Leveraging RockRMS to Make Disciples
Leveraging RockRMS to Make Disciples
This past month, Simple's COO Jeff Ward (jeff@simpledonation.com | (512)846-7803) presented a webinar for the 2025 Christian Stewardship Network.
In this presentation, Jeff explores how to leverage RockRMS to identify and engage with people who are showing spiritual growth and interest, starting with giving. Using Paul's personal approach to ministry as a biblical foundation, he demonstrates how technology should enhance—not replace—face-to-face discipleship. The core philosophy is that growing disciples is more important than growing giving, with giving serving as a signal of where God is at work in someone's life.
Through practical demonstrations, Jeff shows how to set up connection types, opportunities, and requests in RockRMS to follow up with new givers, capture stories of generosity, and minister to lapsed givers. He walks through the step-by-step process of creating these systems and emphasizes the importance of personalized follow-up. Even for large churches, he suggests starting small and decentralizing the process to make meaningful connections that can lead to deeper discipleship.
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Transcript
00:05 So today I'm going to talk to you about leveraging RockRMS, grow, generous and engaged disciples. And I really want to start with, this question, if Paul, the puzzle Paul were living today, how, what would he do with today's technology?
00:20 Would he, be delivering online sermons through maybe opening his own YouTube channel or would he be doing podcasts, you Spotify or Apple or whoever, would he rely primarily on group, email newsletters, or group text, what he have his own TikTok channel.
00:41 I post this question on my son and he said, duh, dad, it's obvious he'd be selling tents online. He then said, oh, also, he'd have to have a Patreon account to raise support.
00:54 But really what I want to talk about is, How Paul would leverage technology to, engage in personal relationships.
01:05 And a lot of that is, is based on what I see in scripture. In scripture, I see that, Paul's approach was very personal.
01:13 If you look in 1st Thessalonians chapter 2, verses 7 through 12, you see language like, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children and, him being, affectionately desirous of them.
01:28 And how he was ready to share not only the gospel, but his very life with them. And then also like a father with his children.
01:36 That that's the kind of language. And I mean, you can't imagine a mother nursing her child through TikTok or through YouTube.
01:43 And in the same way as we think about making disciples, we really need to realize that there's a, it's just a very personal aspect.
01:53 It requires some component of, Face to face. And I'm not saying that Paul wouldn't use technology. I'm sure he would.
02:03 I'm sure that, well, he used the technology in his day. He wrote letters. That was the technology. And I'm sure if he was around today, he would send emails and he would send texts and he might use some of these other mediums.
02:18 But ultimately, I think he'd use them in favor of, supplementing. His face-to-face and small group meetings. And, that's what I want to look at today as we talk about, how to leverage technology for targeted discipleship.
02:37 One of the things that we can do is that we can identify people who are of an interest in growing.
02:44 Years ago, I worked as a, volunteer youth leader at my, church. And in that youth group, there were some wealthy kids and some not- so wealthy kids.
02:57 Some kids that seemed to put together and some that just seemed like they're a mess. There are some kids whose families were in church every time the doors opened, but there's some that came from unchurched families and they had just started coming to church themselves and the parents didn't come.
03:11 They're older kids and younger kids, popular kids and popular kids. There's all these segments. And I saw a youth pastor, spending time with a diverse group of people, and I couldn't make heads or tails of how he was deciding who to spend time with.
03:26 And so I asked him how he was trying to decide where to allocate his resources. And what he said to me was really reminiscent of something I had learned in going through, Henry Blackabe's, experiencing God study years ago, where Blackabe says that, God reveals Himself where He's at work and
03:49 His revelation is an invitation to join Him in that work. And what He said was, I spend my time with the people that show an interest, that ask, that, that are starting to grow and be responsive to what God's doing in their life.
04:04 And we can use data to help us identify those kind of people, people that are expressing an interest, people that are, taking steps of faith.
04:13 And then we can use those tools To enhance, personal connection to help us, engage with people not as a replacement for engaging with people one-on-one, but to enhance that.
04:25 And, what I'm going to show through this talk is how we can, prioritize small group and one-on-one connections by leveraging the technology.
