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Blog

Jul 09, 2024

Pricing update: maintaining our commitment to churches amid rising costs

Today, we updated our pricing due to inflation affecting our business costs. In this current economic climate, we must adjust to continue providing excellent products and best-in-class support for our churches. The updated pricing is effective immediately for new customers. Current customers won’t see the increase until their first bill after October 9, 2024. All Organization Administrators and Billing Managers of our customer accounts will receive an email today with their new subscription t

Planning Center

5 min read

Jun 12, 2024

A commitment to our customers: never being acquired

Hello there! I’m Jeff Berg–the CEO, Founder, and Owner of Planning Center. This is my open letter to our churches (and potential customers) outlining my heart behind why Planning Center is independently owned and not for sale, and how I plan to ensure it remains so. At Planning Center, we are guided by what we call our “three loves”: We Love Our Churches, We Love Our Team, and We Love Our Products. I firmly believe that we can prioritize our love for the church and our team because we do

Jeff Berg

Owner / Developer

3 min read

Jul 19, 2022

Planning Center is SOC 2 compliant: affirmation of our commitment to security

You trust Planning Center with very personal and private information. Your congregation’s prayer requests, children’s check-in locations, financial data, and so much more are in your Planning Center database. We take your trust very seriously and do everything possible to protect your data. To affirm our commitment to security, Planning Center has officially completed a SOC 2 audit of our systems, processes, and policies. SOC 2 is the standard in information security. Every privacy-minded org

Planning Center

3 min read

Mar 16, 2020

Coronavirus: What has (and has not) changed at Planning Center

Things have changed rapidly for many of us here at Planning Center, and we know they have for many of you as well. Since schools are closing, many of our employees are now homeschooling their children; and with the arrival of COVID-19 to San Diego County, we've officially closed our Carlsbad office for the foreseeable future. We have been a remote company for a long time, so we can continue to do our jobs from anywhere we have the internet. This has helped us make some adjustments to our sched

Planning Center

3 min read

Feb 06, 2020

Resources has a new name—Calendar!

Every successful event takes teamwork—from the smallest prayer group on Wednesday mornings to the largest Sunday services. Facilities teams have Resources to help them communicate and coordinate these details, but they’re not the only ones who need to know the event schedule. People from ministries across your church need to have easy access to what is happening when, where, with what stuff, and know who is responsible for it all. In the last year, we’ve expanded the scope of Resources to meet

Planning Center

4 min read

May 22, 2019

Planning Center University: LIVE Training Courses

One of our goals is to make Planning Center easy-to-use on your own, with documentation as your guide and access to support whenever you need it. But to use our tools to their fullest potential in your ministry, it’s helpful to start with a big picture perspective of how all the features work together. This is why we started Planning Center University. Planning Center University started out as an in-person training course hosted in our offices. We quickly realized that keeping up with demand fo

Jeff Berg

2 min read

Mar 18, 2019

Discontinuing Support for Internet Explorer

The web moves fast. And at six years old, Internet Explorer is getting left behind. In August of this year, Planning Center is joining the growing movement away from Internet Explorer and will no longer support the browser in any of our applications (with the exception of Church Center).* Why the change? About 3% of our current customers use Internet Explorer; and yet, our teams spend significantly more than 3% of their time solving Internet Explorer-specific bugs and ensuring it can support

Planning Center

3 min read

May 23, 2018

GDPR and Privacy Shield Compliance

In preparation for May 25, when The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will become effective in the EU, we released a statement outlining how Planning Center complies with the standards of both GDPR and Privacy Shield. GDPR provides people in the EU with new rights around the privacy and protection of their personal data, and creates new standards for the protection of that data. These standards apply to churches who collect personal information from their congregations, as well as org

Planning Center

1 min read

May 02, 2018

The Icons, They Are A Changin'

Pop open any one of Planning Center’s web applications and you should notice a fresh, new logo in the top left corner. Why would we change it at all? Let me give a little context to help explain. When Planning Center started over a decade ago, we had one application focused mainly on scheduling volunteers and organizing worship services. This application was known as Planning Center Online. Planning Center Online received a ton of support from our amazing community of customers, and with t

Shane Armitage

3 min read

Apr 03, 2018

Sunday Mornings at Planning Center

Behind all the church services happening across the world each Sunday are thousands of people quietly working to make sure the day goes smoothly. Their unglamorous work tends to go unnoticed, but without them your chairs wouldn’t be set up, the hallway would be dirty, and the pastor’s mic wouldn’t be turned on. Typically on our blog we like to talk about the new, exciting features and major updates to our applications. But today we're going to share with you some of the less glamorous work ou

