RX 24 - A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Church Utilizing Rock Web and Mobile - David Belk

Transcribed Content

Continuing on this afternoon, we have a behind the scenes look at church utilizing rock, web, and mobile. Please join me in welcoming to the stage David Belk. Hey. As he said, my name is David Belk. I'm with Venture Church out of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I'm just going to kind of unpack what we've done with through Rock with our website. Disclaimer, I'm not a designer as you will be able to tell by the presentation. This is just kind of an outline of what works for us. It's not going be a fit for every single person. But the cool thing about Rock is you can make it unique to yourself. This is not going to be a technical presentation. It's just going be an overview. So if you're here for a technical web, I'm not going be offended if you go. A little bit about myself. This is my family, me and my wife there, my son, some friends. Community and family are very important to me. There's no way we could do what we do working on a staff without community surrounding you. And whenever you're thinking through going, thinking about going through this process, you're probably not going to be able to do it alone. Whether that's reaching out to people in the community through chat or the community that you already have existing on your staff. If your staff does not currently support you in this, take that as a challenge to step up and encourage them and kind of give them direction into that area and be patient with them as well. Because at the end of the day, they're the community that's going to be able to partner with you and help make this happen. Because there's no way I could go in and design a website. There's no way I'm writing HTML. We use Triumph, I highly recommend them, to help design and create the website. So yeah, that's a little bit about me. But we'll move on. Alright, this is a verse that we've kept in front of our staff throughout our whole process. We switched to rock about three years ago. And this verse just continuously resonates with all of us. Because everything we do in rock is a discipline. Because we want it to be accurate, we want it to correct, we want to present the best product as possible. It doesn't have to be perfect, but we do want to make sure that we're disciplined in honoring God through the stuff that we're putting out there. Whether it's devotions, whether it's websites, whether it's the message that we put out there. So it does take time. It does take discipline. It does take effort. Don't think that it's just going to come easy. Before I get in, I do want to encourage you to start with your why. Why are you considering switching to a rock website? If it's because you want a billboard to make announcements, to just get information out there, Rock may not be the best choice for you. You can design a website like that on Rock. But I think it works best whenever your goal is to engage with people on a deeper level and help create disciples in your organization and also challenge people in their walk with Christ. We'll kind of go through some of the tools we've created throughout this to kind of help. So before we get into that, dominoes, everyone knows what those do. One domino has to fall and knock the next one down. This wasn't a day one thing for us. This was we launched three years ago on Rock. We got our data correct. We got all of our information correct. We got the vision for this correct. We got people on board with using it. We trained people before we ever moved. So don't think that if you are just now switching to Rock, you need to go ahead and just jump day one onto the mobile app and the web. Make sure your content's there, make sure you learn how to use it, make sure you take the time to do it correctly. And I would encourage you to maybe switch to data first. Does that mean you can't do it all in one? No. I've heard of churches that do switch to rock for everything at once. What we were doing before, which may or may not be where some of you are, so we were using Squarespace for our website. Squarespace was not a bad product. It was very easy to use in the sense of just going in making a change. But at the end of the day, it was actually a little harder. We were also using SubSlash for our app. I can't speak to where they're at now. We haven't used them in a couple of years. Also very easy. But at the end of the day, both products were actually more difficult to work with because it meant that our content had to live in multiple different places. So someone had to go in there, organize all the content and make sure that it was in every single place correctly. And oftentimes we were leaving out an entire sermon on the app whenever it was on the website just because of a simple mistake or a simple oversight. But having one place to put everything, which I'll get to an example of what that looks like through a video in a little bit, has been tremendous for us. And it's really saved us staff resources at the end of the day and freed our staff up that used to do that for other things. This is just kind of a quick glance of our website, what it looks like. And we have almost two different sites. The first site that we have is the logged out site. This site is more of that billboard view. It's more of hey, come and see who we are as an organization. See if this is a place that you would belong. And we hope to present it in a way that they make a decision of yes, this is a place that I want to check out and come. And if you see the next steps, really hard to see there. Let me pop over to the website. The next step here is plan a visit. Watch on demand. Or hey, if you're not logged in and you're looking for more features, we want you to log in because we want to know you. More about our church. Welcome to Venture Church. This is who we are. Find times and locations. Here's pictures. See if you'll fit in here, which I promise you, you will. Everyone does. Quick, the latest message that pops up through our content channels, upcoming events, share your story, and then different ministry areas. And that's basically what we chose as hey, these are the most important things about our church. If you've never visited and we want you to know who we are. They do have the option over here to find anything on our website. So we're not completely locking