04:38 So, I understand that in coming to this talk, That there's people with all kinds of different abilities and knowledge, knowledge of rock.
04:50 You know, some people might not be using rock yet, they might just be considering it. Some might be using it, but they're, they just barely know I get into rock.
05:00 And then we, we have power users who largely are going to know how to do. They're going to the terminology I'm talking about and how to do all the things we're talking about.
05:10 I'm going to kind of target those people that Know a little bit about rock. I'm gonna explain things pretty thoroughly and then but also show you how to set some things up in rock.
05:21 So, that said, I have some assumptions. And, one of those assumptions is that growing disciples is more important than growing giving.
05:34 I actually think growing giving is a byproduct of growing disciples, but a lot of times in churches you have People who focus on generosity or stewardship or advancement or fundraising and really in the nonprofit world, this is really common.
05:49 I, I feel like that if we shouldn't be focused on just growing giving or giving will give us signals that will help us know who we can invest our time in, or really talking about how to grow disciples.
06:05 Also, I assume that community is critical to growth. That growth, spiritual growth happens in the context of community.
06:14 It's one of the reasons I think that, scripture says, tells us not to avoid the assembly of the saints because we're there to encourage one another.
06:22 And that's God's design. I also think that, large group teaching, small groups, and one-on-one are all components of discipleship.
06:32 Also discipleship involves teaching and modeling. And we're going to talk about that a little bit, how we can model for people in addition to just teaching them.
06:42 And then, this, this focus on generosity that you're going to see in this talk. And frankly, that's throughout a lot of the CSN is, is really a supplement to, not a replacement for, discipleship.
06:59 So those are my assumptions that are built in. That one, make sure you're clear. So I'm going to, take as a case study on how to leverage rock to engage and grow disciples.
07:15 I'm going to take new givers as a case study. One of the reasons for that is there's really strong biblical support for it.
07:22 If we look in, second Corinthians chapter nine, Paul took the time to thank the Corinthians for giving. And, In taking the time to thank him, he was modeling for us what we should be doing, but he was also modeling gratitude for them.
07:41 So this is where that modeling piece comes in. When we express gratitude, for someone's act of faith, we're modeling for them how to encourage someone else who's growing in their faith.
07:54 And so, all models that in second Corinthians 9 and, In there, he, he commends the Corinthians readiness to help.
08:08 He commends their zeal, and he even ties their gift to their faith when he says that their submission comes from their, I mean, their submission mean their obedience comes from their confession of the gospel of Christ.
08:20 So Paul's really modeling, in addition to, to thanking them. And we need to realize that when someone's giving for the first time that they're, their giving is a declaration.
08:32 It's a declaration that they trust God. They're not holding on to that money, trying to, make their own way, but they're giving to God.
08:42 For a lot of people, it's an acknowledgement that God owns it all, and that they're giving back a portion to him, an acknowledgement of that and, and, and trust of him and obedience to him, as a steward, they're, they're saying, God, I'm gonna open handedly hold what you've entrusted
08:59 to me. And, give and share with others. And so that's a step of faith. It's, it's a response to what God's, to the faith that God's given them.
09:09 It's, it's a way for us to see that someone, is responding to God's work in the life. And so this goes back to what I've saying is, you know, we need to see that as a signal of God's activity.
09:21 And then we need to recognize it and encourage them in that, in, in Philippians 414, through 20 Paul also thanks the, thanks the Philippians for their gift.
09:37 And so this is just, again, another model, of how we can do and should do. So, I want to talk about how to do this in rock.
09:52 so, the way that I want to, demonstrate thanking these new givers is through using connection requests, using connection opportunities and connection requests.
10:06 So if you really want to understand connections in rock, a good place to start is the rock RMS engagement manual is a link here.
10:16 There's also, the Rock U videos. And then, those are just great places to start. Really, the thing to understand that a connection in Rock is like, if you think of sales, it's like a sales funnel.
10:33 You have different ways of getting people into the funnel, but the ideas to move them towards something. In this case, what we want to move them towards is, greater faith.
10:43 We want them to grow in the faith in greater Christ likeness. So I want to take someone who's exhibiting, some interest or activity of God in their life.
