RX 24 - Boosting Weeklong Engagement with Interactive Experiences - Daniel Younglove

Transcribed Content

So moving right along this afternoon, we have boosting week long engagement with interactive experiences. Please join me in welcoming to the stage, Daniel Younglove. Well, hey, we're almost there. Last couple sessions of the last day, you all powered through, so way to go. You're part of the elite few that are still chugging along and sitting in seats, so thanks for making some time to be here. Just to kind of set the stage before we dip into some content here. So we're going be talking about interactive experiences in Rock. You can take it in a whole bunch of different ways. Kind of the approach we'll be taking today is talking about it more from a communication strategy standpoint and how this can be a digital discipleship tool for you. If you really want to parse the code and go into, like, some deep dive on some of those technical things, I have an awesome technical team here that can help answer some of those questions. But the approach we're going to be taking is a little bit more conceptual and using this as a digital discipleship tool. So my name is Daniel. I've been on staff at the Crossing Church in St. Louis for about eight years now. Got to be on the Rock team starting about three years ago. I'm our digital team lead, which really means I get to work with a whole bunch of super smart technical people. I get to stand on the side and go, that sounds right. That sounds really good. I don't know what you're talking about. But I also get to interface with a lot of our ministry teams and leaders. So I get to work the people side of some very technical solutions and then find alignment between what is our big vision strategy and what are some digital practical tools we can use to align those two things and to reach people for Jesus. So before we get into some of this content, we have a unique history with the interactive experiences function. So years ago before it was something in Rock Mobile, we have a lead pastor who has a really high value on interacting with congregation. And when we were one site, that was great. When we went to multisite, we would have campus pastors walk around and text in stuff because the pastor would ask a question, and the campuses would respond, the pastors would run around and get texted responses, and that sort of worked, but it wasn't a sustainable solution. So we talked with a local development company. They built out this kind of bespoke app for us that used SignalR that could do real time communication. It was really slick. No one had ever seen anything like it before. But that's sort of all it did well. And it worked. It worked. It technically worked. The inflection in my voice keeps changing. It worked, but we knew it wouldn't have a long shelf life for us because it wasn't super flexible. Anytime we needed a change in it, we had to talk to a third party developer. There were lead time issues. It was expensive to maintain. So we were kind of like, okay, this temporarily solved the problem for us, but this isn't the long term solution. And since we were already a rock shop, we're like, well, if we could have a rock tool that solves this, then we could bring more things into rock. And if there is a theme I've heard all week long, it's the more things you have in rock, just good things happen. So like with all good stories, we called up Triumph. We said, hey, we have an idea. I don't know if it will fit in part of what Mobile does, but this would be a game changer for us. And actually, couple of years ago, there was actually a conversation we had in the hallway with a couple of leaders of Triumph, and we were trying to just brain dump on them. Here's what we needed to do. Here's what we're thinking. And thankfully, a couple other churches caught the vision and we're able to go in and and pay for the the feature to be added. But when we were talking with them, knew we needed real time communication. We needed something that had like a moderation step to it because even though it's hopefully all Christians at our churches that are using the app in these ways, not everyone is always appropriate or on subject or on topic when they share these responses, so we need a little bit of a moderation step to kind of clean things up sometimes. We wanted to be able to visualize the data that was coming into us, so different ways with graphs and various other things. And we needed flexibility because that was our main pain point with our old app. It just was not flexible. And we have in house development kind of firepower, and we wanted to let them loose on whatever this solution was. And by the way, this was the reason why we switched to Rock Mobile. And if anyone isn't on Rock Mobile yet or you're trying to figure out if that's the right move for you or whatever, Triumph makes it really, really painless. They'll build it out to the spec that you need it for. And then just once you get moved on to it, just the maintenance of it is actually pretty light. So just a shout out to them that they make that process really great. So when we then moved over to Rock Mobile, the interactive experiences function was on there. We've used it a couple times during the conference. Maybe you all use it in your church context. But it's really, really simple. It's right on the homepage of the app. It's ways to join an experience where you can push out prompts to