Planning Center

3 min read

Feb 08, 2018

The End of Planning Center Projector

In 2012 Planning Center released Projector, an iPad app to help churches present lyrics & slides wirelessly during services. As an app that was only available on iPad, it was always intended to fill a narrow gap in the church presentation software market while providing a tight integration with Planning Center. Five years later, we’ve expanded into a full Church Management System, with seven powerful web applications. To develop Projector, our mobile team has to stop work on Services and Musi

Planning Center

3 min read

Dec 22, 2017

2017 at Planning Center

2017 marked Planning Center’s 11th year! As we reflect on the last twelve months, and look forward to the New Year, there are a few highlights, blessings, and special moments we would like to share with you. This year 3,738 new churches subscribed to our applications, and the number of churches using our free People app more than doubled from 2,400 in December 2016 to 4,950 this month. To keep up with the continually growing number of churches using our software, our team had to grow too!

Jeff Berg

5 min read

Dec 06, 2017

Retreat Week 2017

Every time I meet a friend for coffee, I feel like I have another unbelievable story to tell about this place. Because when we say that we love our churches, our team, and our products, it isn’t just some feel-good slogan; it’s our culture and identity. The love around here is outrageous. Retreat Week is just one example of how that love is lived out in the life of our company. Four times a year, our many remote team members come to the office for the week to collaborate and connect in per

Allie Rice

Product Manager

5 min read

Aug 29, 2017

Our Commitment to Reliability

Over the past couple weeks, Planning Center’s performance on Sunday mornings has been unacceptable for your standards and ours. As a parent who has stood in long check-in lines and as a former church staff member who has experienced the pain of a slow check-in process first hand, I feel your pain. We let you down, and we’re not taking it lightly. Our entire organization is focused on fixing this problem and regaining your trust. I want to be as open and transparent as pos

Planning Center

11 min read

Aug 21, 2017

Family Fun Week 2017

My name is Emily, and while you may see my name in the byline of a few of our blog posts, I am primarily a behind-the-scenes player on the Planning Center team. I don't develop, design, or support the products you use; my job is to support the people who do, and I want to share with you exactly how incredibly special the team I support is. Every three months, Planning Center's remote employees fly in from all over the country to spend a week with the in-office employees. Every Remote Week is

Jeff Berg

8 min read

Apr 24, 2017

Easter Weekend at Planning Center

At Planning Center we want to make sure Easter weekend goes as smoothly as possible. We intentionally don’t push any new code for the weeks leading up to Easter, our Operations team is up and ready to react to anything out of the ordinary, and we over-prepare our servers to handle any potential unexpected loads. Here’s a recap of some fun facts that happened over Easter Weekend. There were 878,598 people scheduled for Easter through Planning Center Services. That’s a little over 11% more t

Scott Myers

Product Manager

2 min read

Jan 13, 2017

In Review: 2016 at Planning Center

What. A. Year. In 2016, Planning Center celebrated ten years of great apps and even greater people, and I was honored to start working at Planning Center as a Support Agent on the first possible day in 2016! I still can't believe I work in a place as amazing as this one. Planning Center sets itself apart from other companies by allowing and encouraging a family atmosphere at work, time to brainstorm new features, and availability to dream about the future. That's what keeps me coming ba

Jessica Little

Support Agent

5 min read

Nov 22, 2016

Staff Retreat 2016

Hello friends! I’m Kin, one of the developers here at Planning Center. If you find a bug in Android Services or Music Stand, definitely send an email to support. Make sure to mention that it’s probably Kin’s fault. 😉 The key to Planning Center is love. We love our churches (you), we love our team (us), and we love our products (who doesn’t?). I’m here to walk you through one of the ways we love on our team: Retreat week! (AKA the best week of the year). Six whole days of non-stop collabor

Kin Fong

Android Developer

6 min read

Oct 28, 2016

Getting Started with Planning Center

New Planning Center users are often surprised by how easy it is to get started. They might anticipate a long sales process, followed by a long (and expensive) setup process, followed by days of training (pay for that too!). But we do things differently. We believe that churches are best served when you, the church leader, are equipped with the knowledge, the tools, and the help to get started with Planning Center. We want to see you succeed, this is how we help. The Knowledge Ou

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

4 min read

Oct 27, 2016

Come Join the Community!

We’re super excited to introduce an interactive space for you to share and glean wisdom from one another. Planning Center Community is a free Slack group that will allow people from all over the world to share their triumphs, struggles, and ideas. * Wondering about transitioning from one ChMS to Planning Center? Here’s a handful of people sharing their stories. * Ecstatic about your new Check-Ins stations? Let’s celebrate! * Have a custom report you can’t live without? Fantastic! It ma

Danna Sampson

Community Support

1 min read