10:52 And I want to move them to, to greater faith and Christ likeness. And so in this case, we're going to take the fact that they're a new giver.
11:00 And we're going to put them into this funnel and we're going to take action to try to move them down, down the steps.
11:06 And so I'm going to show you how we would set this up in rock. Are you seeing my screen here?
11:14 Okay, so it rock comes out of the box with this involvement, connection type, but you can create new ones and I created one called generosity.
11:25 The way you do this is you get to this by the way under the the people menu you go to connections.
11:31 So once you go to people menu and connections, you'll have whatever you have already set up for most churches.
11:37 It's involvement. And the idea here with this, these connection requests they're set up in the core rock is that people can sign up with their interest in serving in children's ministry as a greeter or an usher.
11:49 And that creates a connection request that a staff member can then follow up on to get them plugged into that ministry.
11:56 Maybe they have to go through a background check. There's different steps you can create along the way. So I want to set up a generosity, connection type.
12:06 And so I click that. Icon, and to create a new connection type, you just press plus, and then you name it.
12:13 There's different things you can set up in it. There's activities you can take. You can set up in the statuses, you can set up.
12:21 I'm going to show you what I set up in generosity. So, if you click edit, you'll see, the activities that I wanted to take to, record is one to verify it's a legit connection, and we'll talk about that in a minute.
12:38 But then there's different kinds of calling, either calling with leaving a message or no answer or calling and getting them.
12:43 There's meeting, there's scheduled meeting, there's sent emails, sent handwritten cards, sent text. These are not in order except alphabetically, which is why I put one here, so to show at the top, if you wanted to order these some way, you could put, you know, maybe number two is called no answer, three
13:00 is called, Left message, whatever order you want to put them in. In addition to activities, you can set up statuses.
13:08 And this is going to create a, conbon type board. I'll show you that in just second, that they would flow through.
13:15 In my case, I wanted to start in two verify so I can make sure it's a legitimate request. And once they've been verified, they go into contact.
13:23 Once someone started the contact process, it's in progress. Once that's done. I want to go to follow up because my intent was, hey, they've given, that's great.
13:33 We want to thank them for giving, but then I want to see how we can further engage them and that's the two follow up piece.
13:39 And then once you've done that, it's complete. So you can set up these different statuses. Again, you just press the plus button, you create the status you want.
13:47 So that's connection types. That's the first thing you have to do. Once you have a connection type, you can create the connection opportunities.
13:55 In my case, I have four. I created one for first time givers, one for laps givers, one for potential stories of generosity and one for exceptional gifts.
14:04 You can create however many you want in whatever categories you want. Again, you just press plus. There's different things you can set up to where you have one per campus, for example.
14:13 There's a lot of different things. I'm not going to go into all the details of this, but you can see those in that engagement manual I referenced.
14:20 So once you have your, Connection type and your connection opportunity setup. The question then is how am I going to get people into this first time giver, connection opportunity?
14:33 How do I get them in the funnel? Which by the way, I'll show you that, just so I have better context as I, get them in there.
14:44 So, I mentioned a con bon kind of bored. That's this. These people are in the two verify stage. These are in the two contact stage.
14:53 I have one in progress and one to follow up. I don't have any complete. So, basically, you know, once you're in here, I'll show you this instrument and actually get in here how to work it.
15:04 But, you can move these once you've taken action just by this and you can also click on them and add your different activities.
15:13 So I'll show you more of that in just a minute. I want to show you first how we get these in here.
15:17 And a lot of the talk today is going to be just different ways to get people into this connection flow.
15:23 The reason I want to use this connection flow is because it gives you that ability to connect one-on-one. In this connection request, I can send emails, I can send texts, I can call, I can go meet with someone, whatever.
15:36 It's all about connecting one-on-one, so I can really personalize the connection. So the way we're going to put people in the first-time giver connection Opportunity is through the giving alerts.
15:49 So rock comes out of the box with this ability to set up giving alerts and the way you set them up is by clicking again on the icon or sorry the gear icon.
