Earlier this year, our Central Staff and Executive Team made the decision to switch away from Fellowship One (F1) to the Rock RMS for our Church Management System (ChMS). We had been using F1 for years, but during that time Highlands has grown to church with thousands of people attending and serving each weekend across six locations. F1 had really become a “thorn in the flesh” for many of our staff members (I don’t have experience with F1, just what others have shared about their experiences). Within my first month on staff (July 2017), we transitioned away from F1 to the Rock. From my limited experience with Rock, I can already say that it has been one of the most amazing pieces of technology that I have used over the last few years.
It’s all about relationships.
Rock RMS is designed around relationships. The company even calls the Rock a Relationship Management System (RMS for short). Relationships happen between staff and volunteers; relationships happen between your organization and members. Rock RMS is built for connection. In short, Rock RMS helps churches connect with attenders and members. You can easily track attendance, giving history, family dynamics, and pretty much any other statistic you would like on an individual or family profile. We use Rock RMS for Children and Student Ministry check-in as well as volunteer check-in each weekend. I serve at Highlands Fellowship as the Online Director and I am able to use Rock’s check-in feature to virtually checkin my Online Campus volunteers; it literally takes seconds to find and check-in team members.
Rock is also the back-end of our brand new website (you can check it out @ https://hf.church). Users can login in to give online and manage their family profiles. One great feature about the site is that it will customize their experience based on their login information. For instance: if we are having a baptism weekend and they have already been baptized (because we can track that in Rock), it will not show them a “Get Baptized this weekend” slide and could instead show an alternative slide asking them if they knew anyone who needed to be baptized. Pretty amazing!!! It will also give them event priority based on their campus when the visit pages that have event blocks from Rock RMS. The frontend (bootstrap/CSS/HTML5) and the backend (Rock RMS) work together to create a system the call Lava (lava is fluid rock… Clever).
There are unlimited possibilities with Rock RMS; we are barely scratching the surface of what this software can do for a church or organization. We use Rock as our email campaign manager, workflow and form manager, and you can even text people in groups. Those features alone have replaced 4 other programs we were using on a weekly basis.
Rock RMS is free. Yes it’s free. They ask that you pay $1.50 / weekly attender per year to help them continue to build out this platform, but there is no catch or required payment. It’s one of the best deals in the business. You can pay for some of the integration like MailChimp, Amazon S3 storage, but many features are completely free.
If you are little tech savvy (or want to me a little more tech savvy), Rock is a great fit. It takes some work to get things the way you want it for your organization, but it is well-worth the investment. That process has given us a chance to think through all of our workflows and create systems that really work for our church. 2018 is going to be incredible thanks to the Rock RMS platform.
Not sold yet? Here are a few churches that you might have heard of that use Rock RMS: Newspring Church, Willow Creek, Christ’s Church of the Valley, Central Christian Church, Lakepointe Church. You can see a bigger list here – https://www.rockrms.com/organizations .
There are dozens of features I did not mention. I could write a much longer post about the value that Rock RMS brings to our team (and that it could bring to your team). If you have any questions about Rock RMS, you can visit https://www.rockrms.com/. If you want a more personal review, shoot me an email and we will chat (jeaton@hf.church).