people and they can respond back to you. So there's a couple different ways to do it. And just to kind of set a baseline for how this functions and then we can start brainstorming some new ways to be using this throughout the week, There's really kind of like three parts of an interactive experience. So first, there's a prompt. So we get to push out a question or a poll or something like that to our people. They get to respond, and then there's that moderation process that we we said was so important to us. So if we ask a prayer request and someone's like, well, my aunt Betty, she's just been a terrible person all her life, and she really needs to find Jesus. Someone should really pay for aunt Betty, her address is 405 Main Street, and someone should go visit her and knock on her Okay. Well, thank you. We'll be praying for Aunt Betty. But that might not be appropriate for everyone else to see. So that moderation step is important. And then a way to present the results that are coming in, whether it's a pastor being able to view the moderator results, creating graphs, word clouds, those sorts of things. So those are kind of the three basic functions or three basic component parts of what an interactive experience looks like. So let's just click through a couple ways that these can be used just generally, and then we're going to have some fun with some other stuff here. So kind of a Q and A format. So a really basic way, and maybe some of you have experienced this already, is you can push out a question. So let's say in the middle of your Sunday service, you read from Acts chapter two, and you can say, Hey, what questions do you have about the passage we just read? Push that out through the app. People can think about what they just read, put in all their thoughts and responses, and then you can take a look at it. So let's say that's the prompt that you push out. There's that moderation step, so your moderator is going to see all of the incoming content. You can approve and deny. And then let's say your teaching pastor decides, I'm going to use the teacher view screen. Here's all the moderated, approved responses. And then in their sermon, they might say, hey, we're hearing from our downtown campus. You had a question about what Paul meant by this word. Okay, let's tackle that right now. So it's a really cool way to kind of weave in people's feedback in real time. And that's probably one of the more straightforward ways that you could do an interactive experience. Another one is a word cloud. So just right out of the box, when you get responses in, Rock Mobile or the Interactive Experience dashboard lets you create word clouds from that. So let's say you ask your congregation, hey, what's one word that best describes your season of life right now? Go through the moderation step because you want to. And then of those moderated responses, all these single words, then it builds a word cloud, and it's a really cool visual that your teaching pastor or one of your other communicators can interact with. But it also can be really telling. You can tell if maybe it's a season of joy for your congregation, maybe there's struggles or some sorrow, maybe you're actually kind of letting everyone see in real time, oh, these two things are living next to each other in our seats, and it really can help kind of train people's minds to be aware of all the different seasons of life someone might be in. So again, that's a really simple visual, but it's just a quick way out of the box that you can use an Interactive Experience. And just a quick side note, if you do word clouds, let a little time go because the more the words that get used, the bigger the word becomes, and if you have all the words that look the exact same size, it's not very interesting. Okay. So another way you can use Interactive Experiences is you can hack it a little bit. So while at the most conceptual level, you're asking you're producing a prompt, people are giving you responses, and then you basically have this dataset, you can do some things out of the box. You can also hack it a little bit and say, Okay, well give me all of the responses that were approved here and maybe dump it onto a simple HTML web page. And now you can start visualizing it in other ways that don't just happen right out of the box. It's not super, super complicated. And we can chat at the end of this session if you're interested in that recipe for using this sort of visualization. But let's say in this case you say, and this is a real use case for us, hey, in one sentence, how can our church be praying for you during service? And and we're actually going to share it at the end of the service. Go through the moderation step. And then the way we built this particular one was we actually had an experience at the end of service that slowly scrolled all of these prayer requests across the screen. And so I'll just share a quick snapshot of that. This is just a freeze frame from just one service we had. And you can see, when we talk about digital discipleship, just how honest some of these responses were. I mean, it kind of takes your breath away around pregnancy, marriage, someone losing a child in an accident, anxiety about school, all these sorts of things. So this is a way that it's not just people being able to share prayer requests, but you can see how honest people get. And it is just a really holy moment when your entire congregation gets to see the