16:02 You want to enable giving automation and then set up the days you want it to run. You have the ability to choose to run it just on contributions on contributions and event registrations.
16:12 If you have other transaction types those will show up here as well. A contribution event registration is what comes out of the box, but in this instance, we've added payment as another option.
16:22 I've seen some churches add other receipts, something like that. We want to run this just for tax deductible accounts.
16:29 In some churches, they may want this to be more than that. Some churches are recording, directed giving on a person's profile in a non-tax deductible account.
16:40 If you're doing that, then you might want to, custom select. The accounts you want to choose. Once you do that, I'm gonna, I'm gonna just blow by these, giving journey settings.
16:54 This is something in rock where it labels a person, each of these, statuses based on the settings that you put in here.
17:03 I'm not very concerned about that right now. What I want to do is create a first time giver alert. And so the way to do that is click plus.
17:10 Once you do create the plus. Then you go in here and set it up. And so this is a gratitude alert.
17:17 It's running on Wednesdays by leaving account blank whatever I chose before as far as all tax deductible accounts and contributions is what's gonna dictate.
17:27 I could set this up for a single campus in which case I would probably call it first time giver Austin campus if that was the campus I've set it up for.
17:37 I could then pick the accounts for that campus. Once I create this, I put it on Wednesday. The reason I put it on Wednesday is because I want to give my team time on Monday and Tuesday to make sure that, these people aren't duplicates.
18:01 When a new gift comes in, if someone gives with a new email address, it might save a new person record into my system.
18:08 And so, it's ideal for a church to have a process where they're verifying those duplicates and merging them on Mondays.
18:19 Some churches do it maybe on Tuesdays. That's what I'm just giving an extra day. So this is going to run on Wednesdays, hoping that we've had time to merge duplicates so we don't get false positives.
18:25 Maybe you have someone that gives weekly and they suddenly give it the new email address. It'd be weird for them to get a first time giver.
18:35 Thank you. If that's, if that's the case. I'm saying I only want to give, call someone a first time giver if they're giving at least $10.
18:42 You could put a dollar in here if you wanted, you, yeah, you could put $100. I wanted to consider someone new, if they've given in a year and a half, thus the 547 days.
18:48 And then, so that's all that's going to take to make a new giver. These things are used more for, increases in frequency or amount, so like exceptional giving, or out of out of the normal pattern giving, you can set alerts for those as well.
19:05 We leave in those blank because we just want anyone who's given $10. For the first time in 547 days. And then we're gonna drop them into the connection type that we set up of generosity and the correct connection, opportunity at first time giver.
19:23 And then once you save it, that's all you need to do to make that work. So every Wednesday, there's a job that runs that will populate, my connection board.
19:34 So you'll see here, there's some, I'm presenting this on a Monday, five days ago was Wednesday, so that's when a lot of these were added.
19:44 So, once these get added in here, it's really about just working them. And so, what you would do is you would go in here and you want to make sure first that this is not a duplicate.
19:57 One of the things that we have done is turned on badges on the connection request to get some ideas of information about this person.
20:06 But really, if you want to know more, you just click on the person profile, and then you can see the data.
20:13 You can click on extended attributes as deep as any information. So this person first gave back in 2018, but last gave on March 2nd, given five times in 52 weeks.
20:29 You, you, you're probably looking at this and saying, wait, if he gave five times in 52 weeks, why is he showing up in my year and a half?
20:35 It's probably because those accounts are non-tax deductible. We have a lot of non-tax deductible accounts in our system. But I can look at other information on this person, their history, and just see what's going on with them.
20:50 I can look at, and so I can see the demographic changes, just a lot of information I can look at.
20:57 If there was any attendance history, I would see that here, any communication history. This is all information that's helpful for me to know.
21:04 You know, sometimes seeing the family, if there is any other family members is helpful for me to know. So once I feel confident that this isn't a duplicate, then I can go back to my, connection request, and I can add my activity.
21:23 And I'm going to say I verified it's a legit connection. Seems legit to me. You don't have to put a note, but you can.
21:36 Whoops. I'm in trouble typing. And then, I can save this. I can go ahead and move him to two contact.
