RX 24 - Use Rock to Make Your Life Easier - David Axelson

Transcribed Content

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our session. Let's give a warm welcome to David Axelson. Awesome. Thanks. I really appreciate you guys being here. I know I don't know about for you all, but it's been a really sweet time at the conference for me. I know a lot of you all are kind of with me in this boat where you're the one of a couple of people maybe at your church who works with Rock, and it cannot it can kind of feel a little bit like you're in it by yourself. And I feel like Rx is an awesome time to be like, no. There is a community of people who care about you and the work that you're doing and are just excited to come alongside you. I know, yeah, there's just a lot of people in the community who, like, love God and care about the work that he is doing in and through you and through your teams. And I hope you all come away from this conference feeling that. So what we're going to talk about today is how you can use Rock to make your life easier. This is something that I think yeah, this presentation will have a lot of examples for different things I'm talking about. But the examples do not matter. That's not the point of it. In the takeaways, there's breakdowns and walkthroughs of how I set these up. But really, what I would love for you to come away from this talk with is just a feeling of agency, really, that because you are on rock, if you come across something that's hard, if you come across something that's repetitive, you have the opportunity to do something about that in a way that can make your life and the life of the people that you're working with just easier. And so we'll look at a bunch of examples. We're going to look at three categories that I think of in that. But like I said, the examples are less what I want you to take away from this and more there are lots of opportunities. And I think as people who work with Rock, we want to develop that skill of recognizing like, hey, I'm doing this repetitive task a lot, or hey, I'm doing this thing and it's more complicated and there's friction there. Like Rock is one of the few platforms that you can really do something about that friction. And you don't have to be a developer. Nothing I'm talking about requires any say any coding. Nothing I'm talking about requires actually changing any Rock blocks, any rock code. There's some things at some SQL, but also you have this community around you that can help you with that. So nothing here is unattainable for you. And if anything feels too hard, david. Axleson is my Rocket Chat. Hit me up. I'm happy to help. So one of the things that I think can be difficult to understand in approaching Rock, especially if you've moved over from another CHMS, is what exactly you have in Rock. Because out of the box, it can look a lot like your previous CHMS. And I don't know that the term RMS is the most clear and helpful. And so this is not Spark approved. This is just how I think about it. In Rock, you have a CHMS and a CMS. And so CHMS would be like FellowshipOne, CCB, like a church management software. CMS would be WordPress, Squarespace, something like that, like a website builder. And if you've worked with a website builder, you will know that you can make a page, and then they'll give you options to drag blocks onto that page. Rock is essentially that, except they've gone through the trouble of making all of these CHMS blocks and putting it on the page for you. And out of the box, rocks can do a ton of what you need it to do. But it's important to remember that ultimately you have that CMS underneath that, and you have full access to edit that. And that comes with a lot of power and flexibility. So the first category that I want to talk about is I'm calling Swiss cheese. I'm calling it that because I watched a YouTube video that was talking about IKEA and the layout of IKEA stores. And the interesting thing about IKEA is that it is designed for you to take this single path and go through the entire store slowly, methodically through each section, which makes it a great date night. My wife and I did that a lot early on, pre kids especially. Just kind of wandering around is a lot of fun. But you're going through the entire store. But if you are an employee there or you know the store really well, you know that these dotted lines exist. You know that there are these shortcuts. And you know how to get immediately from the place you are to the place you want to go. Rock can feel a bit like this meandering path sometimes. But because you're on Rock, you have the opportunity to make these shortcuts for yourself. So we'll look at a couple examples of this. The first one we're going to look at is a page that I make on open registrations. So event registrations is one of those areas where I found myself having to deal with a bunch of different pages in Rocket at the same time, and moving between them wasn't as quick and efficient as I would have liked. And so I made this report, and it pulls up the list of all of our active registrations. There's a handy little checkbox there if I need to look at older registrations. And all it does is the first link there takes me to the list of people who've registered. The second link is for our staff. That is the external link that they can copy and paste into an email if they're sending people the registration. And then some simple dates related some simple information related to it. Starting the date, whether it has a wait list, whether it has a cost, the payment account, and who the contact is for it. So at a glance, our teams can see all the information they would need for registration as well as information that they would need to share. So I found myself going back and forth between the Edit page, trying to find it on the external site. I still don't know how to find the external link to a registration in Rock. Anytime I'm on the demo site, it's still a challenge for me because I have this. And this is a lot easier way of dealing with it. Another