RX 24 - You are Sent: How Rock Has Helped Us Manage Missions Trips - Scott Ballard

Transcribed Content

Welcome, everyone. Appreciate you coming. And we are ready to kick off another session. Let's welcome Scott. Thank you. But otherwise, we'll get started talking about mission trips and the Summit Church. The first slide I always start with is talking about my awesome family. You probably, if you've been in one of my sessions, are tired of hearing about them. But these are my kiddos. The two in the front are lovingly known as the ROC twins. We were placed with them in foster care in at ROC twenty seventeen in Chicago. And so every year, I kind of use the ROC conference to kind of age them up and show their growth. But they just turned seven years old. Prior contrary to Aiden's face there on the left, he actually loves our family. And on the right there, as we're staring at my mom off camera, who's probably making smiley faces or whatever. But we've been in North Carolina for four point five years now, thirty nine years in Texas. I was at the Village Church, several of the guys here. And really, like a Rock Hall of Famer is in our midst now. So you guys need to meet David if you haven't. He's fantastic. And then I serve as the Digital Strategy Director at the Summit. I don't know what that means, just like you don't know what that means. But here we go. You are sent. You are sent is a phrase that I heard the first time I walked through the doors of the Summit Church, and I was super confused. Now now I look back and I'm like, you're not very smart person that you didn't put this together. But when people greet you Or sorry. When people On the way out of the door, the last thing the pastor says is you are sent, It's a little bit weird, or it was for me. And then I walked upstairs. So we're this is like during my interview phase. I walk upstairs and everything's branded like a a airport terminal. And I was like, this is the most unwelcoming, uninviting kids area that I think I've ever seen. Who wants to hang out in an airport terminal? But the summit is really, really serious about missions. There's a lot of things that I feel like we do really well. There's a lot of things that we need a lot of help with. Missions is not one of those things that we need a ton of help with outside of God's grace and provision and power to change lives. They have a they had a mission before I got there, planting a thousand churches in a generation. And to date, we're well over 600 of those. And most, I'd say 80% of those are overseas. So you can't go to the summit and not hear this phrase. Every staff meeting, big or small, ends with pastor JD saying this to our staff, reminding us that we're going out into the community and and asking us to just look at our life and live on mission. Grocery store, gym, the whole nine yards. Right? It's a church, so there is this important verse in the Bible about going and telling people about Christ. Right? If you haven't read that, you should. But we're gonna talk today about how we translate that calling and that responsibility that our church values so much, and then how my role and my team get to play a part of that. Does that sound good? So I love The Office. If you can't tell that, I'm sure I'm breaking some sort of copyright or trademarking but here we are. So a participant. We've got details like you've got people sitting in your seats and you have the typical like, hey, come join a short term mission trip, right? And the first thing they wanna do is they wanna know where we're going. Like where is the summit at? Like I have a heart for Africa or I have a heart for you know, whatever, Texas. We don't send short term trips to Texas. And then obviously, they have to decide whether or not they want to register. And then obviously, money is a big factor in this. So I kind of wrote out these steps. We've all had this feeling of anticipation. Like we hear the calling, we're excited to go, we've always wanted to go to this place and serve amongst the people there and learn their culture. And so we're kinda getting that feeling as we sit in these services at church or on our case, really anything that you receive from the summit. I wonder what it's gonna be like. How's the food? What am I gonna wear? Where am I gonna sleep? Am I gonna be in a tent? Am I gonna have a bug net over me? Like there's all these things that we typically think through when we're going on any trip, much less a trip to another country that is foreign to us. And then the final thing that I always think about is how many rich aunts do I have that could pay for my trip? Or how many rich old uncle Sams do I have that wants me to write them a chain letter, send it to them, and she can't log in to the Internet, which is why I chose this scene with Erin and Irene from the office. If you're familiar with them, I'm not gonna give you an office lecture today. So let's back up. What are the things that you have to do to prepare for a trip that you're going on? It's okay, I'll let you just shout them out. What are some things that you, like any trip, doesn't have to be a mission trip, what do you have to do as the person going to get ready to go? Like this trip. I hope you all know the answer. Tickets. Yep. What else? Transportation. What? Where am I gonna sleep? What am I gonna eat? Weather Weather forecast. Oh gosh. The sun. That's the weather forecast here. Yeah, the surface of the sun. And that's great. And then we, most of us in this room, are more on the other side of that coin of like, how are we going to pull off all of the things that we need detail wise to get our trip actually in an airplane, everybody alive, on the plane, boarded, documents. And so I kind of put this together. We don't really take blood type. We don't