RX 24 - Stepping Stones To Success - Sena Brickwedel

Transcribed Content

Welcome everyone to our session. We have it's, great that we have, Church here from sunny, warm Florida for the coldest room at the conference here today. So let's give a warm welcome to Sina and Brandy. Hello. Hi, everyone. Good morning. Thank you so much for coming to our breakout. We're so excited to be here and to connect with each of you and share some of the things that we're learning and doing, and our hope is that we you'll be able to take something meaningful away from here and apply it at your churches to advance the kingdom. My name is Sina. I work at Christ Fellowship Church. I've been there for nineteen years and yeah. Nineteen years and eight years in the apps world coming out of more support ministry, and I get to do what I do with my friend and boss. Hi. I'm Brandi, and I've been with Christ Fellowship for seven years. And actually, the day that I started working, my first week was the first week we went live on Rock. I get the privilege of stewarding our apps and our development teams as well as our data analytics and reporting teams. So I've I've came from the secular world. I will never go back to the secular world. I love what I get to do, and I love what I get to do it for. Fun fact. You can't see them, but I have a lot of tattoos. I really like to get tattoos. My husband and I love to go boating and fishing, and I'm originally from here, so I'm in my homeland. I love it. Oh, yeah. Fun facts. Okay. First off, I'm app my job title is application support manager. And then the fun facts, I am voraciously learning German. I'm having so much fun doing it. So if you speak German, come and talk to me so that I can butcher your language with you. I'm also learning SQL, another language. Not as much fun, really, if I'm honest. It's my favorite. My favorite language. And I am an avid backpacker. I am going hiking 75 miles on the Appalachian Trail at the end of this month, I'm looking forward to that. Yeah. So today, we're here to talk about steps, really about how rock is functional. Now we didn't know what John was gonna talk about in terms of using the Lego analogy, but we love to lean into that. And it's our favorite thing about rock, that it's the perfect blend of flexibility and functionality, much like Legos that are blocks that you put together and can really create whatever you can imagine, much in the same way that Rock has that ability. And what I love about Rock is that not only can you build a ministry tool, can really design an experience for people. And so the example that we're going to show today kind of showcases building, taking some different components and putting it together. Hopefully, it's not intimidating. Our hope is that you will see you can do it. And, yeah. Yeah. That's great. Alright. Alright. So the we're gonna go over a specific project that we worked on, really that Sina worked on because she's the genius of the team. Christ Fellowship Leadership Values Project. So we we our old process was very cumbersome, very confusing, time consuming. When new staff would come on board, they would receive text messages, and they'd have to watch one video at a time and do it in like, once they finished one, they'd get another text message to go watch the next one. It wasn't a really pleasant process. So Sina worked with our HR team to really come up with a new process. And as part of that new process, we were going to have our whole staff team get a refresh. And there's actually 10 videos. And we wanted to better track that completion, and we we weren't doing a good job before, but now we are. Yeah. So leadership values, what are those? You know, we all our churches have core values that we they're probably kinda similar. For us, leadership values are really specific to staff. We believe that culture is really important and curating the culture, designing the culture, it's not a culture by default, but really tailored to not only do things well because what we say is how you do something is just as important as what you do. So if you succeed at the end of the day but you've stepped on a lot of people to do it, it's a big fail. So our leadership values really help define our culture because we believe that a life giving spirit filled culture is gonna help us deliver the message and mission of Jesus Christ. So 10 we have 10 leadership values. Oh, thank you. Okay. Now one of the things that I wanted to take a side shift and talk to you guys about, when I talk to different churches here at the Rock Conference and in the community, one of the things you guys ask us about or that we all talk about is how do you get not only how do you do things in Rock, but how do you actually have a successful project, a launch, something that people adopt and use once you've built it? Because we've definitely put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into projects, and they just don't take off, and it's very frustrating. So I went to we went to the church IT network last year because it was hosted down in our area, Palm Beach County, and I went to a breakout that was amazing. It was by Carl Peterson, and it was on how to do hard things, and he presented this Lipit Noster framework of how to do hard things, and it basically walks you through a great process of what you need to do. We tend to start with the action plan. Here's all of our steps. But I just wanted to share this with you because I found it really meaningful, and I hope that it helps you because it will really set up your projects for success. A lot of times, like with this project, it's kind of happening organically, but the larger project you have, the more important this becomes. So the first step is vision. What are we doing and why? In this specific project, we worked with HR. Their big dream was to send an email with a link to a page with all of the videos. That was what they asked for. And they wanted to be able to track what people did. And we're like, yeah, that sounds okay, but kind of boring. We can do more than that because many times, ministries want to offer