prayer requests of the people sitting around them and have a moment to pray. So again, as we talk about engagement, yes, it's engagement, but this is a discipleship tool that can really have some, like, powerful Holy Spirit moments too. So quick sidebar. So so that kind of sets the foundation for here's how some different interactive experiences can work, so fair enough. If you're thinking through communication strategy, you're probably sitting there going, yeah, but how does this sort of fit our marketing funnel? Or because we're churches, our discipleship pathway. Right? So and that's a good question because again, engagement for the sake of engagement is fine, I guess, but if we're really wanting to be strategic and we're trying to help people grow in their faith, that's really what we need to be focusing on. Right? So everyone has a different discipleship pathway or a different way of thinking about it. So just for the sake of these examples, let's say we're talking about moving people from the door to the core. So the people at the very front doors of your congregation that maybe never step foot inside a church, and you're helping them work down and take steps in their face so they're maybe a core member of your church and a thriving disciple of Jesus. So let's just say, for the sake of example, that's kind of your discipleship model. So how does using the interactive experiences sort of pair up with your discipleship model? Well, I don't want to be too clever or too cute, but really I think it can meet people anywhere they're at in that. It's not a, hey, this is just really powerful for lifelong disciples. It's also not only for people on the fringes of faith and you're just trying to get your toes up with Jesus, this we've all matured far past beyond what this could be. This really kind of cuts right through wherever anyone's at in in your discipleship pathway. We're going talk in a second about how you can pair this up with other digital discipleship tools that will help be kind of contextualized for what for how your church might approach that. And again, I'm being really cute and clever by giving a little bit of a tilt of that arrow because hopefully if you can use interactive experiences in a way that pairs and it becomes another digital discipleship tool for you, people will, throughout time and throughout some of these experiences, continue to grow in their faith and take some of those big steps of discipleship. So like I said, the examples we gave have so far been kind of what exists on a Sunday morning. It's a very nice closed loop. So you create a prompt, people give their responses, comes back, you finish the service, Amen, go get lunch, that's it. So that doesn't really necessarily talk about what is this about weeklong discipleship and how does this function work within that. And again, the title of this talk is boosting weeklong engagement, not just Sunday morning engagement. So let's now look at from Sunday to Sunday and the weekdays that are within. Now to be fair, this should probably have been like squares with the Sundays stacked on each other like a calendar. I'm kind of sick of the Gregorian calendar myself, so I thought like a hoagie sandwich or something like that is probably a better approach. Which is it hoagie, sub sandwich, hoagie, hero, grinder? Y'all from all over the country. Okay. Sub. I know some people my friends in the Northeast get really particular about it, and they pretend that they don't even know what I'm talking about if I use a different term. So okay. So it looks like a sub sandwich. So here's our Sunday to Sunday sub sandwich. I hope this makes sense. We'll see. So again, we've been talking about sort of this closed loop of Sunday to Sunday. Ask a question, people respond, answer it in the service, we're done. But we don't have to only do that kind of within a closed loop on a Sunday. Even though we're getting real time communication, it doesn't mean we have to share all the results and everything in real time. We can get that information on a Sunday. But what if instead of sharing it that same Sunday, we kick it out to the next weekend? So what you could do is have a prompt of saying, hey, we just read that passage. What are your thoughts on that? Because we're gonna continue this conversation next Sunday, and we want you to inform where we go in the next message. You might even have a prompt where you say, like, hey, send in your favorite worship songs about hope or forgiveness. We want you to inform how our worship is going to happen next Sunday. By the way, make sure you come back again. So these are just ways now again, I know all of you have a % church attendance. Everyone attends every weekend without any any changes to that. But hypothetically, let's think that maybe someone attends once every three, four, five weeks, and then coming back next weekend is not a guarantee. Well, a way you can start to seeds and create a little bit of buy in for them is to have them contribute. So if you have a prompt, it's a really low barrier to participate in this sort of thing. They're sharing their opinions because if you give someone a smartphone, they're happy to share their opinion. That's kind of a truth of nature. You can start to sprinkle in a little bit of buy in for them to go, oh, I did contribute that song or I did have a really unique question about that scripture passage. Maybe I will come back next week. And so before