21:55 I could even assign it. Whoops. One of the things, if you know who's the best person to call him, then you can pick.
22:05 Or to send an email, maybe it's their campus pastor, or maybe in the history you saw that there's some information about them.
22:13 So then I can pick that person that, should contact them. And then when Alicia Marble signs in, if she's got her connection request filtered to just hers, she would only see Jeffrey Eust.
22:25 Once someone comes into contact him, then again, you just contact him. Yeah, that activity. I called, great conversation.
22:43 Actually, I don't want to call even. I'm just going to sit. I'm going to start by sending a handwritten card on these.
22:49 So, sit, handwritten card. And then, I'm going to save. And then, I didn't mean to connect. We get how to set a future follow-up.
23:15 Edit. There you go. So you can set a future follow-up. I'm gonna say, sent a hand written card after a week, call, and see if he'd be interested in getting me.
23:40 Into a small group. So I'm gonna call this to follow up and then I'm gonna pick the future date and save.
23:55 So once I close that you should see him in the to follow up except I think I have future dates filtered out, so I can put future follow up there and it would show him.
24:08 But come back teeth it would show up in that list. So you can see the process from start to finish kind of how we would go through this and say I've already got this guy connected that moved him over.
24:21 So that's really the front to end of connections on new givers. I want to give another example just to show another way to get people in the funnel and that's sharing stories of giving and So let me go back to my presentation.
24:47 So, really, this is about declaring the goodness of God, and it's a way of encouraging others. If you read 2 Corinthians 8 before Paul, thanks the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 9, he's telling them the story of the Macedonians who gave out of their extreme lack.
25:06 He's really doing that as a, a story of God's goodness, of God's provision of their trusting God. And, that's a story to encourage others in their fate.
25:17 And so for us, one of the things that we can do to encourage others to grow in their faith and their faithfulness is to tell stories.
25:25 And so since we're talking about giving, I just, I mean, you can do this for any kind of story, but I wanted to have a way to capture, stories of generosity.
25:36 Maybe people telling stories of how they gave out of their lack and trusted God and how he's provided for them or Maybe it's I heard a story recently of someone who went to a journey of generosity and Afterwards they sold their house.
25:52 They downsize so that they could give more money away And so these are kind of stories. They're great to tell others as encouragement to others and so Really the way that I would go about doing this is twofold.
26:08 One is to notify your staff about your desire to capture these stories. And, when you do that, then they can just manually add those.
26:23 They can go into opportunities, they can go to potential stories of generosity, and they can just manually add a request.
26:31 So, I don't know. Let me think who's in here. Bill. Yeah, so I can say Bill Marble. Select. I can tell the story.
26:55 Bill got fired up and sold his house and gave all the proceeds.
27:10 Not half like Anna, Nia, and Sapphira. And so, there's no need to verify. I know this person. I've, I've done that.
27:27 And so, I can say, hey, the person that's collecting these stories is the Simple Rock admin admin. And so, I'm gonna go ahead and sign them as a connector.
27:35 I'm gonna say that. And that goes right in there. I think I've already done this. Twice before for the same guy.
27:42 So, but yeah, this is how you can manually add it. The other thing you can do, is you can create connection cards just like you do for, just like you do for the greeters and ushers and whatever.
28:02 And so you can, when you do that, wherever you put them, you know, you can go in here and I didn't, I didn't filter these out.
28:08 I've got All the others where people can add, but you would have just this one. And people could click on it and self, self-ad themselves, saying, hey, I have a story.
28:20 This is an ideal kind of thing to do, like, after a journey of generosity, you can email your people and say, hey, what, what, how's got impacted you or maybe it's after going through, financial peace university, email people asking if they have a story of how God worked in them, that they'd be willing
28:36 to share and then they can come in here and You know, tell the story and connect, and that will flow into that connection card.
28:44 And once you have several stories, you can bring those people together, make some videos, or maybe you're going to take make, articles that you'll share in a monthly stewardship newsletter or in, some of the context as a way to encourage people.
29:02 So, that's, that's, two, two other ways you can get. Data into connection requests. So last example I want to give is for lapsed givers, really just thinking through that when people stop giving they usually have a reason.