you the solution that they want, but they don't know what they don't know. And so when you get innovators in the room and have the conversations, you're building relational equity, you're building influence, and you're delivering excellence. So the vision is important. Consensus. So consensus is really important, right? You want everyone to buy in that needs to buy in to the process. So in this one, we talked with our leadership development person who then went back to HR, took our suggestions, and then they went to senior leadership. They loved all the ideas. And then we We got the buy in. Yeah. They submitted a formal project for that. Skills. Skills are the expertise needed to actually do the project. We have great skills, but we have great partners too. We use Triumph Tech, and we like to say Charlotte, who's in the room today. She makes us look really good. Our staff thinks we're so smart because we have her in our back pocket. So, yeah, we're so thankful for that. Incentives are important. Well, we wish we could do monetary gifts, but that doesn't really work out so well to make people do things. But there's other ways. You can incentivize things by gamifying it, having fun. In this project, what did we do? Confetti. Oh, confetti. Confetti. Oh, we also at our staff meeting, like, was a deadline given, so if you had watched all 10 videos by the time staff meeting happened, you got your name put in a raffle, and we gave away prizes. Pretty good ones. Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes incentives are just helping people care not giving one more thing they have to do, but really helping your ministry care for people better and showing them that. Resourcing, providing the support needed for change. I've definitely failed at this. I think I know Rock so well that I think I'm delivering to the ministry what they need to do to accomplish this, but really really thinking through how to give clear expectation and direction on what needs they have to do. And then finally, the action plan. So if you've got a great vision, consensus, you've got all of these things in place, this is gonna succeed. Right? Like, I just really like this model because now the action plan is just the grease to get you there. And so why change fails is if we don't follow these six things. So if you don't have an action plan if you I'm sorry. If you don't have good vision, you're gonna have confusion. How many times have you actually, like, launched something and there wasn't really good vision that it failed? How many times have you launched something that there wasn't consensus on? If that happens, you're going to have sabotage. You're going to have people complaining about it, and you're not going to have that buy in. How many times have you not had the skills to accomplish it? Then you've got anxiety. If you don't have the resources, you've frustration. If you don't have incentive, you'll have resistance. And finally, if you don't have an action plan, you're on a treadmill going nowhere. So Scott Ballard was in here yesterday, and he talked about the I don't know. It was like the love email. It was like the email from someone complaining. And I was really convicted because there's been a lot of frustration at times, and we all have to deal with that frustration. We all have to deliver something and someone's not happy with what was delivered. We all have to deal with maybe some difficult people that don't understand technology but think that they know what they want. And they're just solving a they've got a solution, and it's not really the best way to solve it. So you're kind of fighting. There's that tension. I know Frank and Markham talked about that. His marketing team talked about that yesterday. So that's why change fails. So it's really this has been helpful. Alright. So in let's show some what we're doing in action. We're just gonna demo. What we decided is, hey. Let's put something right on the home page of Rock. This is our home page, and you can see our leadership values summer refresh. And Bill has watched zero of 10 videos. You can see there's a little click off to watch the videos. Okay. Dave here, he's watched two videos, so he's getting two gold stars, and it keeps track. Oh, Bella's watch seven. Notice that the panel turned to yellow from red. And then when you have watched all 10, you get the celebration guy. You get your 10 gold stars. And she turned green. Oh, yeah. And the top turned green, so it's done. And advance that one. The other fun thing you get is confetti. I've to hit play. We're a big fan of confetti. Yay. So every time they load the Rock homepage, they get confetti. And that came straight from a recipe from Jeff Richmond called Staff Celebration Confetti. Really love oh, stop that one for a second. We really love confetti around here. So we use his recipe, which allows you to celebrate staff birthdays, staff workiversaries. And if you're on our team, we have different customized confetti every time we load rocks. I have blue confetti every day. I get my blue confetti. Me too. Some of our favorites that are not on our team, we've given them confetti. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're a big fan of the confetti. All right. It's good incentive to get people in rock. Yeah, because they're like, hey, how do I get confetti? Yeah. We have had that. All right, so the other thing that we did is we did some report oh, here's the leadership value click off page. Basically, it's a content channel view that has the different videos. These are our leadership values, and you can see I've already watched them. If you hadn't watched them, it would say watch video. This right here is actually a workflow entry page. It looks like a video, but it's actually a workflow entry. So they hit complete, and then they would go back to watch the next one on that page. Yep. So some fun elements. I don't know what's next. Hold on. Play. Okay. So the next one, we're going to just show you our HR report. You want to lead that one? Sure. So of course, we want everyone to finish their steps. HR wants to be able to hold