really care about your pet's name to go on a short term mission trip. But the rest of the stuff, maybe even retina scans is a little bit of a stretch. But these are just a few of the things that you and I have to manage, well, not I, someone on my team staff in the Missions department has to manage. But you might be that person. You have to manage all of these things, all of these documents. So you think about having a trip of 12 people times a million different tasks, and your Google Sheet, I'm sure, is amazing, right? Or however you're doing that. So we tackled this approach mainly because it showed up in my interview. So this is four and a half years in the making. So hear me nod bells and whistles. I said four and a half years in the making. It was one of those things they threw out in my interview that was a problem area of rock or a more of a concern area of rock. And it's like you telling me that there's one layer to an onion. I, we spent the first year and a half trying to just figure out the current process. There was no documentation. It ended up being a 65 page Word document once we got through with it. They had systems that tied to other systems that kind of did a percentage of stuff. They liked that. They liked that. They didn't wanna lose that. They, don't you dare touch this. You know, the whole the whole thing you go through when you're working with, well, ministries and and people. And so we wanted to kinda step back and make that list and build that process in such a way with the goal in the end to be able to run it completely on rock. So about a year and a half in, two years in, that whole team transitioned into different roles. Anybody have that happen at your church? And then we went through a change on the development side. So those two people had that 65 page document conversation and they're now both gone. So that's cool, right? Year two and a half, about two and a half, three years in, they get a new person. She has no idea what the process does or why she uses it. She just was told that's what we do. So she and I basically sat in a room together and as best as we could, we got in front of a whiteboard and we were just like, let's just figure this thing out, right? So now we are four point five years in and we rolled this out about eight, nine, ten months ago maybe. And you know, when approaching any type of tool in rock, I've said this in both of my sessions so far, don't start with rock. Start with a blank slate. Start with a canvas of just white paper or whiteboard or whatever program that you start that you think you're gonna use for a long time and then you have one set of notes in it and you pay $75 a month for it. Sorry, it's lunchtime. You know, there's nothing shady about dry erase markers. You know, they're not the devil's pen. You know, chalkboard, you've got chalkboard. Those will work great. Notebook, paper, all that stuff. But I want you to do this exercise with this this particular process. It's just sit down, you first, in a room with a blank sheet of paper. And I want you to list out the things that if you were going on a vacation, a family vacation similar to what we just did, what are the things that you have to do and have to collect and have to know about in order to go on that trip? And then I want you to take that list and I want you to make another column and you wanna think about a trip. So ideally, if you've not been on a trip with your church, you would find somebody that could sit with you and do this. And you just talk about what are, like tell me everything that happened on your trip. And you're just there writing notes, writing notes, writing notes. And then finally, encourage you to meet with the people who are overseeing it. So in our case, this is a lady named Emily. She's fantastic. And the third column is my meeting with her. And then basically from there, what we do is we took all of those columns and we tried to see where the overlap lived and the stress points and the victories in each column. So I wanted to hear from Emily what she liked about the tool because it wasn't all bad. I mean it worked. But Summit sends somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 trips a year And that number is already it's not quite back to what it was pre COVID. So it's a large volume that Emily has to do, and it is just Emily. And so anyway, we came out of that. And so we had that list and we started talking to Triumph, who we use as our partner, about building this project to see what we could all comprehensively fit into it. I do wanna I do wanna be clear, I've tried to do this in all of my sessions. Is there I want to demystify this reality that you have to do a bunch of custom development to do what I'm about to show you. You don't. It's out of the box. This is a stark website. If you go to rockrms.com, click on the demo button, put in the also secure password of admin admin, you get logged in and you can play around with this right now. The one thing that you will notice, hopefully, you've seen it or if you haven't, it's a pretty cool feature. We did fund an ability to do family fundraising into Rock and it's now part of Core. You can actually scan that QR code there and go to the manuals and it will talk about the fundraising groups and things like that. But this feature allows you as a family member, so if I'm a dad leading my family on a trip, I have a collective sum of money going toward fundraising, which is super helpful as you'll see in a minute. So out of the box, you all got that? Out of the box, this is what the core trips page looks like. Another thing that you'll hear me say a lot is it's at conferences like this, you're gonna see like my version or Summit's version of this page. And it's prettier. I just have to tell you, it's