them out of our website. They can, we're just not presenting it to them directly. I'm going to go ahead and log in because this is actually going to take me to the profile. But that way I'll be logged in whenever we come back. Okay. So that's the logged out view and that's the heart behind it. Home page, just talked about that. Logged in view, once you're logged in, it now becomes a little bit more customized to you. You just saw a glimpse of the home page. I'll go over that in more depth in just a second. The homepage actions change. They're no longer find a campus. They're now encouraging you to, if you've not been baptized, get baptized. If you're not in a house church, join a house church. If you've not served, then serve. If you are doing those, if you see at the top, it's now watch on demand, read the Bible plan, read the daily devotion. I'm gonna go back to the homepage so you can see it a little bit more clearly. Changing the actions. Still welcome. The message, presenting campus events now. The events are now dynamic because we know the campus that you're on. And then you've got more resources. So the resources are the next steps that we want you to take to help hopefully steward you to be closer to Christ. Play from cruise line. Okay. The profile page. I was gonna show you my profile page just a second ago, but my all of my information's on there. Please don't show up at my house if you saw my address. I will welcome you. But you know, be kind of creepy. So there's my family. As you see again, we're presenting, hey, this is what we want you to do as a church. Our strategy is invite, invest, impact and ignite. And those are obviously inviting is straightforward. Investing is investing in community, so getting plugged into a house church. Impacting is serving and igniting is giving. And if you're doing those, then it's gonna highlight. Who has a fantastic strategy of measuring the invite piece? Raise your hand. Anyone? Okay. Because I invite, mine's gray. We've kind of played around with some ideas. We have some invite links on messages that measure the invite piece. But still like that's not the % great way. So that's a piece we're still figuring out. So full disclaimer. We'll get to the seven marks later if I've got time especially. But that's a tool that we use to hopefully disciple people and help them grow in their relationship with God and their relationship with serving others. Brief overview of our mobile app. This is incredible, also designed by Triumph Tech. I really appreciate their work and everything that they've done for us. But once again, whenever you're logged in, you've got your profile with next steps. The badges light up. The giving badge is actually a little bit more dynamic on this one. If you have given within thirty days, it's bright orange. Sixty day turns a little bit like dull. One hundred and twenty days is almost nonexistent. And then past that it goes back to gray. Because giving is something that we want you to continuously do. House church, you're in a house church, you're not. You're on a serving team, you're not. Obviously we've got the message. We've got the ability to check-in. Right now that's the WebView version of mobile check-in. Message knows daily devotion. That's what it looks like on a Sunday morning. If you log into it right now, you would not be presented with check-in. Survey definitely wouldn't be there. Message notes would not be there. And then you would see daily devo and bible reading plan because it's during the week. Prayer has been a huge one for us. I think I've got a little bit more on prayer later. So I'll talk about that one, but I love that section. This is a little bit more, group details. I love group leaders being able to see their groups, to be able to manage their groups, to be able to take attendance in there is really incredible, see their group members' information straight from the app. And then we've got scheduling. There's a groups finder if you see it over here to the right. We are house our house churches are based on locations. So we search by address and they pick the closest one to them. So we've got all that built in. They can sign up for a house church there and then events is a newer feature that we're working on. It's not released yet. So just kind of bringing our calendar to the mobile app where we did not have that before. Some new features, some of these were announced yesterday morning. Person search is coming very soon. We're going to release that hopefully next week. So you can go to a person's profile. You can now interact with that person's profile, add reminders and connections. Reminders are one of those features and notes are also one of those features that we have not used very well in the past. We had to have them. I knew about them. But it wasn't easy to go in and say, okay, I'm talking to this person. Let me jump on my phone. Let me go to Rock. Let me go to their profile. Let me know all this, log in. Well, once you're on the app and all of this is available on the app, it's as simple as pulling it out of your pocket. It's already logged in. You go to your person search. You add the note on their profile. You add a reminder on their profile. Hey, this person said they're having surgery whenever I'm talking to them. I'll follow-up on that date just simply going back to the app. This person's interested in baptism. Let me go to their profile and let me add a connection directly from their profile. So I'm really excited about those features. We haven't started using them yet, but we will soon as well. As you can see the reminder dashboard, that's the way it looks. And then SMS conversations is coming as well. We will have the ability to send messages directly from the app. These are some of our engagement tools. Some really fun projects. If you come talk to me about these, I might talk to you about Holy Week. I'm not going to talk to you about the Christmas one because it does not follow best practices at all. I wrote it a year and a half ago, Had no idea what I was doing. And I would do it very differently if I did it today. I would use content channels. This is all just like hard coded in there. I think it's actually a web view. So I wouldn't recommend it but it does allow us to now have cool features that are dynamic on our site based on stuff that we can put on a person profile. We are using an attribute here to see if they've