they even leave your doors that Sunday, you're already getting some of their buy in and getting them to have some skin in the game for what's happening the following weekend. You can also have a prompt on a Sunday, but then maybe hold some of that and trickle it out during the week. So again, depending what your discipleship models are and some of those things that you value, you might have podcasts, social media posts that are a core part of reaching your people during the week. Maybe there's a newsletter, evening prayer meetings, maybe your small groups meet during the week, whatever some of those really core discipleship pieces that you have are. So in the case of, let's say, prayer requests, you might ask for prayer requests that Sunday and then say, hey, make sure to follow us on on social media. We're gonna be sprinkling those out during the week so we all can be praying for each other for the for the rest of the week, and we'll see you next weekend. Or maybe it's gonna be prompts that are given to all of our small groups. So maybe, hey, the small groups that meet this week, there's going to be dedicated prayer time for all of the things that you all just shared with us. So these are, again, just ways to find what, in your context, what are those critical steps for people. You get the prompts on a Sunday, and then you can start to sprinkle them in those other spaces, and guess what? There's always an invitation with that. Right? Here, small groups may be praying over your prayer requests. And by the way, are you not in a small group? Registration's open right now. Hop into Community. This is really powerful and good for your soul. So the examples so far have been prompts that start on a Sunday, but you can also set up interactive experiences and schedule them to happen during the week too. And we are going to get back to this in a second, but you can even expose a certain interactive experience for people that are within certain data views. It doesn't have to just be a one size fits all, like everyone sees this or no one sees this. And we will get back to why that's so powerful here in a second. But let's say you let's stick with the idea of small groups. And so you have your small groups. Now anyone who's in a small group has an interactive experience that's scheduled and populates and is exposed for them when they meet, And it's a chance for them to then say, Oh, here were my insights on a passage, or Here are my favorite worship songs or questions that I have or thoughts that I have on a particular topic or on a poll or anything like that. And then that can maybe, let's say, that informs the weekend. Well, that's that's really nice if all of your small group people are doing that, but that feels again kind of like, well, people who are ready all in doing something good for them, but how is that necessarily a discipleship tool? Well, again, if you want to use that on the weekend and your pastor can say, by the way, we heard from our small groups this week. Here's some thoughts that they have or some things in culture that they're noticing that we're going to address in this message. By the way, not in a small group? You see how it goes. And again, it really can be dependent and fit into whatever your discipleship process is in your church. So you could even let me jump back here for a second. So it can be small groups, maybe it's people who are taking a particular class. You can have a special prompt that's sitting out there just for them. Maybe some people on your volunteer teams, it's a way to push out questions to them. Again, any of those things that might be part of that funnel for you where, hey, if serving is a really big value in your well, it's a big value in every church, but if that's a really critical part of your discipleship model and that's something you're really trying to get some traction with, maybe you can do some things with your serve teams. It gets mentioned on the weekend, and then people understand, oh, our serve teams aren't just serving. Their fingerprints are over what's going on around here, and I'd love to be able to participate in that sort of way. So as we talk about weeklong engagement and those are just a few examples, not trying to be prescriptive with it, but those are a few examples of sort of out of the box how interactive experiences be used throughout the week and not just on a sort of a closed loop on a Sunday. And so as we talk about that, I want to share a couple of things because again, if you're thinking sort of discipleship or digital strategy or communication wise, these are going be some things that will be kind of bouncing around in your head too. So just a few metrics. These are a little tricky because it's not always completely clear with some Rock Mobile things on why someone downloaded the app and various things like that. So we've bumped some digital metrics alongside some other maybe more analog metrics, you might say. And so in our context, because interactive experience is really kind of what we lead with with Rock Mobile, We have about a 75% join rate. And by that, we're looking at the number of in person attenders, so kind of butts in seats, so to speak, who are joining the app and joining an interactive experience on the weekend. We've had up to about 75%, which is a huge conversion rate. And I don't know about you, but I mean some pastors in the room might be going, I'd wish 75% of my people would just sing