RX 24 - Rock Reporting - Start with Strategy - Peter Sanders

Transcribed Content

Morning. I hope you're all ready. This is gonna be good. We're gonna talk about rock reporting, start with strategy, and let's give a warm welcome to Peter Sanders. Thank you all so much for being here. Thank you for choosing to spend part of your morning with me. When I saw the schedule, I marked like four or five other talks that I'd rather be at than my own. So I I appreciate you all choosing to be here. And thank you to those in the future that watch this on the subscription. So my name is Peter Sanders. I serve with Trader's Point Christian Church in in Indianapolis, Indiana area. We are a six campus church. We have about 8,000 to 10,000 weekend attendance depending on the time of year, about 190 on staff. I serve as the data analyst and application specialist on our ROC team. And if you don't know what that means, neither do I. But I get to spend a lot of time in our ROC system working with our ministries, trying to optimize how we use ROC and using the data that ROC provides in order to make ministries better at what they do. A little bit about me personally, this is my wife Alyssa and our two dogs, Chomper and Squash. And now that I've shown you a picture of my dogs, nothing else I say today matters. I know you all like me because I have dogs. So we live just north of our main campus. I've been on staff for about five years. My wife is a nurse and does crazy, incredible, cool things. She's way cooler than me. But, yeah, we we love being a part of the Traders Point family. I've actually been a part of that church my entire life, so it's been a real blessing for me to now get to be on staff with them in such a unique role. But you're not here to hear you're not here to listen to me talk about myself. You're here to learn hopefully a little bit about reporting. So why am I talking about reporting strategy today? If you've been on a similar track to me this week, you've probably already heard a lot of presentations about reporting data dashboarding. And I'll admit, a lot of the things I'm gonna say today, you've probably already heard. But I hope to package them in a way that's easily actionable, tangible, that you can take your next step. The reason reporting matters is that churches have been blessed with incredible resources, whether that be the manpower of the staff, generous contributions that people make financially, or the time that people devote to their church home. And because of this, we are called to be excellent stewards of the resources that we're given. And in order to do that, we have to make sure that we are being informed by data. Not necessarily data driven. The Lord is is the only one that that that's leading our ship. But we wanna make sure that data, as an old leader of mine consistently would say, has a seat at the table. So today, I hope that we can talk about how to do that effectively. And as you've probably already heard this week, we talk about numbers because numbers have stories behind them. They represent people. People represent lives, and lives represent eternities. So we wanna make sure that we are stewarding the resources, the impact we have well to impact as many eternities as we can. Another reason we want to talk specifically about strategy is that it's really easy to start running before you know how to walk. And if you start running before you know how to walk, you're probably going to trip or you're gonna run-in the wrong direction and have to course correct and spend a lot of time and energy getting to where you actually getting to where you actually want to be. Because of that, this is intended to be a start here presentation. My goal is to talk to the person in the room who is just getting on to Rock, isn't on Rock yet and is considering it, or just stepping into a role, in the data analytics insights world. But I hope that there's something in here for everyone. So where do we start? For me, I believe the most important thing we can do to make sure that we have an effective data strategy is start with definitions. I don't know about you, but I I've been in a meeting or two where I've walked in. The goal of the meeting was to talk about some initiative or or review the effectiveness of maybe a program or an event. And maybe ten to fifteen minutes into the conversation, the meeting has devolved into arguing or trying to determine what a thing at our church actually means. We started by trying to determine if our small group program is doing well, if the initiatives are succeeding and we're meeting our goals. And halfway through, we're arguing about what is a small group at our church. How are we categorizing small groups at our church? Are youth groups small groups? Are kids groups small groups? What do the numbers that we're showing on the screen actually mean? So in order to save you a lot of time and pain through those conversations, starting with definitions is the place to go. And the first question we want to ask is what do we care about as a church? A great place to start answering that question is your mission statement and your vision statement. Begin by contextualizing those in ways that are actionable and you can actually pull some results from those. I realize not everyone in the room gets a lot of face time with the leadership of your team. Hopefully you do or you have someone that you work with that does. But asking these questions is so important and making sure that key stakeholders in your organization have buy in with the answers to those questions will just propel the journey that you are going to go on after this. So first we want to determine what we care about. Is it discipleship? What is it outreach, global local outreach? Is it our weekend experience? Is it some combination of all of those things? Begin to put at a high level what are the things that we care about most as a church. And then take that a level down. The next question is what do those things actually mean at our church? And