example is having to do with events. So I don't know about you, but I am frequently said, hey, there's this typo in the event on the Events page. And so I pulled the Events page, I'm like, sure enough, there's a typo. But what do you do to edit that? You have to go to Tools. You have to go to Calendar. You have to hope that the event item is named something similar to the event occurrence that's showing on the page. And you have to get in there and edit it. So what I did is the left hand side is what you would see if you're not logged in or if you don't have edit rights for the page or for the event. And on the right hand side, if someone has edit rights for the event, it pops up a little edit button. Lets you click it, takes you straight to the edit page for that event. So I found myself taking that kind of long path around to get to the Edit page for this and was able to do something about that. And so this is just a little bit of lava in HTML. And it sticks it at the top there. It looks kind of nice. And it takes me directly to the Edit page for the event. This one is a one that's really fun. Tony let me see. I think his last name is Visconti. Is that right? Yeah. He's a super cool guy. He put this in a recipe, And I loved it. So any page that has this kind of same setup where you have the little tree view on the right or on the left, and you can pick the different elements. So like the group details page, the pages list in your CMS, and this workflow configuration page is one. Any of them that have that, they will use the page parameters in the URL to once you select that, it'll reload the page with a page parameter at the top. So in this example, it would be whatever the workflow configuration URL is. And it would be question mark, workflow type ID equals, and then a number. And all you're doing when you're selecting something from that tree is updating that number. But Rock has this handy block called the page parameter filter, which lets you set up your own filters that will also update that page parameter. And that block has a really nice search feature. If you use a single select attribute and say, I forget the exact wording. I'm blanking on the exact wording. But there's a way to make it so it had a really good search filter to it. And so instead of taking the time to remember where I put it in the tree, I just search by the name and I'm able to click it and get directly into that. So things like that where I'm running into a situation where I'm doing something and it's taking a long time to get to where I need, you can put those shortcuts in there for yourself, and it'll take you directly to where you need to go. The second category that I want to talk about is automation. Rock is incredibly powerful when it comes to automation. It's doing a ton of automation behind the scenes that you're not seeing. And it's giving you access to all of that. There's a few different types of automation going on. This one is kind of fuzzy whether it fits in the automation category, but I wanted to include it because it's super helpful. And that is I'm calling it dynamic fields. If you are in a registration or a workflow form, you can set up a field that's a single select or multi select, which when they load the form, it'll let them have a dropdown or radio buttons where they can select items. Those fields can be dynamically generated using Lava or SQL. And what that lets you do is whenever they open the form, it's going to go check and see what belongs on that form. And it will automatically put those in that list for you. And the powerful thing about that is maybe the people who are updating those ideas are not the same people who have access to build workflows. So instead of you having to go in and, hey, they've decided to add a new group leader to their list of group leaders, you don't have to go in and manually add that person to that field. They can just add that group, put that group leader in there. And because you have code updating it, the next time someone goes and run that form, they'll see that accurate list and be able to your staff will be able to update those things without you having to go in and manually do that. Another thing you're able to do from that is some automation. So I want to talk about a case study. So this is a women's bible study registration. So I'm relatively new, and then our admin for the team that runs our women's bible study is also relatively new. So we walk into this women's bible study registration season. There's gonna be a few hundred women signing up for women's bible study. We do it the same time we same way we did the year before. She gives me a list of group leaders. I copy and paste that list, comma separated into that single select field. And so when the women are registering, they're able to say, hey, I know who I want to be in the group with because I was with them before or a friend invited me. I'm going click on that list. She takes the results of that, export it into Excel. And she said she spent twenty plus hours on an already very busy week putting all those women into the groups that they requested. Next year, I've learned that we can dynamically generate these fields. So I use either Lava or SQL, I can't remember which, to generate that field and generate it in such a way that the field knows the ID of the group it's selected. And then handily in Rock, you have the option to automatically run a workflow based off of someone who's registered. And so not only did it automatically update that list whenever she needed to add or remove group leaders from it, it also went and whenever someone registered, automatically put them in that group. So it went from twenty plus hours of work for her to less than thirty minutes. And that was because there are some women who put no preference on there, and she had to manually find the right group for them. So it went from a significant amount of work in an already busy season to being almost completely automated just because I was able to take advantage of these tools. She was very grateful