RX 24 - Essential-Style Rock Implementation - Ryan Smith

Transcribed Content

Welcome to the second session of day two of Rx. Today, we have with us Ryan Smith from Calvary Chapel Chattanooga. It is not only his first time speaking at Rx, it is his first Rx. He's been to MasterClass, but that's about it. He also doesn't love public speaking, but he's gonna do his best for us today. Everybody give him a warm welcome. Thank you, Josh. Alright. Yes. As Josh said, I am way more comfortable behind a sound board or a lighting board or a keyboard somewhere than in front of people. But if you'll bear with me, we will get through this, and it'll be great. Emily and the team invited me to come and talk about how we've gotten started with Rock because we have kind of had a different approach to it. We've been talking about transitioning to rock for it's been kinda like a four or five year process. And taking that leap to get started was challenging for us. So I just wanna kinda share the story of how we came to be here, how we ended up making that decision, and sort of the steps that we've taken so that others can learn from our story. One of the main takeaways that I wanna share is you can do it. This is one of those things that it when we were researching Rock, it it seemed like, wow. All these features, all these things, so much we can do. It would be such a help for our church. And but it also is very daunting when you start looking at all of the things that could possibly come and how how do we transition, how do we get it all set up, how do we launch, and and get everything going. And so this is kind of the rah rah rah. You can do it. We are we're in the process. We're not fully there yet, but we're working on on getting everything up and running and getting our whole church all centrally on rock. But this is just one of those things that it is gonna take time. And but I really think that we're gonna get there, and it's gonna be a great thing for our church. I'm gonna share a little bit about our story. We have the privilege of working for a pastor that is he supports his his staff, and he wants to give us the tools that we need to do our ministry well. And in doing that, it's a lot of freedom, which is great. He does not micromanage us, but it also has kind of gotten us into a bit of a corner with our data. And that is that a lot of our ministries have been working on different systems for many years, and it's not cohesive in any way. And so that causes really bad data because people are in one database, their information is correct, and they think they've updated things with Calvary Chapel, but they actually haven't. They've only done it in one small piece in the area, and it doesn't communicate with anything else. And so that's it it's not good for our church, not good for our our church body, but it also isn't great for us because we don't have good channels for communication. And so we we have been working to one of the main focuses with getting to Rock was because we have unique areas of ministry, and they do things differently. And so we really think the feature set of having a rock and using it is gonna be great. But we had to get everybody on the same page, if that makes sense. And so we have things fragmented in a different planning center we use for services, for volunteers, or we're moving away from that, but that's what we had been using. We had our small groups on a different platform, church teams. Our giving was through fellowship one and Kindred. And so we were just really our website and things like that are run through SubSplash. And so everything is just really fragmented. And so it it makes it really difficult to kinda get everything in one in one box. And but everybody likes the customization of that. Their ministry works well in whatever they use. And there's also things that we need to improve and and and want to improve as well. So we really found that Rock was kind of that fix for most everybody's area of ministry. But just getting there was gonna be take some time and be kind of difficult. So that that leads us to our problem. This is the problem that we're trying to solve with Rock, and that is multiple databases, bad data, and poor usage of analytics. Our church does not use analytics because we don't have good analytics. It it's we don't have a a traditional church membership, So we often don't know who is coming in and out of our doors at any given time because we can't see check ins as in one place and giving is in another place. So there's not any real way of tracking any any sort of metrics and having any analytics of what's actually happening in our church. We end up spending more money because we have all these different platforms that we have to maintain, keep running, and and work towards. And there's just no unified focus for our church as far as communication channels and those kind of things. So that was a problem that we had. And then we really do think that the solution is to use Rock. And so like I said, it's been a long road to get to launching with Rock. And I'll I'll talk about that more in detail here in a minute. But we have I came to the master class, and I knew nothing about Rock at that point in time other than kind of the function. But I dove right into master class, and I was like, wow, this is really cool, all these features, but how do I get started? And so that was bit of a journey for us, which I'll share more about in a minute. But I I would say, like, one of the key things is to work with good partners. That's that's what's gonna make you successful in this launch. Because without the right people, it's really difficult to get going and get launched with that. So strategic partner, this is the solution that we've come up with. And we've been working with Triumph. I know there's lots of others out there, but Triumph has done a great job for us. And so and Josh is one of those partners with us. But, yeah, this is this has been huge in helping us get