Question

Photo of Alastair Kendrew

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Implementing Rock RMS for an entire denomination

2

Hi

I work at the head office of The Salvation Army in New Zealand. We're looking to implement a new Church Management System across our entire network of roughly 100 churches, and like the open source nature of Rock RMS. I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask my question, but hopefully someone will let me know if there's somewhere better.

As I see it, we have two main issues with implementing an off-the-shelf Church Management System, which hopefully Rock RMS can address:

1. We want each individual church to operate independently, but we want to be able to obtain consolidated summary reporting (e.g. total attendance for a region)

I'm thinking 'multi-suite' won't work because we want to keep individual churches separate, and my understanding of multi-site is that it would be difficult to restrict login access to individual churches, and for the user to only see people at their church?

So I'm thinking we either need to implement Rock RMS once for each church, adding some form of reporting codes to enable consolidated reporting; or export the data regularly to our reporting database.

  • Can we have multiple church instances on the same database, or is there a simple way to access multiple instances?
  • Can we add custom data to each church instance to use for consolidated reporting directly from the database?
  • Presumably we can develop our own reports?
  • Is there a data export routine that we could automate to get data for loading into our own database for consolidated reporting?


2. We want some Salvation Army specific enhancements - like our rolls (different types of members, but with extra information).

Some of our requirements, I'm sure could be met by renaming fields that are already there, but am I right that we could simply build our own module and add the code to the main code base?


Thanks for your help.

Alastair

  • Photo of Jim Michael

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    Hi Alastair! You are correct that trying to use campuses/sites to segregate your 100 churches in a single Rock db is not practical. Rock simply doesn't have the separation typically desired for your scenario (eg like you mention being able to search for anyone across the entire db, and keeping finances for one org from being viewed by someone in another org is almost impossible). So, yes... your best bet is separate Rock instances, and then some other way to roll up that data for "global" reporting. Rock has a rich API that could possibly be leveraged for this, and also (as of v7) has the ability to push data to MS Power BI, which could then (in theory) report across all of that data.

    To answer your specific questions:

    1. No, you cannot have multiple instances in the same Rock DB... but you can easily run multiple Rock databases on the same SQL server. Each Rock instance would need its own file structure and db.

    2. There is nothing built into Rock to allow the consolidated reporting you're wanting... any such reporting has to be done outside of all the Rock instances themselves. Power BI as mentioned above seems like the best bet here to me, unless you already have a reporting system you can connect to each instance of Rock via its APIs.

    3. You can export data manually via CSV, but it's not automated. The BI stuff _is_ automated via a job, but it would only be useful if you're actually using PowerBI for your reporting.

    4. You can add any Person attributes you want... it's unlikely you'd need to rename any existing fields... you can easily change the values for things like member statuses, connection statuses, etc. and add any additional pieces of data you need. I think you'd be surprised how extensible Rock is in this regard.

    5. You can write just about any add-on you want to Rock, if you have the time and talent. Some really low level stuff that would mess with core blocks is possible, but not advised unless absolutely necessary, though, because at that point you're basically forking the code and making your own version and wouldn't be in sync with the core releases anymore. But possible, yes.

    If you want to discuss more with people that know a lot more than I on the dev side, I suggest you join our Slack team at rockrms.com/slack. It's much easier to have complex convos in real time chat vs. these forums.

    Hope that helps!

  • Photo of Alastair Kendrew

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    Thanks Jim - that's very helpful.