begin to put very specific definitions to them. If our church cares about discipleship, what is discipleship at our church? If it's groups, what is a group at our church? What types of groups do we care about at our church? And then once you get those definitions in place, you can start to build the measurements to measure that success. And then at that point, will start asking, are we measuring the right things? And it's important especially at the start if you are getting the luxury of starting with a clean slate to be very selective at first. It's really easy to start putting a ton of numbers and measures and metrics on a page. And the more numbers there are, the less all of them mean. So start by being very selective, very intentional with the first things that you want to focus on. And finally, this is one of those, in a perfect world, I realize this is not at all realistic but I wanna point it out anyway because this is a pain point that I've personally experienced a handful of times is asking, once you've answered those questions, asking, will this stand the test of time? I can't tell you how many times we've built out the structure and the process to capture metrics over time and then the definition changes. Groups at one time were only considering these types of groups and then all of the sudden, hey, we actually want to include this different type of group that we've had for however many years in the past but we didn't consider it a group up to this point. Or giving definitions, things like that. I realize we do not live in a perfect world and people's minds will change, people's definitions will change. But as much as you can influence from the start, finding things that will stand the test of time is extremely valuable and helpful. So once we've gone through this work of asking a lot of really good questions, defining really clear answers, our next step is alignment. Because it's quite possible that the people that you answer these questions with might not reflect the sentiments of your entire organization. So the next step is making sure that everyone on your team, everyone in your organization, as best as you can influence and as best as you can impact, making sure everyone is rowing in the same direction. And that starts by asking the question, does everyone know what we care about as a church? Now that we've answered that at the top level, are we cascading that down so that everyone else can clearly say, yes, as a church, our mission is blank. Our vision is blank. The things we care about are a, b, and c. And the reason this is so important is because that third question down, is everyone able to contribute good data, good insights, good support to what we are actually trying to achieve as a church? It's it's really easy for departments to kind of get into their own world and and have their own singular focuses, and you can begin to try to compile these organization wide reporting tools to understand the health of your church and realize that there are entire departments, entire teams that are completely in their own world going their own direction. And so again, as much as you can influence, making sure that everyone on the team is aware there's clear communication. There's there's clear communication of what matters and why reporting why good data matters. And then this leads us into systems. Everyone can know that good data matters, but if we don't have effective ways to capture that data, it doesn't really matter. As the saying goes, garbage in, garbage out. Thankfully, ROC is really effective at helping us capture good data if we have the systems and processes in place to make that happen. I'll talk more about how how Rock can help with this here in a little bit. But I do wanna sit with this for a little bit. Wanna make sure that we it's important to ask what data do we need. Again, the example of groups. If if groups is the the focus, discipleship's the focus of our church a a key focus of our church, what data do we need to collect? Well, we probably need to know what types of groups we have. We probably need to know how many people are in those groups, how many groups we have. It'd be nice to know are people actually attending the groups that they're in. And then can we get some feedback on the effectiveness of the groups? Can we see if people in groups are engaging in our church more or less than those that are not in groups? Plenty of questions we can start to ask of the data once we have it. But again, we have to have the systems in place to be able to achieve that. So do we have the clear processes in place? And once we have built them out, and hopefully you're able to collaborate between ministries, technology teams to do this well, continue to optimize the process. Because the first thing you create to do this will probably not be the best way to do it. And as you've likely seen this week, Rock is always iterating and developing. So there are always new and better, more efficient ways to get this data in. We don't at least personally, I I don't want this to become more important or more burdensome to our ministry folks just because we for the sake of good data. They're on a church staff to minister and shepherd people. They're not there to tally numbers and help us report. So I I wanna do everything in my power as a as a technologist on our team to make that process as smooth, as simple, as easy for them as it can be. And again, it's important it's important to look to Rock and the tools that they provide to do this. And finally, it's important to have an emphasis on uniformity and consistency. We wanna make sure that everyone's understanding of the data is strong enough so that they're actually putting the same data into the system. I I I went through a fun exercise a couple weeks ago of of pouring through our old attendance data that was in Excel spreadsheets from like 02/2005 to 2013. That was a trip. But it was just interesting to see how like every year there was like different notes about how they