The MxU Podcast

00:00:00:04 - 00:00:06:12
Unknown
We have Trello, we have Planning Center, we have you go down the list,

00:00:06:15 - 00:00:09:23
Unknown
you add one more thing. It's like, no.

00:00:10:01 - 00:00:20:04
Unknown
I cannot do that. There's been times in ministry where I'm like, yeah, Dave, I'm not accepting your invite. Show me one volunteer who's like, yeah, give me. Give me the list of apps. I'm gonna get it logged in.

00:00:20:04 - 00:00:23:10
Unknown
I'm gonna check them all every day. It's just not a reality.

00:00:23:13 - 00:00:27:21
Unknown
Like, we're having a hard enough time getting our volunteers to accept an invite to

00:00:27:23 - 00:00:34:11
Unknown
Yet we want to implement more tools.

00:00:34:13 - 00:00:39:11
Unknown
I was talking about this the other day with our.

00:00:39:13 - 00:01:02:20
Unknown
VP of productions, and he was I was talking about implementing a VP of productions. Well, like over all productions, logistics, he's final say over everything. Yes. Oh, wow. And I thought that was, you know, you don't want me over production. And he said, I saw about Haley's streamlining all all of our data services, logistics inside of an app.

00:01:03:02 - 00:01:32:16
Unknown
And he was like, no, we have too many of those so far where I've used too many apps already, or too many softwares already. Software, not softwares. So there's no plural, no softwares, software, one software or two software. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Two. One software. I can say 100 software. Yeah. We use a bunch of different software. That makes sense.

00:01:32:16 - 00:01:54:05
Unknown
I like the way that rolls out. I don't like the way to software. Well, I'm not going to say it. You can say and I'll say what I want. Say two software applications. Two software application. No, two software applications. Okay. Yeah. Anyways, it's just a small little thing. I actually don't even care, but I respect it in software.

00:01:54:05 - 00:02:11:11
Unknown
For a long time I've been corrected by a lot of engineers. I respect it. Yeah. Anyway, imagine that engineer correcting somebody 100%. Yeah, of course there are people. I don't understand his take, though. Like what? We want to house everything in one tool. Oh, no, we can't, because there's too many tools. There's too many things. Like getting rid of all the too much.

00:02:11:13 - 00:02:32:12
Unknown
Right? And coming down to one right. So that's where I was headed. So it's like we have Trello, we have Planning Center, we have, you know, go down the list, docs, drives everything. It's you add one more thing. It's like, no. Yes. I cannot do that. That's too much work. What's a pain to to work with people who are obsessed with that many tools?

00:02:32:13 - 00:02:48:20
Unknown
Yeah. It's like I. There's been times in Minister, I'm like, yeah, Dave, I'm not accepting your invite to Trello. I don't want to be on another tool. I don't want another place to look at. Right. But like, there are those people, you probably have them in your ministry where it's just like, this guy is obsessed with new tools.

00:02:48:20 - 00:03:11:17
Unknown
And I got all these invites, and I do not want another invite to a thing to look at. That's right. And when you're when you're specifically a freelancer. So I know that we're not talking about freelancers in this regard. You work for multiple companies. All these multiple companies have their apps and their tools and stuff. So but like in the ministry standpoint, say I volunteer, not just on the weekends.

00:03:11:17 - 00:03:30:09
Unknown
I volunteer in kids ministry, I volunteer in first impressions, and they all have their own apps and their own way to do things right. So it's like, what is the right one? Yeah. Like what? What do we use? What is the easiest? What is the most? What's the best most effective way to to manage something like that. Yeah I don't know.

00:03:30:11 - 00:03:53:04
Unknown
Well we're trying to figure out right now. Yeah. Well it's tricky to. I filmed a video about this, maybe a month or so ago. There are a lot of niche aspects of our ministry and what we do. And so it can be easy to creep into. Oh, we use this one thing over here for our patch sheet creation and documentation.