and a little bit angry that I hadn't done it the year before. But that's the kind of thing that we can do. So not only make things easier for ourselves, but also clear up space for our ministry teams to do more of the ministry and less of the admin work. So I mentioned workflows. Workflows in Rock are triggered automation. So something will kick it off. And a lot of different things in Rock can kick it off. But what I wanted to talk about is the fact that you don't just have to have workflow forms kicking it off or something like that. You can use workflows to automate and increase the speed of stuff that you're working on. So for example, I have this form, which I handily cropped out the name of, but this is my add child groups workflow. I don't know if you've had to make like 20 or 30 child groups for something, like table groups, small groups, but it's a lot of work to go. Add child group, put in the name, put in the group type, save, reload the page, get back in there. This form lets you select the parent group, tell it how many that you want to be created, and select the group type. You can optionally add the names. If you don't add names, it just assumes you want it to be group one, group two, group three, group four, group five. And then you hit Submit. And then it is done. It creates the groups. So that's not saving you twenty hours worth of work, but it's a fair amount of rather tedious work, which again goes back to the mindset is if you're doing something and it's tedious, Rock can do it for you, especially if it's something repetitive like this. This workflow relies on a plugin, Blue Box Spoon's Workflow Stimpact plugin, which if you're at all interested in workflows, I would very much recommend because it'll let you do some cool things like for loops and creating entities. So it's very helpful. But this kind of thing exists where you can and I use this all the time. If I'm going to be doing something more than like 10 to 12 times, especially if I know I'll be doing it again in the future, making something like this where there are tons of times that we're going to be making child groups for a group. That's just something that's happening over and over again. And this cuts down the time to make something like that dramatically. The last big type of automation in Rock is jobs. So jobs are timed automation. So Rock is able to say whatever kind of schedule you want to put something on, it's going to be able to run different types of code based on the time. Rock uses this a ton. So all the stuff it's doing behind the scenes to clean up your data, it's going to be running those jobs at night on its own. But you can make new jobs in Rock. One of my favorites is the Data View to Workflow job. So at the bottom here, you select a data view, which is just a filtered list in Rock. And then you select a workflow. And what it'll do is when it runs, it will take everyone who's on that data or everything that's on the data view. This is a person one, so everyone who's on that data view. And it will run the workflow for that person. This is incredibly powerful. So the example here is our LVKV is our preschool and elementary ministries. So they were manually pulling a list of everyone who had attended the first time that week, for the first time that week, and sending out a welcome email. Now they would copy and paste that email from Word or something, but it was still manual work that they were doing on an already busy weekend. And what we did was we took a workflow, put the content of that email in it, and then set this to run after our Sunday services. Every week, the DataView pulls the list of everyone who was new that week with the parent transform. So we're sending the parents, not the kids. And then it automatically goes and sends that. We did something similar for our elementary ministry. They wanted to send their kids a like a PDF handout that went into more details that was to give the parents an opportunity to have conversations with their kids about what they learned in Sunday school that morning. And we did something similar. We pulled a list of everyone who attended at that service, and we sent them an SMS with a link to view that PDF. And we're doing that every week. And all they had to do was put the new PDF in a content channel, assign the date for that week, and the workflow took care of the rest. And these are things that we set this up, we set it running, and then haven't touched it. It just runs and does that work. And that takes that burden off of those teams, off of me having to do work to make these things happen, and just works. Last category let me look at is custom reports. So Rock has a lot of powerful reporting features. But one of the things that you can leverage that for internally is for pulling data from multiple sources. So we're going to look at check-in configuration. How many here find check-in setup confusing? Yeah, there's a lot of information going on there. I tend to think of it as a triangle. You've got the group, you've got the location, you've got the schedule. And as long as you've put those things together, then check-in works. But all three of those things are located in different places on different screens. And so we created this. And this is built off a dynamic data block. I think we may have redid this in a different under just a table. But this is pulling a report of the different groups available, the age range set up on those groups, and which rooms were available at which of our service times. So in one page, our kids team can see exactly what's set up and what's not. Yesterday, we launched our fall student ministry, Wednesday night programming. And they have a similar page set up for them. And they were able to tell me ahead of time, hey, there's a group here that doesn't have a room listed for student nights. We want them set up for check ins. So they were able to go in and do a quick check-in this and see, oh, hey, nothing's set up here. Can you get that set up? Because they had added a group. And so it showed up on that list