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Blog

May 03, 2022

Save files to People profiles

Ever need congregants to save a picture, a document, or a signed form to someone’s profile in Planning Center? Maybe you save signed membership covenants, or you need to keep a driver’s license on file for people who drive the church van. Or perhaps your jurisdiction requires proof of vaccination status for certain activities. Well, just in case you didn’t know, you’ve been able to save files to profiles for a while (surprise!); but now you can collect those files through online forms! So yo

Jeff Berg

2 min read

Sep 23, 2021

Create Custom Dashboards to Share Metrics

Tracking numbers like attendance, giving, and first-time guests is a way to take a pulse on the heartbeat of your church. How are people doing? Are they engaged? What can we do to help? Sometimes a blip in attendance is what you need to find the people who need support, encouragement, and care and make sure they don’t slip through the cracks. Engagement numbers like this are trackable in Planning Center, and the new custom dashboard feature in People makes it easier to find and access the st

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

4 min read

May 05, 2021

Make Announcements with Church Center Push Notifications

Last-minute service cancellations, all-church meeting reminders, important community updates—these are the kind of things you want everyone in your church to know about as they happen. Now you can keep everyone in the loop by sending announcements to Church Center from People! You can send the notification to groups of people from the same place you send mass emails and texts—Lists! Similar to texting, your notifications have a character limit. Unlike texting, push notifications don’t cost an

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Mar 04, 2021

New Background Check Dashboard

Verifying someone’s background is the bare minimum churches can do to ensure proper care and protection. Background checks are such an incredibly important process, we are constantly looking for ways to improve the feature to make it as easy as possible for you to order, track, and manage checks. Our latest update is a refresh of the background check dashboard to surface the most important information. The first new thing you’ll see on the dashboard are the quick filters right at the top. Th

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Feb 16, 2021

Announcing Text Messaging from Planning Center People

Have you ever wanted to send very fast, very short letters to your congregation? Based on our feature-request inbox, that would be a heck yes. Well, today is your lucky day—texting is here! And like everything we want all churches to have easy access to, we put it in Planning Center People. So now whenever you want to quickly get a hold of a group of people, you have the option to send that tiny letter. How It Works Go to the list of people you want to connect with and you’ll have the

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

3 min read

Dec 09, 2020

Thank Your 2020 Volunteers

Every church in every state had a radically different 2020 story. Maybe your church shut down your campus and hosted exclusively online services and events. Maybe you tried a hybrid. Maybe your church was business as usual. One thing every church shares, though, is that it took people to make your ministry happen. Before the end of the year, maybe make time to tell them how much you appreciate the role they played in making it through the last twelve months of ministry. It doesn’t have to be

Jeff Berg

3 min read

Aug 04, 2020

Directory: A New Way to Connect in Church Center

It’s always awkward when you meet someone at church, invite them to lunch…and then forget their name on the drive to Panera. What about the stress when you promise to invite a couple to a small group and forget to ask for their phone number? No shame. We all do it, but also, awkward. Enter, the church directory—it’ll be relevant as long as community is, which is to say, always. As of today, you can give your congregation access to a directory in the Church Center mobile app, and on the web. I

Planning Center

3 min read

Jun 23, 2020

Gather Household Information through Forms

When your church is ready to check children into classes again, it will be more important than ever to provide parents with confidence in their children’s safety. Welcoming families to a stress-free environment with a smooth check-in experience is often the first step, but what if you started relieving parent’s stress and inspiring their confidence before they arrive? With the new household fields in Forms, you can collect all the necessary information you need to check in an entire family b

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

May 21, 2020

Invite Your Congregation to the Conversation

Many churches are struggling with the tension between desperately wanting to be together in person and wanting to be responsible and safe. As with our initial response to COVID-19, we are not suggesting any specific course of action for your church beyond following the recommendations of health and government officials. But we want to help. In each phase of transitioning back to meeting in person, there are a few key Planning Center tools you can leverage. This post is about connecting with y

Jeff Berg

2 min read

Apr 24, 2020

Find People Quickly with New Filters

Sometimes you need a quick list of some subset of the people in your church. Maybe you're starting a new youth ministry and need to estimate how many students will be going into high school this fall, or how many women within a certain age range are members. You could make a list. That’s quick and easy, but it’s also a little… much. Lists are powerful reporting tools, but you really don’t need to keep a list kicking around your account forever because you needed to answer one question once and