opened up the door for the day of the advent calendar. And whenever they open up the door, they go into whatever the presentation is for that day, whether it's a devotion, whether it's hey, download this wallpaper, an action we want them to take for the day, something for their family. And they go back out to the calendar, the door is now open. And then every time they go the next day, the next door would be ungrayed out and they'd be able to click on it and continue there. That's one of my favorite things. It's snowed little venture symbols because our icon looks a little bit like a snowflake. So that was fun. Something that was definitely not possible before in our old system. Holy Week content, I did build this out through content channels and I love it. Literally just walking through the week of Holy Week. Pastors giving intentional content through there. We can also measure their engagement to these pieces which is a huge thing because whenever you go to run data views and reports, you can kind of see who's engaging with your church that may not be attending. And you can reach out to them in a different way than you would be reaching out to other people. And then you can also see people that may be using the tools that you haven't seen in a while and send them a quick message. So more engagement tools. I had briefly hit on this earlier. This is in both of our this is the web view. So that just made the screenshots look like an app. We have the wheel which is just kind of a self assessment on where you're at on what we call the seven marks. And the seven marks are just seven different points that we picked out of scripture and we said, hey, this is the mark of being a disciple. Where are you at on a scale of one to five? And then we're using chart JS to present the chart of your result. And the goal is for it to be a perfect circle and a wheel so that you can smoothly roll through your life of discipleship. And then if you are low in an area, it presents, hey, check out these resources in this area. And if you see over there like life rhythms, that's one of them. You will have the message on life rhythms and then you'll have all the content that can help you grow in those areas that you're weak. So a little bit about behind the scenes like what's powering everything. This is why you may or may not be here. This is something that I didn't know going into it as well and especially our communications team. I kind of presented this to our communications team and they were like, okay, we really don't want to switch. We really don't know what it takes. And they got into it. Day one, I don't think they would have switched if they knew everything that went into it because it was a really big learning curve for them. But now that they're in it, they're rocking, they're doing amazing, pun. I'm really proud of them. I had to support them for a season but now they're pretty independent in doing all of this because they know where to go to do everything in rock. And it's been awesome. So first piece, we are using a CDN. It really helps with optimizing images. If you'll notice, let me actually go to this page because that's the best way I think to do this. Serve. If you notice this image right here, it's dynamic based on the size of the site. One thing we wanted to focus on were faces because people matter. We didn't want it cropping out the faces of the people as it moved and just having this weird a rail over here off to the side that we're presenting to mobile viewers and all that. So we were able to we I did not do that. Triumph was able to use the CDN in a way that cropped faces, like cropped it in towards faces and really focused on the people element of it. Because at the end of the day, no matter what we're doing in ministry, people are always at the center of what we're doing and we wanted to present that on our site. Content channels, extremely powerful. Whenever I said earlier people were putting stuff in a bunch of different places, all over the place. It wild. But now they can come back here to the content channels whether it's a daily devo, whether it's a weekend message, whether it's a podcast for our house churches, whether it's the content, the leader guides for that house church. All of that just lives in one single place. So they're constantly just going back to it. As you see here, kind of small, we do have all of our video content and under like messages, we'll have the message notes as a child item in there. All of our devotions which are written primarily by volunteers and they're put in through a workflow. And the workflow creates the item in the content channel and our communication staff goes in, they edit it to make sure that it's good. It doesn't show up until it's been edited and kind of up to their standards. And then they approve it. And once they approve it, then it will show up once the date is met that it's supposed to show up on. We have a Bible reading plan, which is an incredibly powerful tool as well. Featured events, I didn't mention this on the home page earlier. But if you're logged out, we will have a big featured event card because that's kind of what we want to push people to. Hey, here's what's happening. Here's the big thing happening at the church right now. And hopefully, it's an opportunity to draw them in to visit for the first time. If you're logged out, it kind of goes or logged in, it goes smaller because it's less highlighted for you because you're probably looking for that event. And we're also not trying to be a billboard. We're trying to be an engagement tool. Vimeo sync. So we put all of our videos in Vimeo and Vimeo syncs everything into Rock. So whenever we go into Rock into the content channels, the videos are already created there and then we just have to link the child items. We can rename it because sometimes our staff follows a naming structure of Vimeo that they don't follow in Rock. So they rename it, they attach the child item, they attach the parent item of the series, and then it will show up. Vimeo also syncs it to YouTube for us because we put all of our content on YouTube because we believe in allowing people to find our content as organically as possible. So that handles everything for us and it's been a huge game changer from that perspective. More about content channels. These are kind of the way it's structured. You can see the parent item up there is the series. And