people accountable for getting those steps complete. So we did create a simple SQL report that captures all staff whether they've completed it or not. And we didn't add any other filters outside of the just filter options that come in the dynamic reports. But at the time when HR ran this, there was two nineteen people that had completed the training. We have four fifty people on staff. So there's a lot more that still had to go. But this was easy enough to hold people accountable for that. And again, like what Brandi said is we celebrated in our staff meeting those who completed it and had the giveaways. Alright. So how did we do that? Here's the LEGO pieces in Rock that we put together. So we created a step program, and then we added 10 step types, one for each leadership value video. And then we created 10 workflows, one for each step type. Really easy. That's not intimidating. You just create the first one and then copy and paste and change a few things in each one. We created a content channel type so that it was just what we wanted in it, and then we just added the content channel and then 10 items, one for each of the videos that would pull the STEP program and the workflow in there. Then we added a watch page, which you saw, and then the HTML block on the home page to do the celebration and the counter. We also we're not really gonna cover it in-depth, but I'll tell you what we did to get that completion date was we created a person attribute, leadership values completed with a date. It's pretty easy. Then we did a data view that looked at, hey, I wanna see everybody who has watched all 10 who has done all 10 steps but does not have a completion date. If they don't have a completion date, then we run a job that sends those people to a workflow that updates their completion attribute to today's date, and we run that daily. So that was pretty straightforward. And that's what we use for the report. Right, exactly. All right, so I just want to walk you through, and I hope you see how easy this actually is. All right, so there's maybe two spots that you might need to phone a friend. I know that we would and did. But a STEP program is really easy to set up. You add the name of your STEP program, which is Staff Leadership Values, and then we used one status, watched. That's all we did. It took thirty seconds. Done. Okay. Step type. So for each step, you're going to set up a step type within that program. Again, super easy. We named it the first video's title, and I think all of the checkboxes were default. The only one we unchecked was allow multiple because we didn't want to overwrite their initial view if they watched the video again. We wanted to preserve that date. The thing that took the longest for us was to pick those little icons and the colors, which is just fun. That's on the person profile right there. That's all her. She likes that fun stuff. You guys like that, right? It's fun. All right, so on the Steps tab, we just added a step block so that you could see those when you went to a person profile, which ones they completed, And that's really easy. We just added the block and selected the STEP program. Okay. All right. So now let's look at the workflow. So the workflow, because these are Rock users, we just set it to current person. They're already logged into Rock, so that was an easy win. Set the campus and then watch the video. That's actually a form. Like I said, we put the video in as an attribute and then have it on the form. The next one is an easy lava run to just check to see if they already have that step because we don't wanna overwrite it again. And if they don't have that step, we add a date into that step of completion and change their status to watched. And since this is a video they're watching, then we added a redirect to go back to that watch page. Pretty easy. And you just copied and pasted them to do 10 of them. That's right. Yep. So the attributes that were new to me that I hadn't used before steps, I'm just gonna show you those. This field type on the one on the back side is step program step type. So that allows you you can see, you can pick your step program and then your step type. So as you're copying your workflow, you know, this one is for video one. The next workflow, you're just gonna go in, change that to video two, and then you're gonna change something in Lava, which I'll show you in a second, but really easy. And then we use Wistia. We have so we use a media watch, Wistia media sync, but you don't have to. You can do YouTube video short codes if that is better for your church or you don't have a Wistia account. And Tiffany Bunny, who's in the room, I think she did an awesome breakout last year where they go through something very similar, a video step process, and they use YouTube. So if you're interested in knowing more about that, I would recommend you watch that video of the breakout. Okay. And then let's see. This is the lava for checking to see if they've completed a step. So you would just come into this action and change your IDs when you're copying and pasting the workflows for all 10 of those. And that's it. Yep. And so then the next step would be to create the content channel type, like a ten second change, if not less. And we just added a few attributes here. So we've got the I don't have my glasses on, and I can't see that far. We created the workflow type, the step program step type, and the video, and then we added there's a fourth attribute that we added for our next phase of this project, which Sheena will talk about later. And then we also created the content channel and another five seconds of your time. And then we added the content, 10 content items for each video, and that was easy breezy as well. Yeah. And then just a reminder, this is the watch page, and this is what the we just added a content channel view block onto the page and did some formatting with Lava. And and we had our our staff our senior leadership team, like, they spent a lot of time on, like, scripting and having our films team, like, record these videos. So they were really good. None of them