We are using the Rock to help us bring together the reach of the web and the power of data to make disciples.

I love how flexible it is. We generally don't have to worry about workarounds like we did in systems past. We love how it fixed so many of our difficult problems without becoming a problem itself. The community is also a great part. You aren't buying into a company, you are joining a community.

Waiting for the newest features and tools. It can seem like forever when it's something you didn't even know you needed until you heard it's coming soon. Then you have to wait until it's polished and ready. When it's here though, it's basically Christmas.

We were stuck on another piece of software that still looked and ran like it was from the early '90s, but unable to afford anything better, for years. We got into Rock very early after its launch and haven't looked back! From an admin standpoint, I've been extremely happy with the direct access to the data it's afforded me, while keeping the users in a wonderful and user-friendly environment that's available from anywhere. Most reports are available easily enough per the documents, but every once in a while you'll find a more esoteric view of your data that can't be done "out of the box" yet (the reporting functions are growing quickly). No problem- the amazing community has helped us generate any reports we could hope for using powerful tools like SQL queries. And that's an important point to mention, despite the fact that there's no official support for Rock, the community is by far the best support for any product I've ever seen. Since launch, we've digitized so many previously analogue processes and saved our pastors so much time in their days, thanks to the power and accessibility of Rock - everything from inquiry forms, requests, signups, checkins, spiritual growth process tracking and followup, can be centralized in Rock itself, making it our one stop shop for our staff A word of personal advice: if you're trying to save a few bucks, you may be looking at running Rock locally on a Windows Server, but if you do, understand that you'll need to be comfortable configuring SQL servers and web servers, as well as firewall rules and SSL certificates. I highly recommend any of the many hosting companies who support Rock instead, if that's not your particular cup of tea...many of those companies make Rock a nearly turnkey solution.

Flexibility and power afforded to the admins- open source with plugin structure means that you can leverage anything available in the incredible data stored in Rock

It's not as easy for end users to generate any little report they can think of on the fly, so it's extremely helpful for the administrator to be passingly familiar with SQL

Overall the system was adequate for my daily operations.

The customer service was very difficult!

We moved from Arena to Rock in tandem with some changes we were going through as far as how we do ministry. Rock either has a feature or gives you the tools to make the feature, for whatever your church can dream of. Rock is a very powerful ChMS solution that continues to get better without forcing you to make budget cutbacks in ministries to afford it. A really easy to overlook benefit to using Rock, it's really easy to understand what you're looking at when a page loads because the pages are designed with that in mind. This is a huge benefit when training Volunteers or rotating staff (like interns). The community is great! There's a strong community of Rock users that share a Slack channel and help one another innovate at their church and to fix problems when they arise. You no longer have to sit through the tier-0 checklist you normally get when calling tech support, rather you get to have a conversation with real people that have been working with Rock since before you ever knew about it. Being a part of this Rock community is what keeps me from being afraid of tackling all of my church's ChMS needs "without a team". The most exciting thing about Rock is how customizable it is. Rock's Workflow Engine allows you to be very attentive to all of your attendees without having to manually check up on each person. You can do processes as simple as texting someone who visited for the first time a thank you message and an invite to coming events. You can even build full-featured follow-ups to someone joining a small group to make sure it's a great fit. The possibilities are actually limitless. It's honestly a blessing to use Rock to leverage our technical skill to empower our ministries to do things that they've never tried to do before in fear of the administrative overhead. My church has only scratched the surface of what Rock can do, and it's already making a difference after being on Rock for less than a year

Customization, Community, Growth Potential

Host Server has to be Windows Server running IIS, Database has to be SQL