when we sing Amazing Grace on Sunday morning. So 75% participation rate, that's a pretty big deal. That's people jumping in, there's an opportunity in front of them, and they're going to do that. So great conversion rate there. Almost a 70% response rate, so it's about 69% of the people who have joined an interactive experience will participate within it. That number will fluctuate a little bit, like voting on a poll is a little bit lower of a barrier to go, Oh, I like this rather than that or whatever. Having to digest a Scripture passage and share your thoughts in a few sentences, that takes a little bit more effort, so we might see participation drop a little bit from that. But again, these are really great numbers. And again, if you're thinking of ways to get traction with people, to get them participating, digesting scripture, sharing their thoughts, sharing their questions, those are the types of habits and behaviors that is really fertile soil for discipleship to happen. Right? And with these sorts of rates and something that's so familiar like a smartphone app, this is a way to get some of that really early traction, especially for people early in their discipleship journey, and get them engaging with Scripture and things like that. This number is a little fuzzy because it's hard to say exactly why someone did something, but I would ballpark it around 90% of our app downloads are because or happen around the time that we do one of our interactive experiences on the weekend. So again, if you're thinking through, well, maybe we're on Rock Mobile but not a lot of our congregation uses it, or we are thinking we maybe want to do a mobile app but we don't know if there's a big appetite for it because our website is pretty good with those sorts of things, This is a great sort of app only function. And we've seen a whole lot of traction. Now part of that traction comes with just being consistent with it, right? If we get really hot and bothered about it and get, hey, this is the next big thing, we're all about this, and then we don't do anything with an interactive experience for like six weeks, people are going to forget why the app's even on their phone. So we need consistency. And part of consistency is also messaging overcommunicating. So anytime on the weekends where we have an interactive experience, before the service even starts, we'll have some digital signage scrolling. We'll let people know, hey, we're using the app today. Make sure to download the app. It's in your App Store. Maybe during an announcement slot, we'll let people know, hey, if you don't have it, the person next to you probably does. They'll help you get logged in if you have any troubles with that. So really overcommunicating and giving people plenty of lead time so that when your communicator or your pastor has that prompt for them, they're not going, Oh my goodness, what is this thing? Where do I find it on the App Store? And now it actually becomes a distraction rather than something that enhances the message and helps people engage a little bit more deeply. So overcommunicating is really critical. And then without putting too hard of a number on it, we found that about two interactive experiences per month on the weekends is kind of what regular feels like. It doesn't you don't just have to arbitrarily do it every weekend. In fact, it could almost kind of become furniture if you're not really, really thoughtful about why you're using it. So every other week, two times a month, that feels like it's enough of a cadence where it's like, oh, I remember we do this thing and I'm familiar enough with it that I'll participate, but it's not just, oh, here's the thing that happens every weekend, I'm going to dip out of this one. And then a couple bonus things. And this doesn't fit nicely into the presentation but like I alluded to earlier, there's a couple things in here that could probably be an Rx twenty five talk next year. So attendance. While it can be really difficult depending on the size of your church, you probably at least minimum get a head count of who's in your rooms and what is your average weekend attendance and stuff like that. I've heard in a couple talks that there's some churches that through mobile or through some other scanning QR codes and things like that, they'll encourage people to kind of check-in to services, which is a great solution. What we are really encouraged by is because we have such a high rate of adoption and people in our congregation are excited about how they can participate by joining these interactive experiences, we were able to build something where just joining the experience now counts toward attendance for the person joining. Now that also, we can bump that against head count and we're not going have a one for one count on that. But as far as the actual person goes now, we get cleaner data around, hey, you're not just ERA or you check the kid into kids in the kids ministry or whatever it might be, but joining the experience is now also counting toward attendance, and that just helps your data become that much more rich. Digital focus groups. So the way I've kind of been describing these interactive experiences are very much like, hey, here's a question, let us know what you think. And it's very tied to our discipleship model or services or small groups or things like that. But like I said earlier, you can expose an interactive experience based on anyone who's