without anything scheduled because it wasn't set up yet. And so it's an easy way to see multiple pieces of information from different places in the same location, just making it easy to look at this stuff. Another thing you can do is adding value. So for example, this is back to that open registrations page. If you create a registration with a payment, with a cost, there is a default payment account. Ours is called do not use, and it gets used. Our finance director is here nodding. Yeah, so I put in a little bit of code into the SQL underneath this that said, hey, if it's account ID whatever, highlight this in red. And so we can do stuff that adds value. So we're not just pulling the information from different places, but we can add some things that highlight, hey, something's going on here. With the checking configuration page, I did something similar where it'll put a big red X if group is not set up with a schedule for the expected time. And so we can add that kind of value. And so you're not hopping around a bunch of different places, and also you can pretty quickly highlight things. And again, this is something that I set up and it just runs. Like you do it once and then it's available for your team to use ongoing without a whole lot of additional upkeep. All right. I am flying through this. All right. So in summary, Rock provides us with incredible opportunities for customization and automation. So the thing that I want you to take away from this is anytime you find yourself doing something that's repetitive, something that takes multiple clicks to get around, or the right information is just in a bunch of different places. You can do something about that. And none of these things required a whole lot of code. It's relatively simple to make these changes, make these shortcuts, to make these reports. And they can save a lot of time. And it's time that you get back to invest in doing more things. That's time that your ministry teams get back to invest in what they're doing. And like that opportunity is there. And so the skill to learn is that noticing when something is taking a long time or noticing when something is really repetitive. I joke around with my wife because for me, optimization and efficiency is second nature. So I'm seeing things. I'm like, all right, there's got to be a better way to do this. That is not my wife's approach to things. She is the head down, smash through it. And I think this is something where like taking the time to learn that skill of being aware of when something is taking a long time, when something is more complicated than it needs to be, that you can really gain back a lot of time from being able to leverage the automation that you have in Rock. I took way less time than I should have, but I did bring a couple bonus things to look at in case that happened. So we'll look at a couple things and then we'll do some Q and A. Bonus, following registrations. Recently, Rock was updated so that following wasn't just available for people and groups, that's available for any entity. But they also didn't really build out what following does for most entities, including this on the right. It's maybe not clear. But this is if you go to an event registration instance, there's a little star there at the bottom or at the top right that you can click to follow it. It does nothing out of the box. I am 80% sure that it does nothing out of the box. But we leveraged it to add this bit of code to the home page, our staff home page, our internal home page. So if you have followed a registration, you'll see quick summary of what's going on on those registrations. Just how many people are registered over the capacity and when the registration closes. So a lot of ministries have started using this for their registrations. Also our comm team is using this. So they'll look and see, all right, hey, we're supposed to highlight this event with an announcement. There's three spots left. We're not going to talk about that from the stage. We're going to move something else in that people could actually sign up for. So it's been really effective. I added the code behind it. The one complication here is that X is really complicated to make work. It's using some JavaScript and stuff. All the code is in the takeaways for this, but that is the only thing so far that's actually required a significant code. It's using the API to close that out. The other thing that I'll show you guys because we have time is send to parents. This I think is the first recipe I put on the Rock community. If you didn't know, the Rock community has if you go to community.rockrms.com, you can click recipes on the side. And a lot of people, a lot smarter than me, have come up with good ways to do things and they share them. And it's got some really powerful stuff. I learned about something today. There's a recipe for having a drip campaign. So how to set up automated follow-up with people and automatic communication with them over time, which I'm going to look at when I get back. This one is a send to parents button. So it's often easy to get a list of kids that you want to communicate with their parents. But you can pull up the list, you can hit communicate, and then you've got a list of kids. And communicating with them is difficult. This shows you how to add a Send to Parents button. You click the button, it swaps out all the kids, puts in all their parents, and then you have that communication wizard still ready to go to send to parents. That recipe is on the recipes page. All right. All right. Yeah. Sorry, I kind of flew through that. My hope is that I mean, like everything here, y'all would feel empowered, that y'all would know that like, my favorite thing in moving to working with Rock has been that there's almost always a yes. Like, someone comes to you and says, we wanna do this. There's almost always a yes. And I just want you guys to know that that includes things that make your life easier, things that give you back time and do some of the busy work for you. Do you all have any questions?