00:03:53:04 - 00:04:24:20
Unknown
We use Planning center for scheduling and we use email, but we also like to use WhatsApp. And I don't know why we use both, but we still do. For some reason. We there's like when it comes to communication, we're certainly using too many tools. I find like it's very fragmented and how we're communicating. It's wild to me that in the five or so churches I talked to every day.

00:04:24:22 - 00:04:51:08
Unknown
More often than not, and I asked this question to everybody because we obviously saw this with you. I asked them like, hey, what do you guys use for communication? Like, we don't really use a communication tool like that is crazy to me. And sometimes even like on the internal staff, maybe they're using like Microsoft Teams, some are maybe using slack, but like, yeah, with their volunteers, it's it's emails, which is crazy, I just don't.

00:04:51:10 - 00:05:25:01
Unknown
Anyways, communication fragmented all of our other niche problems that we need to solve. Yeah, there's we're incorporating a lot of different tools. Yeah. Let's talk about why having so many tools is a bad thing. We've talked about some of the pain point, but like really as a leader, why we why we should be on a vicious endeavor to eliminate our tools.

00:05:25:03 - 00:05:55:16
Unknown
I don't know, for me, I think it's all personal because you may have a, an engineer or someone that can look at a plate full of different apps and go, I'm fine. My brain works that way. It's nothing for me to say, oh, you want to add a new system? That's cool. But then you have on the other side of things which which would maybe fall in the more creative, high pace, unorganized.

00:05:55:18 - 00:06:20:05
Unknown
It's almost like intimidating. It's almost like when someone reaches out to me, like on LinkedIn and says, hey, producer man, have you tried our new, you know, all in one logistics how to produce an event software? And I'm like, that just overwhelms me. Just the just the paragraph. I'm like, I gotta now take time to learn it, experience it, use it, I gotta take it.

00:06:20:05 - 00:06:39:16
Unknown
And now teach my team how to use it and get them all in. Right. But my I only think that way is because I already have so many other things to do, so it's like an overwhelming, stressful, thing. So it's like, watch this, then why should we eliminate stuff? Well, because of that reason right there. Yeah, I'm already doing too much.

00:06:39:16 - 00:07:02:09
Unknown
If you if you are a leader and you're like, one more idea stresses you out, you may be working on too many ideas already. Yeah. We as leaders can get tool happy because sometimes when we don't know what to do. It's not obvious what to do. That adding something new seems like the right approach. We see this with equipment, right?

00:07:02:10 - 00:07:29:04
Unknown
We want to purchase new gear. We want to purchase new tools, new process, whatever it may be. And wiring is very important. Like just like you said, like there's some people who get excited about that, some people who don't. What I'm finding is that no volunteer gets excited about using multiple tools to serve at their church, right? I show me one volunteer who's like, yeah, give me give me the list of apps I'm gonna get it logged in on.

00:07:29:04 - 00:07:53:14
Unknown
I check them all every day. Like it's just not a reality. Like, we're having a hard enough time getting our volunteers to accept an invite to serve. It's like the most relatable content these days on social media. Like waiting for volunteers to confirm, right? Yet we want to implement more tools. And.

00:07:53:16 - 00:08:22:04
Unknown
We've in some ways maybe forgotten that, like the crux of our volunteer or the crux of our ministry is that it is like volunteer driven or at least volunteer operated, right? Like maybe you're driving, but you got operators that are all volunteer. So the first question we should be asking in any tool that we're incorporating, whether it's buying a new console, whether it's incorporating new software, whatever it may be, is how is this going to affect my volunteer culture?

00:08:22:08 - 00:08:48:02
Unknown
Because if my volunteer culture goes down the drain, or if I can't get people to show up, I'm kind of screwed, right? So from my perspective, that is like that is the high level why of going through and viciously eliminating the fat of all your tools, right? Yeah, I do want to I do want to talk. I do think there's some opportunity on this podcast.

