RX 24 - Ministering to Kids thru Content Channels - Amy Fewkes

Transcribed Content

Hey. Good afternoon. You guys are the most awake people I think I've had in here all day. And I don't get it, but it's awesome, so keep it going. Alright. So let's give a warm welcome to Amy Fuchs, and she's gonna be talking to us about ministering to kids through content channels. Thank you, guys. Thanks for joining me on the last session of Rock. Hopefully, your brains aren't too full by now so that you can learn a little bit about how we administer to our kids using content channels. As JR said, I am Amy Fuchs. I'm the director of IT at the Compass Church. We have six campuses all located in the Western Suburbs Of Chicago, about 4,000 attendants on the weekends. We've been on Rock for six years. So website and our app will be on live in a couple weeks. So very excited and love Rock. I don't know if you guys are familiar with content channels or not, so I wanted to give you kind of a brief overview of how the kind of the structure and how they work. And then I'll go into two examples of how we are using them. There's really three components, and they're kinda hierarchical. So you start with your content channel type, then you create con content channels of that type, and then you put items in those content channels. So for your content channel type, it really defines a structure for all the channels that will go underneath it. Rock ships with some universal ones. So out of the box, you have some that you could use already. But if you need to customize one, you can add it. There's a few important settings here. The date and time. So if your content is time sensitive, you are gonna wanna put in that you want a date range or just a single date like it goes live after this date. If it's time sensitive, then you're gonna wanna add that time field. But if it is not date or time sensitive, you can just put no date. You can also enable or disable things like priority if you're not using that feature, the content field itself if everything all the contents coming from attributes. And status would be, like, if it's approved or not. And the benefit of disabling those, if you're not using them, they don't clutter the screen for your end user who's actually putting in the content. It takes those options away. They're not confused by fields that they're not using. And then the last things are the item and channel attributes. So if you add attributes at the type level, then every channel will get these attributes. And every item added to any of those channel will also get these attributes. So the benefit of having it defined at the type is if you anticipate having a lot of channels of that type. You don't have to go into every channel and add those attributes. So for example, if you have you think you're gonna have a different channel for every campus, but you need the same attributes, you could create a type. The next step after you've created your type, you create your actual content channel. Obviously, the first important setting is telling it what type you want to use. And then if you guys once you start using content channels, you you might create a lot of them. And so giving them categories will just help you in the future to sort and filter, and help you find what you've created. We have a few hundred already, so that category is is important. Editor type is HTML or structured content. I don't know if you guys have worked in the HTML editor. It gives you, some more features. But if all you really need is text or some bold, the structured content makes it easier for whoever's entering, the data. It's a little easier to use, a little bit cleaner. Under the settings, you can indicate if the item requires approval or not. For example, if you have a ministry leader that's adding the content but you don't want it on your website until communications approves it, you can, set that up in there. If you're gonna use the personalization feature in Rock, indexing so that the content in the content, channel is searchable. And then you could also pick if you wanna manually order items. This allows you when you add the items, you can just kinda drag and drop them in the order you want them displayed. And then child content channels. This allows you to kind of link content channels together in a parent child relationship. An example for us is we have message like series, a sermon series. So that's one content channel that contains all the information about that series, but underneath it is a child content channel that has all of the messages. So six or seven weeks of messages are all tied to that same series. And if you didn't identify attributes in your type, you can come into the content channel itself, and add item attributes here. And then I just wanted to point out the content library is here as well. You guys aren't aware of that feature, it's just a great way to share content between churches, and you can pull it in using that content library feature. The last step are the content channel items. And the important settings here really are the title, if you're gonna display that title anywhere, or if you're not, it's like a good internal way to reference what content is in there. The date and time, if you have that enabled. So what date and time are you gonna want the data to go lie or the content to go live. If you're using the content feature, this is an example of HTML. That's the big box in the middle. And then you'll see all the attributes that you added at either the type or the channel, and they're all below. And this is where you actually put the meat in. This is where the content goes that you can then use on your website or in your app, or anywhere else. So that's kind of a quick high level overview of how content channels work. But if you need more information, it's all in the manual, the website manual that you can find on Rock's website. So our first example, was born out of COVID like a lot of other, website features, I'm sure. We went into COVID. None of our kids' curriculum was up on our website. And we couldn't meet in person, and but we still wanted to provide that for the parents to use at home. And so our one of our kids' pastors, you know, made his videos available, And somebody in communications wrote some HTML, and the process was, you know, every Friday, the kids pastor would email them the video links and the stuff that needed to be uploaded. And then every weekend, somebody from communications was going in and updating the website. So we needed to make that process much easier, so, we, implemented content channels. I just wanted to show you on this page, so it makes more sense later. We have, like, three areas, early childhood, preschool, and elementary. And you'll see that we display, like, the current week, and then we display