prettier. But it doesn't really matter because they both work. And sometimes you can get caught up by the one person's opinion about how your website is ugly. It doesn't really matter. What matters is that you can connect the dots and get people into the nations telling people about Jesus, right? And this block does that, out of the box. This is the trip details page right out of the box. So picture of where you're going on the left, donate to a participant. So sending those aunts and uncles those letters with links, e mails with links, they can come back and donate to your page. We'll show you just how that works in a second. A leader toolbox, you can see Oishi admins fundraising total of 2,000. She needs to get going and especially because October is soon. So that's out of the box. This is the no customization. As a leader, you can see how your trip who is on your trip and how they're progressing through things. Alicia has her own trip page. So she can write a little bit about why she's so passionate about going to this trip, and it will show up on here. I added, I'm just a small town girl living in a lonely world, and I took the midnight train going anywhere, which is my favorite karaoke song of all time, but I won't do that to you. And so Grandma can come to this page and click on this button and make a make a payment. It's super simple. So I'm about to transition a little bit over into what our stuff begins to look like. So we made some minor details changes, like some design changes. You can't see it due to the contrast of the screen. But basically, we just kind of blocked some stuff out, not like out, but like blocked them in design terms. And so this is like the most basic of trip pages. This is just a demo page, there's not a lot of content here. But that, where it says trip updates is completely 100% controlled by the leaders of the trip or participants of the trip and they can post updates that come back to this page that they're followers of this trip can see. Also core. You can do that straight out of the box. We just made it look different. Here's an example currently of our short term trip page. This is currently under a redesign, but same thing. Picture on the left, name of where we're going, when we're going, what campus it's affiliated with, you know, estimated trip cost, what we're doing, who's the leader. So Kibbett is one of our campus pastors leading this trip and then the application button. Super, super easy, right? That's a blank slide that I forgot to delete. So this is an example of Cindy's trip page that we've kind of taken and modified, cleaned up a little bit. But the same thing, she has the you have the ability to copy a profile link. So this is a link that you would just easily paste into an email or a text or whatever to get them to. But it's similar to the out of the box. We didn't make a ton of just earth shattering changes. This is a trip leader box, leader toolbox page where you can begin to see sorry, this is not the leader toolbox page. This is a family view of Noah, Ted and Alex Decker, and this is where the family fundraising piece comes in. So instead of like having individual totals for the trip, you have one total that you're managing And any money given to any of those participants goes toward that family fundraising goal. So it's a pretty cool little feature there. This is probably, in my opinion, have been the most helpful thing that we do. So in a minute, I'll show you the behind the scenes of what this looks like in Iraq. But as we mentioned, there's a lot of things that we have to keep track of, documents, passports, doctors. Like if a lady happens to be pregnant and wants to go on a trip, she doesn't have a doctor's notice to go and we have that on file. Or if they have any other type of medical issues and they need to get clearance, Like, all of that is represented by these little icons at the bottom. And I'll show you I'll actually flip over to a trip and show you what they do. So I'm about to do that and just show you more of the behind the scenes, if I can figure out. This is like where I am not great. Well, there's a lot of places I'm not great, but Let me get here. Oh, we can do this. Alright. Okay. So as you can see on the left there let me do this real quick. I'm gonna mirror my settings again so that I can see. Where is it? Somebody who knows smart things. Where is it to mirror your desktop? Anyone? Cool, we'll figure this out. If not, I'll just move on. Yes. There's a what? I got it, man. Look at y'all. Just coming through in the clutch. And you ask me if I'm on a Mac, is there another computer that I should look at? So inside of our group viewer you can see, you know, if I start expanding out all of these years worth of trips, so if I go to 2024 it's quite significant. And so I put together this kind of demo trip to show you if you're familiar at all with setting up a group. Have group item attributes, you have other member attributes, you have all these things. Obviously, they all play into what this is. And we've tied that into a way to show our internal team, so Emily and her volunteers now, kind of a high level overview of the trip details of the trip that they're managing. If I scroll through here, you're going to see a ton of information, a ton of data. You know, you'll start to see pictures of what this actually looks like. If you have questions about that, I'm certainly able to answer those. I didn't feel like you wanted to go through each different attribute that we're tracking, but just know that any information that you want to present is able to be tracked fairly easily. If I flip over here, you'll start to see the outward facing demo of this page, of this trip. So I am this fake leader of this, sorry, I'm the real person, real leader of a