29:20 Either, God's doing something in their lives, maybe they're, they've lost a job, maybe they're, having marital problems, maybe the pastor said something, they hacked them off, maybe, they've moved.
29:36 Whatever, it's an opportunity for a ministry. This is a real personal ministry. This isn't the kind of thing where you want to e-mail someone and say, Hey, so you stop giving.
29:46 What's up? What's going on? But, this is the opportunity to call someone just ask, Hey, how can I pray for you?
30:00 And so, there's, I went in doing this. I want to show you one other way to get data into your funnel.
30:12 And that's still using the data to you. So, again, back to rock. The reason I want to use a data view, you can do this with a giving alert.
30:18 The reason I want to do it with a data view is because I like what we can do with a data view better than what's in a giving alert.
30:25 In a giving alert, I feel like the ways that they do it could lead to false positives more than what we're doing here.
30:33 So, basically what we've done is we've taken some SQL, which I'm happy to make available to any of you.
30:41 And we've just Put that in, to find people that have lapsed in their giving. And the way we do it is we say, hey, if someone has, historically given more than 10 times, they've given over $3,000, and they haven't given in the last eight weeks, but they gave in the same eight week period last
30:51 year, we're going to consider them laps. So they have a pattern of giving, and they're not giving anymore. You can adjust all those numbers in this query.
31:01 You can make it six weeks or nine weeks, you can make it two thousand dollars, you can make it five times, whatever you want to adjust, you can adjust.
31:07 But that's just kind of what we do by default. And so this data view, populates. And then I've set up my, I've set up what's called a, a connection campaign.
31:21 And so let me go back to connections here and just show you how you would do that. It was right up there.
31:36 So once you're in, connections, you quit campaign. Sorry. Let me go back. It's an under the opportunity. So you see connection campaigns.
31:51 So you click here, and then you can add your campaign. And when you add your campaign, you even give it a name, you're going to pick the connection type.
31:59 You're going to pick the connection opportunities. And you have different ways to, Get information in here, but we're gonna do it via this data view that we set up.
32:10 So when you set up that data view, you select that data view, and then I'm gonna say we don't want to contact them if they've been contacted in the past year.
32:20 You can create them all at once, but you can also make a daily limit of, assigned connection requests so you can throttle it.
32:29 And the same way to end those, Those flood into the lapsed givers. And so once those flood in here, you go through the same process we did with the thank you new givers.
32:42 So, I've showed you, three different examples in really four ways how to get people into connection requests. One is through the giving alert, one's through a manual connection, one's through a self opt-in, through a connection card, and, the last one's through a data view.
33:00 One of the things I just want to encourage you is to think about, what are the, what are the signals that you might look at for engagement?
33:10 How do you tell when God's at work in someone's life? And so here's some other ideas for that. It might be extraordinary gifts.
33:17 It might be givers who aren't otherwise engaged. Maybe they're giving, but they're not in a small group, and maybe you want to look at.
33:26 Conversely at the people that are in a small group or who are serving, but aren't giving. I've seen churches, identify staff or leaders who are not giving as an opportunity to come alongside them and disciple them.
33:38 Groups that need more teaching on generosity. I know one church that looked at age bands of givers from zero to 20 and 20 to 30 and 30 to 40.
33:48 And that way they could say, hey, in our Sunday school program, which are done on those same age bands, I can.
33:54 Change the curriculum for that age group, which seems to be lagging behind in giving. You can identify people who are turning 70 and a half as a signal, if they're already giving the turn to the age they might, you might have an opportunity to come alongside them and teach them about,
34:14 asset giving or other tax advantage ways of giving. You might want to identify those people who are faithful and extravagant givers.
34:24 Maybe these are people that you target to ask for stories or that you want to, target to equip to, invest in others and to cycle others.
34:34 I know one church that wanted to target people who are given the same amount. Over many years, they didn't ever change their giving.
34:40 They kind of set it up and forgot it. And they said these are people we might want to invest in.
34:47 Once you have your signal, then it's just really matching your message to your signal. You know, some people need to add a boy, encouragement to continue and if they some people might need to kick in the pants like those people that said it and forget it or the staff member who's not, giving.