00:08:48:03 - 00:09:03:07
Unknown
We don't really talk about you a lot on this podcast, mainly because for me, attention is it just feels like I don't want it. I want it to be helpful. I don't want to just be like set, like a sales pitch, which is why we don't even do many mid roll ads. Maybe in the future if somebody convinces me otherwise.

00:09:03:07 - 00:09:33:15
Unknown
But all that to say, I do want to talk about how we could be maybe bringing all of these tools into one. Right. One of the tensions I'll talk about Planning Center because, you know, planning center services very well, right? You've used it for many years. Many of our listeners use Planning Center services. Where are some of the gaps there that we're finding like, because that is the tool that we consistently see churches using.

00:09:33:16 - 00:09:55:03
Unknown
This last time we talk to a church was using that wasn't using Planning Center very often. It's not often it does happen. I spoke at a, a, a denominational gathering general council last year, and I did a breakout for weekend teams. I remember thinking the same thing. I said, hey, who's who's this planning center in here? And like, four people raise their hand.

00:09:55:03 - 00:10:14:02
Unknown
I was like, Holy smokes. Yeah, it's a lot of churches out there. And you see this within you. It's like, yeah, not I mean, you we think in our space everyone uses it, but it's actually not. I would say to answer your question, though, let's let's back up a decade ago when Planning Center was just another app for just weekend planning and scheduling volunteers.

00:10:14:05 - 00:10:32:22
Unknown
Yeah. And they knew when it was the same product basically as today for services. Yeah. Well but but but yeah. But now today though they at least they have kids check ins and giving expanded to all these other areas. So maybe just maybe they were hearing like, hey, we're just another app, you know, a month, all these other apps.

00:10:32:22 - 00:10:53:12
Unknown
So how do we, you know, monopolize it and become one? You know, that's the wrong word to use. I don't know monopoly, but you know what I mean. Like, how do we make it easier for the consumer. Yeah. And upper prices. It's was smart, I don't know planning center well enough outside of weekend planning. Yeah. Which is really what we're talking about here because that's worship and tech team to to to say what it's lacking.

00:10:53:12 - 00:11:08:19
Unknown
But I do know that at one point they were lacking a lot for the overall church leader like the executive pastor, the, the the pastor that's looking at it going, we pay how much we're Planning Center and only this weekend planning, but now we got to pay for F1. We got, you know, that was still a thing back then.

00:11:08:20 - 00:11:27:20
Unknown
Fellowship one we got to pay for this. We got to pay for that. Yeah. It'd be nice if someone just came out with an app that did it all. Yeah. You know. Yeah. And I think that's part of the issue that I'm seeing for, for folks in Planning Center is it's a, it's a great tool. It's like a glorified spreadsheet in some ways.

00:11:27:20 - 00:11:55:05
Unknown
You put your plan in there, you send out invites you. It is not a great tool for bidirectional communication, right? Like volunteers, they're like, this is where I go to like find out information about the plan for this weekend. I mean, yeah, it's it's how started I mean, yeah, the founder was building notebooks for his volunteers and realized I'm done building notebooks.

00:11:55:05 - 00:12:11:22
Unknown
There's got to be something out there digitally that I can put together core charts for our team. Yeah, and that's what he did. Yeah. So I'd love to. I'd love for you to even beat up, because this is something we're in the middle of right now with you trying to bring everything into one place. Right? This is why we built.

00:12:11:22 - 00:12:31:19
Unknown
The reason I bring in Planning Center is because I've been telling you to do that for ever. Okay, well, now you can ask me, like, hey, is that finally gotten done? We can talk about it. But like with our Planning Center integration, one of the biggest things that we've been trying to solve is obviously you start as training, and that's something that nobody has even been able to touch.

00:12:32:00 - 00:13:02:10
Unknown
I mean, it sounds prideful, arrogant, it's just the truth. Like no one's been able to touch our effectiveness when it comes to training in the platform paired with all the content for worship and tech teams. But okay, so we've kind of solved this training issue if you weren't aware, like thousands of churches use to train their teams and they do it very successfully, but we still have these other issues that that we are up against, that nobody has really put any real purpose built tool together that can solve the issue of training, planning and running Sunday.