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

1 min read

Mar 25, 2020

Coronavirus: Connecting with the needs of your congregation

The ripple effects of COVID-19 are relentless, and we are all feeling it as the days pass and we work our way toward a new normal alongside the rest of the world. Still others (like you) are figuring out how to continue carrying the unique burdens of your entire congregation. You are in the business of caring for the well-being of souls—challenging work in the most normal of times. But in this abnormal time, when you can’t be physically present with your community, the task can feel overwhelmin

Jeff Berg

4 min read

Mar 11, 2020

Expanded Permissions for Workflows

Your church is more efficient and effective when you empower your people to work together as a team, which is the motivation between our latest addition to Workflows. Previously, someone's permissions on a workflow were tied to their overall permissions in People (Manager, Editor, or Viewer). If you wanted someone to be able to create a new workflow, your only option was to make them a manager, which comes with all sorts of other privileges that they may or may not need. Now, these permissions

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Mar 05, 2020

Pro Tips for Easter Prep

Easter is just around the corner, but it’s never too late to plan—even one step towards getting organized can make a huge difference! This post is a collection of some of our best-practices and pro tips as you prepare for what might be one of your busiest and most important Sundays of the year. No matter what area of ministry or what stage of planning you’re in, there is something here to help make your Easter Sunday a success. Create a unique Easter service plan In some ways, planning for

Jeff Berg

6 min read

Dec 16, 2019

New Integration with Zapier

At Planning Center we rely on a combination of tools like Slack, Trello, Basecamp, Zendesk, Github, and of course good old fashioned email to get our day to day work done. Now, if these tools didn’t talk to each other, we’d spend a lot of time looking for information and copy / pasting from one app to another. Fortunately, there’s an app called Zapier (Zapier rhymes with happier) that allows us to easily send information from one app to another—it’s the glue that ties our tools together so we c

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Nov 04, 2019

Email Lists of People within Planning Center

Email has a reputation for being nothing more than a way for companies to send us their annoying marketing jargon, but we all know its more than that. Email can also be a launching pad for meaningful communication. Even messages sent in mass can be a way to refresh people with a word of encouragement, create opportunities for connection, or provide important information. You've always been able to send emails to large groups within your congregation from lists by connecting your Planning Cente

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Oct 29, 2019

Preview Custom Reports Live

Every feature we add or update in Planning Center People is an attempt to make life easier for you, which is why we recently launched a change so you can share Lists and have more control over what permissions List collaborators have. Now, if you use Lists on a regular basis, one of the possible next steps after List creation is to create a Report. The Report Editor has been a feature of Planning Center for years, but because it is so powerful, it can be a bit tricky to know exactly what visual

Geoffrey Lessel

Developer

2 min read

Oct 21, 2019

Share Lists and Collaborate

Reports—everyone wants them, which is why anyone can make a custom list in People. Making a list is a lot like putting together your own personal puzzle— piecing together just the right conditions to find exactly what you’re looking for! If you think puzzles are fun, and you have permissions across your church’s Planning Center accounts, there is a high chance you are the designated list-making expert at your church. And you might be happy to oblige, until you start getting follow-up requests..

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Oct 10, 2019

Create Specialized Forms with Conditional Fields

Have you ever asked “if this, then that” questions in your forms? Do you have a background in children's ministry? If yes, tell us a little bit about your experiences. If no, do you have any background working with children outside of ministry? This is an incredibly confusing way to ask questions. Not to mention a sure way to clutter your form with questions irrelevant to half your audience. Yes, you need the information, but people have to remember everything they learned about induc

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Oct 08, 2019

Make sure people are prayed for and cared for

Right before the Sunday morning service, someone shares a prayer request with you. You quickly type it into your phone, promising to follow up with them. But soon, it's buried under shopping lists and work memos, and when you rediscover it weeks later, you can't remember who you're supposed to be praying for or how to follow up with them. Losing track of notes happens to the best of us, but it doesn’t have to happen to your congregation’s prayer requests. It is possible to pray for and suppor

Jeff Berg

4 min read

Sep 10, 2019

Easy Profile Editing for Households

Even the most organized People account can get messy because of incorrect profile information. An incomplete medical note during a check-in rush, a typo on an event form—these are the kinds of things that linger in your database. That is, until you're forced to update it after accidentally calling an outdated home phone (do these exist anymore?!) Editing People profiles is easy for admins, but you don't always know when someone needs to update their information, which is why your congregation c

Benson Lee

Product Manager

2 min read