fake trip. So you have all the information from that previous setup screen and it's listed here. We have some high level reminders about due dates, like when deposits are due for the trip and then I can see the current participants that are in my trip. So Lynn here and Grayson is my wife and my oldest. And you'll notice Eric here in this situation, he's not actually single, but in this situation, he's the only one in his family going on this trip. And so you'll notice he does not have this link, whereas if I do it, I have a little dropdown of the trip participants. Can you all see that okay? Yeah. You'll also notice that there's all these little icons. So that one, particularly if you can't read it, it says medical insurance card, background checks, you know, let's see what they are. This is like the funding measure. So they're 100%, fifty %, whatever the percentages are. Dollars 300 deposit, which is typical upfront for a trip of this size and magnitude. 75% funding, waiver and covenant. We saw that one, medical release form, international passport, and then again, the background check. And a little bit of information on the people. So, and then again, sorry, the fundraising total obviously is there. So if I go to a trip page, this again is like the details over here. And this is my family, so it knows to put all of that on the same trip details page. And you can individually give to these participants, but again, you can go give to Grayson's profile and it will come immediately back into the family's fundraising goals. Same thing if you make a payment here to me, it still populates that amount. My trip profile is an interesting thing. This is where you just click this little edit button and you can type a message. Again, core feature, type a message describing why you're doing what you're doing and what you're hoping to accomplish there, maybe how somebody can follow along with your trip progress. You know, I'm the leader of the trip, I have a little bit more permissions here to update documents and things of that nature. This is where if I was setting if I was looking at Grayson, his parent would be set to me. He's a minor, so it would say yes. Has he been on a previous trip, and if so, what trip was that? And then any certain task would show up that are remaining for him to complete. And again, you're gonna see a lot of the same you know, examples. So for example, I love live demos, so if I just upload some random QR code image and I hit save, you'll notice I'm under that medical insurance page, or that medical insurance attribute. And if I go back to my profile, you'll start to see these callouts, these whatever they're called, I think they're called call outs, that are in colors. So I think you can see this, but that one in the bottom is green. And then the ones at the middle row are orange, and they will turn green. If they pass, they'll turn red. So if somebody's passed the deadline, then that shows up here and also shows up on a report that we have behind the scenes. And then again, I just uploaded my insurance card and now that tile is green. Go back one step here. So, again, leaders toolbox looks like this. So now that on there, these icons are tied to a persistent data set, so that'll update here in a couple minutes. But that's why it's not lit up on the icon front. But pretty real time in a sense of collecting this type of information. We're doing really, I mean, really basic ways of getting people here is as soon as you're added to one of these trips, so your application goes through and you're approved for one of these trips. We have a little link under our My Account page that shows up that says My Mission Trips. And it takes you directly to your version of, like if you're a trip participant versus a trip leader. And this alone has been a game changer. Here's full disclosure. It's not been all roses and fairy tales. It's been a hard it's been a hard journey. There's been a lot of intense conversations because we don't argue, but we have we have intense conversations. There's been things that have broken. There's been things that we're still ironing out about this behind the scenes that we're learning as we continue to roll this out and get feedback from the people in our church. But used to, this was a gigantic spreadsheet. And I'm about to tell you something if you are a data nerd in here that might make your stomach turn. In that spreadsheet were passport numbers. I'm not gonna talk about the sharing permissions that were tied to the spreadsheet. My blood is boiling. I'm still upset about this. And then also they converted them over into rock. This was well before I got there. Converted them into rock in plain text. How awesome is that? How do you how would you like to walk in in the morning and find out that thousands of passport information is just in plain text? I sold it to Russia, so we're good. So anyway guys, this is kind of, I mean, we got fifteen minutes left. I want to leave a good chunk of QA time, Q and A time because I know if you have answer or if you have questions, I want to make sure you have time to ask of those. If I didn't cover something enough that you want me to do, I'll either do that now or we can follow-up before the conference is over or even after the conference. The best way for us to stay in touch here is for you to scan that. If you can, I'll make it bigger. It's just my badge QR code, so make sure you use the Rock app. But if you have questions, I'm always available. Well, not always. Most of the time on Rocket Chat, you can ping me. You can show up at my house. I live on Rock Creek Road. That's no joke. And that was one of God's sense of humor things when we moved from Texas to North Carolina is I literally live on Rock. So any questions that you guys might