35:03 It may be that someone needs more knowledge, and that's kind of the thing with the people turning 70 and a half.
35:08 It may be that someone who's not giving needs more knowledge. They may need to know how to get a debt, how to manage their money better.
35:15 So really, we're just trying to see, how to match a message to a signal and then even to think that who's the best person to reach out.
35:23 You can automate all this. A lot of pushback that I, I get on this, and on my encouragement to personalize is, hey, our church is too big.
35:32 You can automate, you can use workflows and workflow jobs that can send emails automatically and even set attributes on people.
35:39 We've done that for people. You can even send out communications directly from the giving alerts. And one of the things you can do to make it less cold is you can give a call to action to get connected.
35:56 You can, I've seen a pastor send out his, scheduling link to schedule coffee with him when he's done this.
36:03 So there's, there's different ways you can do that. What I want to encourage you to think about is that, there's risks.
36:11 You have the risk of getting emails sent to people that aren't new givers. One church I know did this, handled this by just calling out in the email are data.
36:22 It might be inaccurate, but it seems like this is your first time giving, if it's wrong, would you please let us know so we can update our database?
36:32 But you might have false positives, and you also have a more limited ability to customize the message. When you're contacting a single person, you can look at their history and you can see what you can know about that person, and that can inform what you say to them.
36:48 And you also have a better ability to customize who it comes from. You can use data in rock to segment people into groups and change them message based on those groups, even to make the message come from a different person if you're doing email, like you can make it come from their campus pastor,
37:05 Assuming their campus is marked right in rock that may not be, but that's why high touch helps is it just allows you to really customize.
37:14 So now's the time for questions. Any questions? I, I guess I would have more of an encouragement than a question if a church would ever say, hey, we're too big to do this.
37:30 Isn't, isn't that what you're there for is to reach out to those that are, you know, trying to grow their walk with Christ.
37:39 And this is a huge opportunity for that. Yeah. One of the things I would say is Do something. Maybe you can't, maybe you have a thousand new givers and it's just overwhelming and you can't reach out to a thousand.
37:54 Well reach out to ten. I mean, it's opportunity to connect with ten people that you're not connecting with otherwise and thanking them and encouraging them and modeling for them.
38:05 I would also say, maybe you need to decentralize more as a large church. How can you get, More people involved, campus pastors, get them involved.
38:18 Other campus staff, ideally, you're, you're even getting lay leaders involved. You know, in my church, they say that, every life group leader is a shepherd.
38:28 Well, let's let the shepherds contact those people and thank them. How can we, how can we do that more?
38:36 Yeah. I agree. They should be doing. This is what they're there for. And, and you can, you can throttle it.
38:43 You can make it manageable. I know one church said, Hey, we can only give our, campus pastors 15 new connections a week.
38:52 But we want to call 50 call or email or text 15 people in a week. It's three a day on work days and frankly, you can connect with a lot of those on Sunday morning.
39:01 But we're gonna get 15 a week. The goal is let's surface the right 15 and so. Maybe it's not first time givers, maybe it's just connect cards, maybe it's 15 connect cards, and you're just gonna create 15 connection requests based on that.
39:17 But somehow you need to identify who's the right people to be connecting with, the most strategic that are showing the most interesting growing.
39:25 And I think first time giver is a good indicator of that. There's others for sure. I guess this is those touch points.
39:37 That you speak of for calling people. I guess this is a great way to, identify other ministries that could, be impacted by these.
39:48 So whether during those touch points, calls or in-person meetings, you might have new volunteers for ministries that are really hurting for, for help.
40:01 You could have, you know, potential for a need of counseling, if, people are in a broken situation with their marriage, and that wasn't even a consideration, and just by seeing some of these patterns, uh, in giving.
40:20 Yeah, there's a lot of real good that the church could be, bubbling up from these, opportunities. Yeah, and that's really a big part of the point of Making that personal connection.
40:36 Some of those things you'll never find out if you don't take the time to call or meet one-on-one. That's great.
Awesome. Thanks for sharing. Yep, thank you.