launched, get started, get some momentum under under us, and get things started. And then buying from leadership. So like I said, we had lots of different platforms. And it really kind of took our leadership saying, hey, we will be willing to sacrifice some things in the short term for a long term goal. And that is to get everything all in one place, working cohesively together, and launched with Rock. And we know that that's this is gonna be the long term solution for us. And so everybody kind of said, yeah, we're willing to give it a try and get launched with it. So without this this buy in, I think it's gonna be difficult, but that's that's what was made it successful for us. So before I get to this, I'll I'll share a little bit more of the history of of how we got launched with Rock. So we realized we couldn't do this on our own. So we I came to like I said, I came to the master class and learned some things. And I was like, I'm gonna need help. So we reached out to a local company that was a development company that several people from our church had had were working there for. And they had launched Rock for another church. And so we thought, this is gonna be great. We're they're they're they're here locally. We can get started, and it's gonna be awesome. And so we started there. We had tons of meetings to talk about all of our data. They looked they did discovery on everything that we had, all of our databases that we currently had. We paid a lot of money to have them analyze that data and tell us we can come up with a plan to get it all in rock, but it's gonna take some some time, some money, and some work. And so initially, we were like, okay. That sounds great. Let we need this. Let's go ahead. Let's get started and jumped off into that venture. Well, unfortunately, that that partner, that that company, we had some issues with them, and they weren't meeting the goals that we had set out that they said that they were gonna meet. And so that we started into that process. It was supposed to be a three month process to get get started. And we were a month in, and they hadn't done any work. And so we were like, this is not this is not working. And we had heard from the people that went to our church that worked with that company or for that company actually left the company and said because they weren't meeting deadlines and things like that. So that tabled rock for us for a while because we were like, we have to keep ministry doesn't stop. We have to keep going. And so how do we get to our end goal? We don't really know, but we're just going to table it. And I had a conversation with Emily. I think she emailed me and said, hey, I'm just checking in. How's your how's your rock implementation going? And this was like a few months after that. And I was like, not really happening. Like, we're we're not doing anything because we we started down this road and and nothing is necessarily happening. And so she was like, well, can we get on a call? Like, I'd like discuss it with you. And so we did. And basically, she was like, I think that after talking to you and finding out what your goals are, maybe you could try not bringing all this old data in because it's gonna be a huge investment for you. And also, it's a lot of it's bad data. It's it's stuff from years and years and years of people that have come to our church, done something, left, and different things like that. And so it's she was like, what if we just launched with nothing? Would you guys be okay with that? And I thought, that's an interesting idea. I I mean, we could that that's there's potential for that. Like, that that could work. She's like, I think if you worked with the right partner, you could get started with with little to no old data coming over. And so we did. We we took off. And so we I started meeting with Josh and the team from Triumph, realized that that was a great place for hosting, for getting everything off and running and have with their support. And so we did. We started with basically leads us to the plan. We started with all fresh person data. So we sent out a form to our church. We had a QR code. Said, hey. Can you give us your information as it is now? We wanna serve your you well. This is gonna be the future of how we interact with you as a church. And so we would love for you to give us all of your your information as it stands today. And so we did social media pushes. We did announcements from the platform, and we have people in the lobby to help get people signed up. And we just discussed what was the bare minimum data that we basically, the easiest access for people. Like, what what do we need to function? And let's get that accurate and true to today so that we can move forward with that in Rock. And interestingly, I I thought it was gonna be way more difficult to get get buy in from our church, but they responded rather quickly and and with a a a lot of excitement about it. And so we were able to gather, I think in the first couple of weekends, like 2,000 person records or 1,800 person records. And it just started to climb from there. And really, big push that we used to get us there was by using children's check-in. So we gave a date that if you were going to check-in your kids as of this date, it was no longer in planning center. It was going be in Rock. So you had to go ahead and do it. And the sell too was like, hey, you just give us your family information once for the entire family. You're able to check-in, and then we're gonna have all your information from then going on. And you just need to update us if anything changes. And so that was like I said, it was it was great. We we had a lot of people sign up those first couple weekends. When check-in came around, we had we had some our children's ministry team is here, And we had we had some people that we had to, you know, check-in and do on the fly that weekend. But for the most part, we had a a great successful launch with children's ministry in that way. And