Life.Church — LifeGroups in Rock RMS

2 min readMay 7, 2019

LifeGroups Tool Overview

In 2017, Life.Church began to look for a new tool that would provide a reliable way to search, manage, and empower follow-up for small groups meeting throughout the week, which we call LifeGroups. After researching our options, we decided to build out Rock RMS to replace our previous LifeGroups tool and launched the new LifeGroup’s tool in the summer of 2018.

Ways we are using Rock for LifeGroups:

Individual LifeGroups Management
Group Leader & Community Leader Assignments
Leader Sign-In and LifeGroups Prospect Follow Up
LifeGroups Search Tool on the Website

Ways we are not using Rock:

Tracking Attendance for LifeGroups

Rock Configuration Overview

This section explores some of the ways we are using Rock’s features and configuration for our LifeGroups search tool on our website. While there are several ways to set up a system like this, the information below is what we determined works best for us.

Group Types

We created two group types for our structure:

LifeGroups Hierarchy — used for creating structure in the Group Viewer page.
LifeGroups — used for LifeGroups.

The way our group tree looks is:

Region A
Campus Name
Group Name A
Group Name B
Campus Name
Region B
Campus Name
Group Name A
Group Name B
Campus Name

Group Attributes

Group Attributes are used to provide additional information about the LifeGroups, such as Type of Group, Group Age Range, etc.

Workflows

We use three different Rock workflows in our LifeGroups area:

Interest Form — Initial workflow that collects information from an attendee who shows interest in a LifeGroup, which then notifies the LifeGroup Leader of the group.
Prospect Follow-Up — Campus notification workflow that notifies the campus LifeGroups team if a prospect has not been contacted within a specific time range. It is important to us that no one falls through the cracks.
Daily LifeGroup Change Digest — Daily notification to the campus LifeGroups team of changes to LifeGroup details such as location, group attributes, schedule, etc.

Reporting

At Life.Church we like to say, “Data has a seat at the table.” With regard to this project, that means we consult data to track attendee engagement, follow trends, and stay accountable.

Here are a few of the reports that we built out in Rock:

Pending Prospects (members) — The list of who has expressed interest in a group but has not been followed up with.
LifeGroup Leaders — The list of current LifeGroup Leaders.
Community Leaders — The list of Community Leaders, which are volunteers who help lead and coach our LifeGroup Leaders.
All LifeGroups with attribute filters

Within our first month of being “live” we saw an 85% increase in attenders using the tool with over 1,600 new people finding community. We’re excited about the continued engagement we are seeing connecting people together using Rock RMS!