I’m Kevin Carpenter, the President of Arisen Technology Corporation. After leading in Intervarsity Christian Fellowship together in college, three college friends (Brian Cooksey, Jeremy White, and I) founded Arisen with the goal to use technology to help as many people as possible. Over the past 21 years, we helped create the Ohio Home Energy Assistance Program web application that has helped over 2.5 million people and processed over $1 billion of benefits for lower income families. We created a data warehouse for the Ohio Housing Finance Agency to help homeless people in Ohio. We have created inspirational software for Christian organization like Promise Keepers and Christian Financial Concepts, custom software solutions for churches, and educational games for kids. Now, as a Premier Partner for Rock RMS, we are excited to help churches become more organized, efficient, fruitful and loving. We whole-heartedly support the Rock and have over 15 years of experience in the technologies used to build the Rock. If there is anything you need, please call me directly at 888-777-8600 x100. I would love to meet you and see if we can help in any way. Thank you.
Xenos Christian Fellowship had created their own custom church management system over the past 25 years but were looking to upgrade to newer technology.
Unfortunately, off-the-shelf church management systems were never flexible enough to allow Xenos to upgrade without sacrificing features and processes in their current system. So no upgrade happened – year after year, Xenos kept adding enhancements but were stuck with older technology.
Then Rock RMS showed up on the scene. Rock’s highly customizable data and extensible architecture allowed Xenos to finally pursue an upgrade.
Xenos partnered with Arisen to get the job done. Arisen developed the custom import process to create new defined types, entity hierarchies, and custom attributes in Rock RMS, to extract data from the old system, and to merge it into the Rock RMS system.
Xenos could run the import process as often as they wanted and could easily wipe imported data without impacting the custom pages, Lava, and workflows they were developing. This made testing new features easier and less risky.
Xenos Christian Fellowship has hundreds of high school, college, and adult home churches. They are the core foundation for the whole church. As these home churches grow and plant, Xenos tracks the plant history. Sometimes the planting of a new home church group comes from multiple other home churches.
To easily track the many-to-many home church relationships graph, Arisen created a custom Rock RMS plugin to allow Xenos personnel to add new group relationship types (e.g. Planted, Planted From, etc.) and then create relationships between any set of groups.
The plugin has a feel similar to the Known Relationships between people already built into Rock. As the need for new types of connections between various groups arises, Xenos can easily add new group relationship types and new group relationships without any programming – meeting needs that haven’t even been thought of yet.
Xenos Christian Fellowship tracks attendance numbers along multiple dimensions for all of their hundreds of junior high, high school, college, and adult home churches.
The dimensions include the number of first time visitors, number of returning new people, number of original group members, number of members who transferred from another Xenos group, and number of out of town guests.
Xenos needed an easy way for home churches to enter the numbers on a weekly basis. Arisen created a custom Rock RMS plugin to make this super simple.
Selected home church members are emailed a reminder using a customized version of the built-in Attendance Reminder job. They can automatically log in from their phones and enter the attendance numbers quickly and easily. It couldn’t be easier.
"Our partnership with Arisen has been really fruitful for our 6,000 member church. As an organic, home-grown movement that grew up over the last almost 50 years, we have developed our own way of doing ministry and analyzing opportunities and roadblocks to our mission. The challenge in moving to new systems has been to not lose the things that are uniquely part of who we are while adapting our many ministries to an enhanced model and way of doing things supported by an open system like Rock RMS. Arisen helped us with simplifying what we are doing and how we are capturing data, before we move to automate and integrate new functions. We are a reporting-rich church, and require solid analytics to make decisions. Arisen was very in tune with that ethos, helping us refine our approach to our work and then helping us convert to new ways of doing business. We’re pleased that we made the decision to work with Arisen and we look forward to continued work with Arisen into the future."
—Steve Bauer
Chief Operating Officer, Corporate Secretary & Treasurer
Xenos Christian Fellowship, Inc., Urban Concern, Inc.
"Arisen has been crucial in our quest to migrate away from our very custom church management system that was develop in-house over the past 25 years.
From the beginning, when choosing between Rock RMS and yet another custom database solution, Arisen recognized the potential of Rock RMS to fit our needs.
As we moved forward, it became apparent that that using a canned script to migrate our data simply would not work. Arisen stepped to the plate again to develop
a custom migration plan that fit our (overly) complex data model.
Working with Arisen has been a pleasure as they have responded to our needs and
requests with speed and precision. Of note, Arisen has developed a data import process that allows us to import, wipe, and reimport data into Rock RMS while
maintaining any custom pages, data views, workflows, attributes, and any other custom data we have entered. In addition, as we have run into must-have functions
that are unique to Xenos, Arisen has quickly developed custom plugins to meet our needs. If there were a Mount Rushmore of complex Rock-transitions, I am confident
Xenos would have a spot on it. Arisen has met and exceeded the challenge of our migration."
—Greg Lawless
Director of Information Technology
Xenos Christian Fellowship
"Arisen has been invaluable to the implementation of Rock RMS for Xenos Christian Fellowship of Columbus, Ohio. Arisen developed an easy-to-use set of utilities to migrate all segments of our complex database schema including multi-dimensional attendance and split history for hundreds of high school, college, and adult home churches, large central teaching meetings, education classes, and financial pledging and giving. Their team has helped streamline our Rock RMS interface for easier use, solved detailed problems when we ran into 'brick walls', and even developed custom plugins for our unique home group ministry. Arisen has responded to all our requests on a timely basis. They have saved us countless hours and taken us beyond many hurdles."
—Andy Ault
Database Administrator
Xenos Christian Fellowship