now we have all this great clean data in Rock. And so we've kind of had a stepped approach. I'd say roll out at a calculated rate. We've been this is kind of where we're at now. We have children's ministry up and running. We are about to turn over our financial side of things. So giving will be in Rock starting September 1. We've been working with Miwell. Morgan's here, but we've been working with Miwell to get us up and running with that. And so we're switching all of our our recurring gifts and things like that are have been moved into rock, and we'll be launching with that shortly. And so, basically, we've taken the approach that as we interact with our church and they interact with Calvary, they're going to be interacting with rock as we launch these segments out. And that helps us to have really good data going forward because these are all the information that they're providing for us. And as we interact with these different areas, we're able to pull that more and more data in because more and more it reaches more and more people. Another thing we're doing are small groups guys here as well. We're going to be launching our small groups starting in a couple weeks. And that's another way where a large portion of our church is involved with small groups. So that's in bringing in more of those people records and getting good data into Rock. So it's been it's been a good journey so far. We've had great buy in. It it seems to be working. So another thing that I would just say is as you're moving through this, the plan is to set reasonable expectations. We realize that not everything is gonna be perfect and smooth, but we just need to make it as as good as we possibly can. And so it it it there's been some bumps, some little bumps, but nothing terrible, if that makes sense. So it it if you have reasonable expectations, you're gonna meet those goals, you're gonna keep moving forward. Here's some things to consider if you are considering something like this. Number one, this was the biggest factor, cost of migrating data. Both with that previous company and with Triumph, we had the conversation. Can you bring in our data from our previous companies, previous databases. And everybody kind of said, yeah, we can do that. How much money do you have to spend on that? How much time? How much money? What are the resources needed to make that happen? Sure, you can do anything. But is it is it really worth like, the the amount of energy you're gonna put into it and the cost associated with that? So that's something to consider. This kinda goes with it. Risk versus reward. There is a risk with not bringing over past data of people. I know some churches this might not work for if you have, like, membership. You you have a, you know, a membership. You're gonna have to somehow note that and and get that information in. If you have certain tracks that you're running, that could be difficult. But what what are you losing with just taking a plunge and jumping into it and making it work? There is rewards to that, there's also risks. So you just kinda have to weigh out those things as you're considering that. This goes with it as well, needs of your church. For us, we really needed to get our information switched over to Rock to help our ministries do what they do best. And so the the loss of previous data is not as important as what we're gonna gain by all of those things. So this this seems to be a really good fit for us. And just the last thing would be compliance. This is one thing that we've had to kind of think about, especially from a financial standpoint, is what do we need to keep for records in the future if somebody comes to us and says, hey, I need a giving. I've been being audited from the IRS. I need a giving statement from 02/2020. Can we do that? So those are just some things to keep in mind as you're moving forward. We made a plan for that. We have we have all those things kind of in place. But just think about those things as you're you're planning your development. Here's some lessons we've learned so far. Work with the right partners. This was the one we kind of learned the hard way. We spent a lot of money. We spent a lot of time with a partner that was not a good partner. And so just really vet your partners and find the people that know Rock, know what they're doing, can get you up and running, and have the knowledge that you're going to need to succeed. So this has been huge for us. Ask lots of questions. Josh can tell you I ask a lot of questions all the time. And the the rock community is great. There are so many people in this community that really wanna help. And so that's just don't be afraid to ask lots and lots of questions. And this one is we're working ministry, but we work with data and we work with stuff that's not very glamorous sometimes. But I would say take we can still take a step of faith. We really felt like God was calling this God was calling us to this to switch to rock. And it was just important for us to go ahead and take this step of faith knowing that he was gonna provide a way for us. And so we did do that, and I think he's been rewarding that. And then this one, be willing to start with the basics. We really are looking at what what is the minimum that we can still do ministry now, but that will have huge ups potential later. So that's that's been kind of our whole journey is let's just get started. Let's get everything in rock and start moving forward. And then we can add all the bells and whistles later. What are the reports we need? What are the tangible things that we need to have for our church to do ministry? Serving, giving, and children's check-in, those things, small groups. Let's get the let's go to the bare minimum, and then let's work from there. Because we have time and resources to build that later, but we have to start somewhere. So be willing to start with the basics. And I think that's all I have for the presentation, but we have plenty of time for questions. So