were defining attendance. That one year it was, oh, this was our auditorium attendance and our group attend or auditorium attendance and like Sunday school attendance. And then the next year, like halfway through the year, there'd be a note that says, oh, now we're counting volunteers. And then a year and a half later, by the way, this number now includes something additional like the middle school or the high school group that meets at night. And we started counting that like six months ago and didn't put a date on it. So making sure that you have the systems in place to have that uniformity, that consistency because as you look over time, a trend can be very deceptive if in one year you're counting just adults and then the next year you're counting adults and people that walk by on the street that never actually walk into your building. So the best way to do this, and I know this is no one's favorite word, is documentation. And I'm speaking to myself first and foremost because I am very bad at it. I'm very bad at doing it. But this is truly, documentation is such an important step in order to make sure that our data collection, our data, the data that we have, the data that we're interacting with is uniform and consistent over time across different ministry areas. So we've talked about definitions. We've talked about alignment. We've talked about systems. By now we have asked our leadership a ton of questions and they're probably really annoyed with us. But we get to go to the fun part now which is implementation. Let's make some magic happen. And thankfully, ROC is incredible at helping us with this. So in the next section, I I just wanna spend some time walking through some of the out of the box ROC tools that you can use to begin your reporting adventures. At the end I'll point to kind of where we've gone as a church but the focus again is just where you can start right away. So the first tool I want to bring up are data views. So these are, this is a great out of the box tool for gathering lists of entities of really any type in Rock. People are probably the most obvious example But you can also query anything from groups to group members, interactions, connection requests, workflows. Anything that's in Rock, you can query it with a data view. I'm not going to go into best practices on building data views. There are plenty of resources in the community on how to get started with those. But yeah, that is what I believe to be the best first place to start. And even within that, start using data views to answer the key questions that you answered at the beginning of this process. So what does our church care about? How do we start capturing the people or the entities that answer that question? And and putting those in a place that they're very clearly defined as these are our foundational data views for our engagement or our vision or our mission and protecting those so that somebody can't stumble upon it and get curious and start changing all the filters and then it's meaningless again. Another important point is organization, folder structure, all of those fun things. Just making sure that the way that you have all of your data views are laid out cleanly and easily so that you can find what you're looking for in the future. Again, I'm not going to dive deep into that. There are a lot of really excellent presentations, resources in the community. I'll specifically point to a presentation last year that Frank Grand did on how his church organizes their data views. It was very helpful for me. I took a lot from it and applied it to our situation. So I'm not going to reinvent the wheel today. I'm just going to point you to someone that knows what they're doing and all of that again is through the subscription. So we've talked about data views. The next great tool to start using are metrics. So this is great for point in time data. So your data view tells you who and how many and then your metric can start capturing how many over time. The nice thing about metrics is that they're very flexible with their input. A great thing about starting with data views and then moving to metrics is that you can use data views to populate metrics. So if you build a data view for how many people are in a small group at your church, build that out and then you can build a metric right after that that says every week or every month, go to that data view and grab how many people are in the small group and save that for the date that it runs. You can also use parameters and partitions so that you can do that by campus, you can do that by group type. It's very, very flexible and it's but it's also very simple. It's easy to start with but then it can grow with you as you grow in your understanding of the ROC tools. And as the list shows over there, there are plenty of ways to input metrics starting with just manual input. And that can be going to the metrics page in internal rock and clicking the plus button and adding a number for the day. There are also some very nice UI ways to make that easy for staff and volunteers. You can put that on your public website assuming you've got some security so that people aren't just like throwing random numbers into your metrics. But you can make it so that volunteers can go out, put a head count. If they're counting attendance on a Sunday, they can go to a very specific page. They can get all of the partitions for their campus, plug in a head count number. It goes into the metric and staff don't have to worry about going in and doing that themselves. And then if you really want to have some fun with it, you can put some workflows around it to remind them, to tell them if it is or is not, or if it has or has not been submitted yet, things like that. So again, there's so much as with everything in ROC. There's so much you can do with it but it's also simple enough that you can start where you're at and just start making steps towards your strategic goal. I think I've hit everything I wanted to well, one more thing with