in a particular DataView. So if you really chew on that for a while, and honestly that should be a talk next year, all the different things you could have views for. So it's not just who's in a small group, but it might be, hey, we want to have a question that just lingers out there for maybe two weeks for, let's say, all of the men at our downtown campus because we wanna hear from them about maybe unique struggles in their lives. Or maybe we have some questions for women who have teenagers because we wanna hear from some of them to maybe inform how some of our youth ministry is gonna structure some future programming. Maybe there's people who have lost their ERA status in the last six months, and you just wanna have a question out there, not going, why aren't you giving anymore? But it might just be, hey, tell us about the biggest event of the last six months of your life. So it's almost like a digital focus group where you can find a really unique subset or demographic of people, have a question, and the questions can sit out there for days, weeks. It doesn't have to just be like for an hour long during a service. It can just be sitting out there. So anytime they log into their app, they go, oh, there's a thing out here for me. What's this about? Oh, they want to hear my feedback about something and enter it. Now to be fair, if you really want to lean into that heavily, there could be other platforms and other tools that would do that maybe more effectively. But I would argue depending on your context, if you're really training people, hey, this interactive experiencing is where we have a lot of back and forth conversation with each other, your people might already be trained to be looking for stuff there and this is just another touch point to encourage them to, hey, check this out. We frequently have something here that might be of high value for you. So even if there's maybe some other tools that could quote unquote do it better, there could be value for you to kind of teach that muscle memory for your people to be looking there for those things. Other content. So I already talked about how we were able to kind of hack the visualization side. So you have your prompt, your moderation step, and that visualization step. And I said, hey, we've kind of hacked some stuff where we kind of take that data, dump it on an HTML page, and do some fun stuff with it. Well, we've also kind of opened up the hood and took out the wrenches and messed some stuff up, hacked some stuff on the front end too, where at the point of presenting a prompt, we were able to get under the hood and have some fun with that. And so again, since this isn't a technical presentation, if any of you are interested in sort of what we did and kind of the mechanics of how we did it, we can chat afterward and I'll make sure to put you in touch with the right person. But last Christmas, we had an experience where rather than just pushing questions, we were actually able to push out these rolling sort of like glittering colors to people's phones. And we had a moment in our service where our lead pastor did this like three minute spoken word thing that tied in with the Christmas story and was just very tied into the theme of the day. And we encouraged everyone to download the app. We're going do this really special experience, and they held their phones up. And we had these sea of glowing, color shifting phones that was just super immersive and beautiful. So you can do some other stuff like that where just on the pushing content part, start to hack into that and have some fun with what's going on there. And my hunch is in the next couple of years, there will also probably be some feature requests on ways to build this out as more churches adopt it, find other use cases for it. We're so excited to hear how all of you are going to do some cool things with that too. And finally, FOMO. So if there's some really cool things going on, people are getting their questions answered and participating and they, oh, I got to help pick the worship song next Sunday or whatever, no one wants to miss out on things. Discipleship. Right? Well, not really because we're not in the game of trying to help make people feel like they're missing out on something. Right? This is about discipleship. This is about an invitation into something special. And like I said before, if all we're trying to do is digital engagement for the sake of engagement, then we're kind of playing the game that the rest of the world is playing. And to me, that kind of feels like salt losing its saltiness. Right? But if we can use some of these digital tools and help people, not just on Sunday mornings where, yes, lots of impact happens during weekend services, but find some of these other tools to continue to reach them and to plant seeds and encourage their walk of faith throughout the week, and then those weeks turn into months and those months turn into years. Well, that's what we're about. Right? And so hopefully, if you've used interactive experiences before, you've probably done it in the context of a weekend. Hopefully, this started to stir the pot a little bit on ways that you can think outside of just one weekend or think through it during the week. And hopefully, you're also thinking through what is our discipleship model? Is this another tool in our tool belt that we can use digital engagement to help people take steps with Jesus? And that's what I got.