then in the series, have all of the mini, like the child items there which would be the messages. And then at the very bottom there you can see the message notes that are attached to that. And on Sunday morning, the message notes will be on the home screen for you to be able to see on the app. That's kind of the child item structure we have there. More about content channels, I'm going to pop back over to the site and go back to the home page. And I'm going to go to the daily devotion. The daily devotion is something that I love presenting to our people. It helps them grow in their faith every single day. You've got lists, whatever devotions you want to read. Let's just go to the latest. You can read through the devotion. Well, let's say, oh wait, I forgot to read the scripture first. You're able to kind of click over because these are linked back to the current day's scripture. And then it's going to, you know, read the scripture and you're like, okay, I'm done with that. From the scripture, you can either read the family content which is geared more towards younger children or you can read the devotion that you originally intended to read. That's not the only way to get to it. If you had started with a bible reading plan, you would go to the appropriate devotion. All right. And once again, those are primarily written through volunteers. It's actually a pastor's devotion that's up there right now. The Bible reading plan is handled through a persistent data set. So it's cached in the memory and then you're able to pull it up quickly without having to have a load on the server every single time we go to it. Calendar is an incredible feature because we're able to use the calendar across the entire site. And there are several different sections. The kids page has its own calendar. There's a overall calendar. And then there are campus calendars. So if we come here to the home page, it's campus events there. Or we can just go to events here, which is all events at every campus. Or if you go to your profile, actually, let's see. Never mind, we didn't put that there. Looking for my campus. If you go to my campus, it's going to automatically know what campus you're at. And then you can see this is what's going on at the campus. You can also come down here to kids. And based on what Rock knows and all of our tags in Rock, if this will load. Yep. There's a calendar here, you just can't see it. All right. I'm going to give up on that. But there's a calendar right there that is geared to just the kids events so that whenever you're looking at the ministry pages, there we go, you'll be able to see the events that pertain to that ministry area. And there are two ways to create calendar items. You can either do it through the calendar section in Rock or you can also create them whenever you're going through. If you have the room management plugin, you can choose to go ahead and create a calendar item there. You can set it to be unapproved until your communications team can go in there, edit it to their standards and approve it. Prayer feature. One of my favorite features that we have. You're able to go into the app, you're able to submit a prayer request and then have other people pray for you. We originally chose to moderate every single prayer request and that was, you know, don't even have to say it. It was not okay. So we decided to turn on the report as inappropriate button. So if something is thrown in there that's completely inappropriate, Then I had an example of that. There's basically someone on the screen that you probably can't read that said, hey, be praying for my video release that's coming out Thursday at 2PM at this link. And that's something that got reported as inappropriate because it's not really a prayer request. Like yes, we can pray for him internally as staff and hope his video release goes well and honors God. But not every single person in the church needs to put him on the prayer list as like the same person going through cancer, know. And we have had some wild things like pray for my cousin. He's yeah I probably shouldn't say that. Yeah, vulnerability there. But then you can also go into ROC and you can manage, I think if it goes to the next slide, you can manage the prayers there. So you can unapprove them. You can say hey this prayer is not approved. By default, we have them all as approved. If they mark as public, will show up in the app and if they're approved. And it will also show the prayer count, which right here, can't really see it, but there's a prayer count going on there. So if someone logs back in the app, they can see hey someone's prayed for me. 23 people have prayed for me and it's unique to individuals. Connection opportunities are huge. We absolutely love these because these are a lot harder to break. We have two ways that you're two primary ways that you're putting the connection request. And that's through these connection opportunities and that's through a communication card. The communication card is a workflow that's susceptible to breaking. Have any of you all had a workflow break? I know I'm not the only one. So we have had some issues in the past. With connection with opportunities, it's direct. You're using this block that comes in rock. You're saying, hey, I want this connection opportunity based on the block settings to show up and put them in this connection request. And it's simple, it's straightforward, it's to the point. It has never had any issues for us. So that's what that looks like. And then it's your connection request that you have in Rock. Sign ups, a little bit newer feature. I don't know many other people using this probably because I haven't asked. But we love it. We've used it for everything from our partnership class just because it's a very simple registration. There's not much that you do to set it up. It's just adding a new time. It's adding a new section there. And we really appreciate that feature. We've used it for serve opportunities. Our main campus hosted and we're about to all host another one, a Christmas store where they said, hey, we've got 23 time slots that we need parents to sign up for and come in in fifteen minute intervals. And three parents at a time can come in in those fifteen minutes to sign up for it. And they were like, I know this is going to be really difficult. I know it's gonna be really hard. It's a big ask there. I was like, no, absolutely