metrics is they are very easy to move up into reporting tools. So once you started to collect metrics, you've got time series data on attendance, groups, engagement, anything you can think of in ROC. Then once you're ready for that, you can start pulling those into reporting tools, visualizing those in useful and compelling ways. So we did talk about organization. The same thing applies to metrics. It's the same folder system, a similar folder system to data views. Be strategic with that. Make sure that there's logic and reason to how you put metrics where they are so that you can find them. Future you will thank you for how you choose to organize today. Finally we get to the fun part, reporting. So now we've collected, we've answered important questions. We've started to collect really good data. We've started to put together some of those pieces in Rock. And now we can pull those out into reports, dashboards, dynamic reports, a lot of things that come out of the box with Rock. Reports are a great way to find out more about the people that you've queried with a data view. Dashboarding blocks are a very simple and easy way to start putting some data view and metric data into a simple compelling KPI visualization. Just a couple words of wisdom that I've experienced. As much as it may be tempting to just put a fun KPI with a number and a little gauge on a page by itself, as much as you can always put data in reference to something. Don't just put a number on a screen. Because you might know that 5,000 attendance for the week is really good but future you or future someone in your position or other stakeholder might have no clue what good or bad is in your context. So as best as you can, always compare it either over time to historic data or set very clear specific goals and compare the metrics, the KPIs that you're representing to those goals. Other tools, dynamic reports, those put some of the filtering ability into the hands of your staff members and stakeholders so that they can begin to interact with the data themselves. They can start to ask some of those questions and answer it for themselves. Pretty easy out of the box solutions. And then as you level up, there are plenty of places to go with reporting once you've exercised out of the box tools and begin to sharpen up some of your own, some of the tools in your tool belt as well. There's a lot of really great things you can do with dynamic data blocks and lava with SQL. And then third party tools like Power BI, Tableau. Yeah, there's just a great expanse of possibilities beyond just what's in Rock. But again, today is not the purpose of that conversation. But if anybody wants to talk dashboarding, advanced reporting, always happy to have those conversations. I'm a big Power BI proponent and love to chat about that whenever possible. So just, I wanted to share a couple examples of how we've used some of those advanced additional tools in our context. And so on the top left, this is a Power BI dashboard that we developed to be our like executive level report. So we've got our essentially this is showing at the top level five KPIs. Under the hood, there's about 20 different measures, data points that are all being pulled in to tell us how we're doing in the core areas that we care about as a church. And so we've got a red, yellow, green gauge for each indicator that's based on the goals that we've set to tell us if we're hitting the mark, if we've got some work to do, or if we need to pay special attention to that area. And then those gauges are representing the key metrics within that. And then on the bottom right, this is a dynamic data block. So this is using some some HTML, some Lava, some SQL just to, a at a smaller scale, look at a specific ministry, some of the goals that they've set, and give them the ability to see at a high level how are we doing in a specific space. And then at the bottom give you that tabular data of who are the actual people behind these numbers and how can we shepherd them better. So yeah, we have been through the the high level, highway speed planning for ROC reporting strategy. We talked about establishing clear definitions, making sure that our organization is aligned, and then building the systems to get that data into Rock effectively. And once it's there, utilizing all the fun capabilities that Rock has to make your reporting dreams come true. So before I end, just a few random parting words of advice. Start now. Wherever you're at, take a step. If it's just having those conversations with your leadership, start start now. If you know that you've got some some good data in your system but you haven't started to leverage it yet, start learning about data views and metrics and putting some of those together. If you're feeling pretty comfortable with your reporting but know that there's more you can do, start learning about some of those additional tools and jumping in. But it's also important to do what you can where you're at. If you don't know anything about SQL, don't expect to start building SQL reports when you go home to your church next week. There are tool sets available at every level from beginner to very, very advanced. So figure out where you're at. Start utilizing the tools you can and then keep learning and growing. We all have room to grow. We all have opportunities to learn more, to sharpen our our tools in the tool belt and further the kingdom of God. And finally, as you've probably figured out by most of the slides in this presentation, ask a lot of good questions. This is so important in reporting and data analytics that we can do a lot of work that doesn't end up mattering because we didn't ask the right questions at the beginning. So I encourage you, start start and continue to ask a lot of good questions to stakeholders, to your leaders to make sure that the work you're doing is pointing back to the mission and vision of your church and furthering the kingdom. That's all I have. I think we've got a good chunk of time for questions.