick, wasn't it? Went through it. So you think you can do that recipe really easy? I mean, the other thing I'm gonna say is, you know, back up to where that button is at. Let's go back there for just a second. If you notice, it just creates that little HTML block, just creates the panel and the button and everything, and that code to it was, oh, so one more. That code to it, there's nothing to it. It's using some global attributes to tell it, you know, hey, what page to go to. So it's using the general for our external site. But then it's also grabbing the URL that they started from so that once they click that email, the workflow is just gonna redirect them right back to where they started at. So if it was the contributions page, it's gonna bring them right back to that person in that contribution page. If you put it on your groups page, it's gonna bring them right back to that group's page. So we built some of that in there just to make it very simple that you can put this button wherever you need it on a person page, like I said, within a HTML block. Is everybody ready to go to dinner or something? It's very quiet out there. This is the the address and the information on that. You know, I may have Ben. I shout out what his. Like I said, if you haven't done contributions through Rock or you're thinking about how to set them up or you're doing them differently, definitely look at Ben's, recipe out there for setting up a very quick and easy way. You can basically have this year plus previous years on there, couple of buttons, a few pages. And, I mean, you can generate your lists for your emailing very, very fast, and it auto updates. It's just it's just there. Once you build that thing, just go to sleep. You can ignore it. It's like I said, kudos to Ben. That was a great recipe for that one there. That really helped us. We we would with with that, we jumped the fence real fast and said, you know, this is a no brainer. We're not gonna keep printing stuff out. We're just gonna send this stuff. And it's very simple to do it. So like I said, our first year, we realized we had I don't know what the total emails we sent out were, but required to actually print and send because we did not have any kind of phone number or email. We had over 500. Our second year, we got that down pretty low. I don't remember recall what the number was, but I do know this year, I think we only printed and sent out less than a hundred. It was in the eighties of actual printed physical statements that we sent out. And most of those were to business contributors that we didn't have emails on. And we called them up, and they said, just mail it to us. You know? Yeah. Just mail it to us. We don't want the email. Somebody's gonna lose it. Right? So like I said, it has made a big difference in our process. And with the ability of having our business people being engaged to grab that information, it's really simplified it for our rock team to keep data updated in our system and know that we've got good emails because that also affects all of our other communications and lists that go out regarding events and everything else. So it actually has a a really far reaching benefit if you can put this in there and get people to use it on a regular basis. It helps all of your ministries. So with that, our rock team, you know, obviously, I'm Kurt. Pastor Terry is actually the lead of our rock team. She's in charge of it. Christine is kind of our coder. She's a does a little bit of everything. And but any one of us, you can contact us if you have questions or you're getting through the recipe and you go, oh, wait a couple. Not not sure how this is gonna work or not. So, that's it. I'm gonna try to get