not. Took me maybe five minutes to set everything up with this feature because it has all of that natively built in. So I'd really highly recommend that. It also pulls their data in a rock. You can tag them as a prospect or however you do your connection statuses and then you can kind of track their engagement. Because we were serving outside people, we were able to see, hey, this person signed up for the Christmas store opportunity and they came back two weeks later and checked in their children. And that's really a cool way to measure the impact. Registrations, I'm sure most of you have seen registrations. Something that we've started doing since we launched the website because people do log in primarily. And this is for two reasons. One, it encourages people to create a log in if they don't already have a log in. Because whenever you go to an event, I'm sorry, we require them to sign in to an event to register for an event. That encourages people to create an account if they don't already have one. But it also helps with data integrity. One of the biggest places that we saw we were getting duplicates were from event registration. Because people will go in, they'll put different phone numbers, they'll put their children's phone number on their profile and all this. And just allowing the sign in brought a lot more clarity to the process for our people. But it also, even though they may have had to create an account, creating an account was less of a process than entering all of their information over again. So they sign in, information's already there, half the registration's complete for them. They can edit anything, their profile's updated and rock and we're good to go. It didn't completely eliminate it. So don't get your hopes up too much. But it did help a lot. Giving, we love giving in the app. We use MyWell, highly recommended them. App and website, we're about to have native giving in the app as well. That should be coming with the rest of our feature soon. And Apple Pay, I'm excited about that. Group Finder, like I said, churches. They are geographically based. I've said house churches a lot, but I've not really explained what those are. Some people do small groups. We used to do small groups before COVID. Love small groups topic based. They were topic based, they were great. We found that people would kind of cycle through them and they would use the off ramps as a time to get out and never come back. So we made a decision after COVID especially, one, we never wanted to be shut down again and kind of have our people out there not able to have a community that they're surrounded by and cared for. But we also wanted people to be so known that if they kind of slipped out the back door, like we wouldn't we would have an idea. And we would have the people who are pastors, lay lead pastors over these groups that we have trained up caring for them and ministering to them. So it takes a big load off of the campus pastors. We've actually had a campus pastor who had no idea if one of the people he was close to was in the hospital, and he was like, oh my gosh, I'm panicking because I haven't reached out to him. But his house church pastor was there sitting with him whenever he got to the hospital with him. So he was very glad to see that. But they're geographically based. Our goal is to have a house church in every community, in every neighborhood to where whenever people go to sign up, they're finding one close to them and they don't have to drive more than ten minutes to their house church. So that's kind of what that is. And that's why this group finder is so powerful for us is because we can then use location to search for those. Group toolbox, we kind of hit this on this earlier in the app, phenomenal feature. Our web group toolbox is a little bit more powerful than the app. We can, if this was a serving team, which I've got the schedule over there, we do allow volunteers to schedule. That's taken a huge load off of our, especially kids ministry volunteers because they can go in, place them on a schedule, see if they've accepted and declined, kind of interact with them from the volunteer aspect. And we use it from the profile page in the app based on the groups that you're in. House church passers also have a toolbox there. They can see very basic information, phone numbers. They can see their addresses and they can also see what they're doing. Those little badges down there aren't coming up very well. But we know obviously, yes, they're in a house church. They're in this group. We know if they're serving. We know if they're partnered. We know completed the seven If they've completed the seven marks, can click on that and kind of see what areas they're weak in so that we as house church pastors can then go to these people and have intentional conversations based around what they know. Workflow forms, everyone may or may not have used a workflow form but they're all native in Rock now. Once again, you can have it based on if they're signed in, hide the name, the person entry block area just like we do over the contact us option. So that's been helpful. Same thing helps prevent duplicates as well if you're primarily signed in. Considerations, I kind of went to my communication staff and I was like, hey guys, you all have been doing a phenomenal job. But we've got a bigger vision here as an organization as a whole and we're going make this change. During that process, if I was a jerk about it, if I had gone to them and I like, hey guys, we're doing this if you like it or not, it's going happen. Were they happy about it at first? No. But at the end of the day, was better for them. So I just encourage you that if you are not part of the communications team, be very sensitive to them because this is going to affect them more than anyone else on staff. And it's probably going to turn the world upside down because they've been doing something the way they've been doing it for probably ten years. And they're going to have to learn something new. And you're going have to walk beside them, teach them, train them, and support them through this whole process. And that's okay. Also be ready for your workload to dramatically increase as a rock admin for just a season until they get a hold of it. Because you do have to be intentional about caring for them and supporting them through this. So if there are any questions, we'll take those.