are longer than I think the longest was seven minutes. So and the shortest was probably three minutes. So it was a really good way to get our culture and Mhmm. For everyone to watch it. Right. And so there's some lava here, and I'm not I'm okay at lava. I'm learning lava. But what Brandi taught me working for her is to become excellent at hacking and slashing lava. So if you haven't played around, just be experimental and see what you can do. I find what works in one area, I can kind of manipulate to fit somewhere else, and I might have to phone a friend if I get myself stuck. But this is the lava for how we formatted it. But, yeah, play around. Hack and slash is your friend. Okay. So the HTML block, we used a couple different items here to add the fun elements. The full screen celebration on the home page again, staff celebration confetti recipe. So I took what I took and added a stipulation to I followed his recipe, and we have versions where if your ID is our ID, we get confetti every time you have the home page. That's how we did that one. And but for this one, we did a if statement in Lava that if you're if you have a completion date, go ahead and play the confetti. So we modified it to be able to have staff have that. And then Google Font has a GitHub repository of emoji animations that are super fun, and you can load them into Google Chat. There's or you can load them into Rock. I have way too much fun playing with that too. And, yeah, so all you do is just copy the code, and it looks beautiful on HTML pages. I think for the celebration dude, I changed the size so he was a little bit bigger. And then the Countdown Lava was where we definitely needed help with that one, but we have Triumph Tech to help us look good on that. And we would be glad to provide any of that information if you were interested in more. We'll do a recipe where we detail all of that out if you're interested. And we know that this isn't exactly what you're gonna go and do at your church, but I hope that what you're seeing is you put components together and you can build some fun stuff. Right? That's our goal. So the next part, the next piece of the project that I'm working on is for onboarding staff, which is where this originally started. For I don't know how it is at your house, but when our staff come on for the first week, they don't know if they have three bosses, two bosses. They're still trying to find where they're navigating the building, and it's just a fire hydrant of information coming at them. So to ask them to do one more thing is kind of challenging, and there was not a great compliance level to watching those videos. So we have built we worked with HR, and they're what they wanna do is as soon as they have an acceptance letter, we have a video from our senior pastors welcoming them to staff, talking about the importance of culture to our heart and who we are, and then telling them about the leadership value videos that they're going to receive. Because most of them, unless they were a key volunteer, won't have access to Rock yet because they're not even it might be two weeks before they actually start, once their acceptance letters come. We're gonna send them a text with a tokenized link. Did you guys know you can tokenize text? I learned that. It's really helpful. So we just pass the person through to an external facing page that has all those that watch page, but it's externally faced so they don't have to be logged into Rock. And we added on that form a comment. HR wanted the comment to be added. I'm like, Well, what are you going to do with those comments? And they're like, We don't know. We just want them to make sure they've watched them. Like, Well, why don't we say, Hey, you can talk to your supervisor about these. So we're going to create a PDF with all of their comments and then in their one on one with their supervisor, they'll talk about the culture and their responses. So that's not the most fun incentive, but it's definitely an incentive to get it done. And I think that's what we have for you. And basically, I hope you see it was it's really not too hard. Take your time. And if you're wondering, how do you know what components to put together? I'll tell you my story real quickly. It's when I started working in rock, I actually couldn't stand what I was doing. Every day I walked, I I would drive into work, I was like, god, why do you have me doing this? I'm a creative. I like creative things, and I'm reading database manuals, and that's just not fun. And I was like, I know you have me here for a reason, and so I just leaned into it. And so we didn't actually have master class, the fir I think it was maybe the first or second master class. It might have been the first. I don't remember. But when that came up, I was like, we have someone on our church has to go to this because we just didn't have the knowledge. And we didn't have Rock U back in 2017, I think it was. So I went to Masterclass, and I just wanna plug Masterclass. It not only teaches you about the components, it teaches you how to think differently about how you can put things together, which tapped into my creative side because to me, creativity is problem solving and coming up with creative solutions. And it just radically changed the way I think. So I would really like to recommend Masterclass to anyone who's wondering how to how to figure out what components you need to build what you're dreaming of. And as Sina figured this out, and when I came on staff, I came from a development world, so I already had that solution mind set. But once Sina went to master class, she could now see all of the potential that Rock actually had. And we've really been able to enable our staff to think differently and start coming to us with their problems, not so much the solutions. It still happens. I know we all get solutions handed to us, but it was really helpful. So we hope this was helpful to you guys and helps you dream and think about how to celebrate. Include some confetti and cool emojis with whatever processes you need to use steps on. Yeah. So you're open for question.