four previous weeks worth of content. If you were to click on the previous weeks, it would open them just similar to the top one. So we created a content channel type, and it's single date because it's gonna go live like Sunday at 8AM, and then it can remain live anytime after that. So we have a date and time. And then we added attributes. So title would be the date, and then the title of the content channel, I saw, would be the date. And then the title attribute would be the, you know, pre early childhood, preschool, elementary. Video, when we wrote this, the media element wasn't available, so it's just a it's a text field that holds the link to the Vimeo video that we use to display the video. A description is a little blurb that shows up underneath it. And then the button text, so what should display on the button and then the button document, what PDF should be pulled up when they click on that button. It's usually like the kids takeaway for the for the weekend or an activity for them to do. And so those will repeat. So you need, all of those attributes for each of the three sections if you have three different grade levels you're displaying. And then we created our content channel. So the type is the type that we just created. We have an icon just the way that the camp or the kids' pastor looks. Like I said, if you have a hundred of content channels, the icon kinda helps it stand out so they know which one to find. We enable indexing because we want all of this information to be searchable. And we manually order the items, and that's mostly they get added and it just gets dropped to the bottom of the list when you add it. But if we put them out of order accidentally when we're adding them, we can drag them to the right spot. And then because we put all of our attributes in the content channel type, we do not have to add them to the content channel itself. They should already be there. And one last thing I would say is if you have somebody who's not a rock admin or not on communications editing the the content, you're gonna wanna have to set up security on the content channel to let those people, add content to it. And then it's pretty simple. They go in. Our titles are rarely changed, so we actually set those as default so they're all populated. We get the Vimeo ID. Our kid's pastor is the one who does all this, so he can, like, just upload the PDFs he wants displayed. And that's he goes through this, and he can load a month at a time or two months at a time, however much material he has prepared. He just goes in and sets these up with the correct date and time for them to go live. And then to get this on our website, you would use the content channel view block. I don't know if you guys are familiar with this at all, but you put it on your website and you would pick the channel, the channel that has your lessons in it. The format, I'll discuss in a little bit. We just pull in a Lava file. So I'm gonna show you kind of the Lava that we use to display the content. You're gonna wanna pick the items per page. So as I mentioned, we're always displaying the current week and the four previous weeks, so we're pulling in five items. So we could have a hundred items, but we only want five returned to us. Filters, this is where we only display we filter on the date and time. So we're only pulling in the content that is, you know, after that date and time. And we sort it, and we sort it descending because, as I said, we want the most recent date at the top, and then we want the other four weeks behind it. So the items per page, the filters to only pull what's live is important, and then sorting. Alright. So this is what our Lava file looks like. This is just a partial. I wanted to make it big enough so you guys could see it. But in the takeaway, I have the full lava file. Or if you are interested, you can reach out to me, and I can send it to you. We use the accordion. It's a lava short code. That's how it opens the top one and then displays the other ones underneath it. And then the what's returned to you in the the in the block is an item. And so you'll see we loop through all of those items. So that's the for loop. And you describe your item dot title, which is our date. And then the attribute title are our three columns. And then we look to see because there may or may not be, like, a a takeaway, or, like, a PDF to look at that week. So if there's nothing in the button text, then we don't display the button. If there's something there, then we display the button and we link it to the PDF that and those are all attributes of the item. So if you don't know Lava, you could probably almost copy and paste it, but hopefully, it's not too complicated. But just know that you're getting that item back, and that's what you can use in your lava. So that greatly, like, just made our communications team happy because they weren't having to communicate the kids pastor. The kids pastor was happy because he could he likes to work in bulk, so he'll go load a month's worth of material at a time. And we rarely the communications team doesn't have to touch the website. It just is automatically always updating. Alright. The next way, we use, content channels, in our kids ministry is through a tool we call DriveTime. Fun little story about this tool is our kids pastor went to a conference at Watermark Church, down in Texas and came back, and he said, Rock has this cool feature called DriveTime. Can you enable that for us? And I said, I'm like, there is not a I'm like, I think it's a custom tool that they built. And so I kind of had an idea of how they did it, but I did call the people at watermark, and they were very gracious, walked me through their process. I tweaked it to make it work for us. So I am going to walk you through our drive time tool. So what is drive time? It's a tool that we developed, and we're using only core rock features. So there's no custom development here. It's all core rock. It's used by our kids ministry. It texts them questions about the lesson their child learned that day. And so the texts are sent right after the service so the kids and parents can discuss it in the car ride home. And only parents who have opted in to receive the text and have had their kid checked in to that service will receive the text. So you can see some of the fun, questions our, you know, our kids' pastor came up with. Like, you know, your child just learned about Jesus blessing the children. Ask them who tried to stop the children from going to Jesus. It just, helps with that conversation between the parent and the kid because if you ask the kid what they learned, they stuff is the answer I I get. So we've had a great response, and parents love love this just to initiate the conversation with their kids. So we do use content channels to hold all