00:13:02:10 - 00:13:28:05
Unknown
Right. We're using planning. Some people might be using planning like Planning Center live, running their Sunday, but there's still so many pieces missing there. Like how many, how many churches? Let's take something like service volume level. We're using apps to track service volume level, like some maybe using smart. Some people are using their Apple Watch, maybe they're using we're using apps for notes.

00:13:28:06 - 00:13:48:06
Unknown
Where are notes kept for the weekend? Because planning center, you have your planning center run sheet. But like where your individual notes for each position, your sermon notes, where the sermon notes go to, those get emailed from pastor, and then you print those out and you have a next to your service order sheet. Right. We're using Pro Presenter to execute slides.

00:13:48:07 - 00:14:07:12
Unknown
Yep. We're it's not even we won't even get into the communication thing or I talked about that. All of our various apps we like to use for communication. So about streaming we're using for streaming or maybe some are bringing it to YouTube. So we're bringing it to Facebook. How we tracking those analytics? Nobody even knows how to track those analytics because it's not really.

00:14:07:13 - 00:14:27:09
Unknown
Yeah. Maybe there's built in analytics and those tools. But you're going to invite your team now and everyone's going to have a reason in like your producers are going to have a log in so they can see stream analytics there. Yeah. Timers. Some are using ProPresenter timers, some are using planning center timers, some are using just native time on the back wall, whatever.

00:14:27:10 - 00:15:02:12
Unknown
Like whatever widget they can find. Yeah. And then where does all those, all those metrics go. How do we evaluate like were we ten minutes over. Where were we ten minutes under it. It's a little bit overwhelming. Like there's so much we tasks in checklists. We recently caught a podcast about task and checklist. Where do those live? It's it really what ends up happening is these things just don't really get executed or they don't get executed all that well because it's just too confusing and too fragmented for the team to get on board.

00:15:02:13 - 00:15:19:00
Unknown
Right. So something like we're working really hard on is okay. We know people are going to use Planning Center like it's great tool to like schedule your people and put like a service order. We didn't talk about like multi tracks to like now we've got other playback apps. Sorry I could just go down the list. There's so many.

00:15:19:02 - 00:15:43:06
Unknown
We know people are using Planning center Pro presenter. We know these kind of these tools they're using. What if we could bring them all together right into one place so that everybody can access these tools with one login and not have to have all this fragmented access everywhere? And so something we're working really hard on is, okay, we've already we've got training in you through the Planning Center integration.

00:15:43:06 - 00:16:06:16
Unknown
We have all your serving data. We have all your weekend plans. We have things like your song library, pro presenter, native integration right to your center, machines to bring. You can even operate Purple Center from MQ. There's all this functionality that's getting brought into one place and we're incredibly passionate about it. So anyways, I took your advice and we did it.

00:16:06:21 - 00:16:29:00
Unknown
Sweet. Yeah. So like planning services and all that. Yeah. Oh nice. So I mean now with you. There's a few different like we really built it around somebody using planning center so that that switching is not as painful. Right. But like you could go in and you can see all your people serving. Pretty soon AI will be able to schedule your team for you and update it.

00:16:29:00 - 00:16:47:14
Unknown
Planning center somebody like I think about this like when we've all had this happen. Bass player gets sick, declines for the weekend on like a Thursday. You're like, oh shoot. What do you do? You don't go into planning center. You just like go to schedule somebody. Now you get on your phone and you're texting people, right? You're like, hey, can you do it?

00:16:47:15 - 00:17:05:12
Unknown
Oh, I can like the first service, not the second service. Okay. Can you do it like it's that back and forth. We shouldn't have to do that anymore. Like we have computers. We have systems that we can build to be able to solve that issue. So pretty soon, like AI is going to be able to fill your positions proactively, even when people decline.

