pulse on the ground

I just had a pretty cool experience. I gave a short demo on the pulse at the new discipleship group (roughly, Bible studies that do ministry together -- we call them DG's for short) training at McMaster. There were maybe 50 students and 3 staff there.

What was neat is seeing how the pulse is being used "on the ground". I fielded a number of questions that gave me some insight in to what's confusing people and how they're using the pulse.

I overheard one student saying how he was able to go to the directory, where it lists all people in your campus, and start straight up calling and contacting people who weren't in a DG group already. Since we've imported all conference registration accounts, there's a few thousand people in the pulse already. That proactive student was able to start connecting people, just because the information was there to do so.

One of the staff was also telling me how it's provided some accountability for leaders. Before, they would say "hey, make sure to pick a time for your DG!" and hope that it would happen. Now, their time is right there on the web site. If they haven't chosen a time, it says "TBA", and if they have, it's updated as soon as they enter it. Now staff can make sure times are chosen by a certain date.

Then some of the staff gave me some feedback and feature ideas, and I showed them how to do various things that they weren't clear on or just didn't know you could do. Overall the demo was good but just being there was the really valuable part. It was really neat to see the pulse in action.