of the content for the text, but there are a lot of other working parts too. So I'm gonna kinda walk you through all of the pieces including our content channels. The first thing we did, as I said, we had you have to opt in to receive the text. We don't wanna be spamming people with parents with text. And so we decided to store if they're opt in or not as a person attribute. It's just a boolean attribute. If you don't wanna store it as an attribute, another option would just be have a group. And if they've opted in, then you would place them in that group to know that they've opted in. And then obviously, there's a form to opt in. So we, like, sent out emails. There's QR codes. It's like in our weekly e news if people wanna sign up. It's just a simple workflow form. If you're sending them a link in an email, you can have it, you know, prepopulate all their information so they just have to hit submit. And then make sure you're enabling their SMS if it's not already enabled on their mobile phone, since they are agreeing to receive the text. If you don't wanna do the form, you could also do, like, an SMS pipeline where people text a number and then it, you know, opts them in to receive the kids, the the drive time text. Alright. So we needed a content channel to hold the, content for the text each week. And so we created a new one. And we didn't need the content field because we're not using it. We're only using the content in each of the attributes. And we disabled a lot of stuff because all we really need is that text comment. And so you'll see we have the three age groups again. So we have what text is gonna go to the age two to four parents, what texts are gonna go to the preschool and kindergarten parents, and then what are gonna go to the text are gonna be sent to the elementary parents. And if you set that attribute type to memo, when you send the text, it actually honors that line break. So we have them set as an attribute type of memo, And the max characters, we limit to a 60, just so it goes out as one text. They don't need a book. It's quick and short. And we didn't trust our kids' pastor to monitor that himself. So, we set the max characters to one sixty, but you guys can set it however you want. And then we created the content channel, and then we updated the security on the content channel. Because all of our attributes were at the type level, we didn't have to add any attributes here. And then to add the content channel items, they add a new content channel for every week. And they include we have a date range on this one. So when like, it's it really spans the weekend. So when does the when does the content start and when does it end? So that date range should include the weekend. And as I mentioned before, carriage returns will be honored when the text is sent when you use that memo field, which is super helpful. So once again, when our our kids pastor is he'll go out. He probably has two months worth of these questions prepared, and he just goes and puts them all in and puts the right time and forgets about it, which is great. So I will say Watermark Church was due using storing theirs as a global attribute. And so if you forgot to update the attribute, the wrong text went out the next week. So somebody had to go in every week and update that. So the content channel worked well for us. And now you're gonna need a data view. So we need to figure out who should be receiving these texts because we only wanna send it to parents of kids who are checked in who are also opted in. So you're gonna need two data views to figure that out. But we have three different age groups. So you need two different data views for each of those age groups per service. So it does get a little long to build them out depending on how many age groups and service times you have. So the first data view finds the parents of the kids in attendance. So you're just looking for kids who attended, and then you just do the post filter transformation to find the parents. And then the second data view just takes the parents from the first data view and then looks to see if they are opted in or not and pulls those in. And then we also have this, like, separate group that we throw in here too, and it's like people on staff or volunteers who just always wanna get the text regardless of if their kids are checked in or not. Or maybe they don't have kids, they still wanna see what texts are being sent. So we just include that additional group in there. So now we know the content of the text from the content channel and we know who should be getting the text from the data views, we're gonna dump all of those into a group. So if you guys are familiar with the group sync, this is how, we sync this we created a group for, each of service and each of the age ranges, and then we set a group sync into the data view. So that's how we get all of our people who should be getting the text into a group so that when we create a workflow, we can send them to that group. Send the text to the group. So we'll need one workflow for every service time. And the workflow attributes, so you're gonna need an attribute to kinda hold the content of the text. And then you're gonna need a second attribute that holds which group that text should go to. And you can just set the default for the group. So we always know that this group at this service time is getting that text. You just set that default. And so we get our content from the content channel using, an entity, Lava entity command. And I don't know if you can read it up there, but we're essentially saying, give me the content from this content channel whose start date is less than now and whose end date is greater than now. That's how we find that specific range, and that pulls in the and then we look for the attribute for that age group. And then you have another action, and we looked. So if that if that if we didn't pull any text back, like if they didn't create any content for that week and the and it's blank, we're not gonna send the text. So we look to make sure that the text is not blank. And then there's a a workflow action that's SMS send action, and it just sends that content from, you know, that text, to the groups that we've created using our data views and groups. Alright. So now that we know what content's being sent, who should receive it, and how we're gonna send it using the workflow. We need to actually launch that workflow. So we launch the workflow using a job. So there's a launch workflow job, and you're gonna need one for each of the service times. So and then we launch our job 15 after the service ends. So if service is at nine, it should end at ten. At 10:15 is when the text will be sent. Alright. And that are the those are the two ways that we, use our content channels. So are there any questions?