00:17:05:13 - 00:17:22:00
Unknown
Or maybe you have still six people who are unconfirmed for the weekend. And you're like, normally I would go and text people, okay, what if they were already proactively texted, reached out to, and it was like, hey, still see your unconfirmed can you can I go ahead and confirm for you in Planning Center? Are you going to be there?

00:17:22:01 - 00:17:44:22
Unknown
Right. So it's things like that that we're really dedicated to making better. But yeah. So all like services analytics. This is something that I really want to show you soon is like analytics. How long did each song go over under what volume was it. Right. Having all of that happen automatically triggered by your probes? Center machine. No one sitting there.

00:17:44:22 - 00:18:07:17
Unknown
Like clicking through the service while it's going. Your operators, your producers can see everything. Like maybe you have multi-site church, see all your timers, all your services in one view. Be able to see, oh, such such campus is is a little over time right now such such campus just wrapped up. Be able to view all of those live experiences.

00:18:07:17 - 00:18:28:18
Unknown
If those all those campuses are live streaming I'm pretty pumped about it. Yeah. And this is where we have some churches that are really testing this. It's going to be it's coming. It will win. This episode is out. Maybe some of it will be in early access. But I'm I am kind of on.

00:18:28:20 - 00:18:49:08
Unknown
Yeah, I would say I am on this journey to try to eliminate the apps, all the apps that we're using right now. Yeah, for a volunteer sake, because I think one of the biggest issues, as we've tried to help train volunteers, that was a big issue. What we found, those people are like, oh, my volunteers like getting them to stay around is actually probably one of the bigger issues I'm up against.

00:18:49:08 - 00:19:07:00
Unknown
And how do we get them to be more engaged in the ministry? Well, it's like we got to make the barrier to entry easier. And part of that is stop inviting them to five different tools, have an app or you can communicate with them. Have an app where you can set expectations for them. Have an app where they can be resourced and learn.

00:19:07:01 - 00:19:27:17
Unknown
Right. All of those things together. Anyways, I've said enough. I'm really excited. That's great. Yeah, I mean, I got that to say, that's cool. Looking forward to seeing it. It needs to be done. Yeah, anytime. There's just one. I'm like, there's got to be something out there that could, you know, not necessarily compete but maybe help. Yeah. In some areas that the other may be missing.

00:19:27:18 - 00:19:46:13
Unknown
Yeah. Well again like all these tools are helpful. It's just they're not you start totaling up the count of them. And the fact that yeah, it operationally is just kind of a disaster. Yeah. And anyone listening, you know what I mean. You're in the middle of it right now. You're like yeah dude, that's exactly, exactly what I'm up.

00:19:46:17 - 00:20:09:23
Unknown
Or if we can use it in live events. Well, I've already told you. Absolutely. You can, you know, dashboards inside is is going to be there is no tool out there that can you can be a slave or operate your ProPresenter machine from also track service decibels also track notes. Also track your service order. Also track your timers like all of that in one dashboard.

00:20:10:00 - 00:20:21:08
Unknown
There is no other tool. It's going to be a game changer. Nice. So, yeah, anything else we talk about? Using too many apps.

00:20:21:10 - 00:20:40:18
Unknown
Don't do it, don't do it. It's too overwhelming. Just for the sake of your volunteers. Just think. Think about it a little bit, a little more critically and realize, oh, this might be a huge blocker in me getting this volunteer, this ministry to where it needs to be from volunteer culture standpoint. Yeah. So thanks for listening to the rant and some of the sales pitch.

00:20:40:19 - 00:20:56:00
Unknown
It's just we're way too passionate about to not talk about it. If you want to learn more about everything I just talked about and see live demo, see how it could actually practically work in your environment, you can. There's going to be a link in the description below. You can get in touch with us. We'll meet with you, show you around.

00:20:56:00 - 00:21:03:07
Unknown
If you want to learn more about me, you can head to our website. We'll put a link in the description below as well. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time on the MxU podcast.