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Apr 24, 2019

Building Relationships with Families in Children’s Ministry

Children’s ministry is often where families form their first impression of a church—you want to give families an amazing experience at your church's weekend gatherings, and you also don't want it to stop there! What you do on Sundays and between Sundays to reach out and connect with families are equally important, and go hand-in-hand. Here are some best practices for how to create opportunities for connection on Sundays, as well as how to continue building those relationships throughout the wee

Jeff Berg

7 min read

Apr 10, 2019

Volunteer Care and Coordination for Children’s Ministry

Volunteers are often the front line of children’s ministry—the people on the ground welcoming families at check-in stations, leading craft time, answering tough questions, and cleaning caked Goldfish crackers out of the carpet after snack time. Finding people willing to do this work, scheduling and communicating with teams, and equipping them to serve well is hard. This post outlines some best practices for how you can use Planning Center People and Services to care for and coordinate your volu

Jeff Berg

6 min read

Mar 13, 2019

New Admin Permissions in Forms

Forms are a great way to get information from the people in your church and are sometimes the first step to building a connection. Whether it be to check in on someone who requested prayer, or to invite someone to the next step of volunteer training, there is almost always follow up. One person shouldn’t have to bear the weight of all of these follow-up tasks on their own—ministry is a team effort. To help you delegate tasks and protect the privacy of your congregation’s information, we’ve add

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Dec 04, 2018

Automations in Forms

So people filled out your form…now what? Maybe you need to send a standard “Thank You” email to everyone who filled out your Connect Card or add everyone who responded to your Membership Interest form to the Membership Class in Groups. Now you can automate these actions and many more with Form Automations! Oh, we also gave Planning Center People navigation a design refresh to look a little more in line with our other applications! All of the actions you already use as Bulk Action

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Nov 28, 2018

New Profile Avatar Editor

Have you ever added a photo to a Planning Center profile that doesn’t quite fit? Well, now you can use the new avatar editor to crop any selfie, groupie, school portrait, or awkward family photo exactly how you want in all seven of our applications! Keep doing good work, Team People

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

1 min read

Oct 30, 2018

Mass Emailing in Workflows

The heart of Workflows is connection—everything about the feature is designed to support strong communication through follow up. We’ve noticed email is one of the most common ways churches like to reach out to people, which is why you can email individuals directly from workflow cards. But sometimes, you don’t need to write everyone a personal email, you just need to send the exact same message to multiple people in your workflow. Until today, the only way to send mass emails to people in

Jeff Berg

2 min read

Sep 14, 2018

Share Public Pages with QR Codes

Sharing a direct link is the easiest way to get people to fill out a form, sign up for a group, or give to a specific fund. Sending a link via text or email isn’t always practical, though—sometimes you have to share links on your paper bulletin or announcement slides. Then the challenge becomes getting people to actually type those URLs into their browsers on the spot. We realized link-sharing might not be the best way for some churches to share public pages, so we created an alternative:

Jeff Berg

2 min read

Jul 23, 2018

Introducing Forms in Planning Center People

Are you ready for one of the most exciting and frequently requested features in the history of Planning Center? We are too. Say hello to Forms. Forms is a way for you to hear directly from the people in your church by giving them opportunities to share information with you. At some point, every ministry in your church will need a way to collect information from your congregation, which is why we built this powerful new feature in the application all of our customers a

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

4 min read

Jun 13, 2018

Email Templates in Lists

Email is probably one of the most used methods you have of communicating with your church. It’s the quick and easy way to share about service opportunities, church events and activities, and other announcements. The problem is email writing can become tedious, especially if a lot of the content is similar to other emails you’ve previously written, in which case you are trying to remember, or find, what you wrote in the past to replicate it. We want to help decrease the overall time you spe

Jeff Berg

2 min read

Jun 12, 2018

Digest Email for Notes

Notes is designed to help you keep track of important information about the things going on in the lives of your congregation, including their needs, struggles, and ministry interest. Collecting information is only half of the job, though; the other half is bringing people into the loop so they can love, support and pray. People can submit prayer requests, and you can continue storing them in Notes, but what is the point if the requests never get to the people who pray? To make the proc

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Jun 12, 2018

Update Profiles in Workflows

From on-boarding new volunteers to following up with first-time visitors, Workflows has become a central hub of productivity and organization for many churches who use Planning Center People. Today’s update is going to help you maximize your time while using this feature! One of the most common practices we see in Workflows is a step dedicated to updating a person’s profile, like changing a membership status or adding someone to a volunteer team in Services. This profile-updating step is s

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

May 01, 2018

New Campus Dropdown on People Profiles

This morning when we released our brand new profile page in Planning Center People, we snuck a new feature in with it: a Campus dropdown so you can track what campuses the people in your church attend! You will see two new small features in People: a list condition to help filter lists by campus assignments, and a shiny widget on your dashboard to show you how your campus assignments compare to each other. But this is only the beginning! Now that campuses are built into profiles, y

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Apr 12, 2018

A Sneak Peek at the New People Profile Page

The profile page in our People application is getting a makeover! Here is a sneak peek of the updated design, along with the three biggest benefits coming to you on May 1st! Less Scrolling One of the goals of our redesign is to make all of the most important information about every person in your church immediately visible as soon as you enter their profiles. We consolidated some of this information into three dropdowns on the top of the page, as well as a new section on the right sid

Jeff Berg

3 min read

Mar 22, 2018

New Reports for Notes

Today’s People update is a quick one: we made changes to Notes to make it an even better way for you to stay on top of what’s going on with the people in your church. We’ve added a new option to filter your notes by date, in addition to the existing Category and Campus search filters. We also created a nicely formatted print view so that you can easily print the notes matching your current filter, just click the print button on the right hand side to generate the report. You’ll find

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

1 min read

Mar 06, 2018

Organize Lists by Campus and Category

Having to scroll through and scan all of the Lists in your People account is not the end of the world, but it is also not the most efficient way to find the list you want. The time you spend scrolling and scanning is also time, however short, you could be spending on the people in the list you are trying to find. Small amounts of time add up to big chunks, and we want to give you as much time as we can, so similar to what we did with Workflows, Lists can now be organized by Campus and Cate

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

3 min read

Feb 20, 2018

The New Duplicate Detector

Just over a year ago we launched the Duplicate Detector to help you find and merge those pesky duplicate profiles cluttering your database, and it’s already been used to merge over 500,000 profiles! This week we launched a new detection algorithm to improve the results of the Duplicate Detector. Our tests have shown the new algorithm to be significantly better at finding duplicates and ignoring similar, but not actually duplicate, profiles. It will save you time by providing better suggestion

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

3 min read

Feb 07, 2018

Bulk Updates Come to Workflows

People are the heart of your church, and the purpose of every feature in Planning Center People is to eliminate the administrative obstacles in the way of the church’s ability to build relationships with people. Workflows is a feature designed to streamline the often disjointed process of following-up with people in your church to make sure no one slips through the cracks. A few weeks ago we improved Workflows to increase the speed of the process to create more time and space for you to focus

Jeff Berg

2 min read

Jan 23, 2018

New People Dashboard

Every house has a junk drawer where we put those random things we don’t quite have a place for. Mine is in my kitchen. Inside it are a few pens, a jar of marbles, some coupons, and hardware for that broken door I keep telling my wife I’ll fix. Why am I talking about junk drawers? Because most apps have them too. In Planning Center People, our junk drawer can be opened by clicking on the gear icon on the list of People. It looks like this: Some of these items are right at home under a g

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Jan 22, 2018

Two Handy Updates to Lists

Sometimes the small changes can make a big impact, and the new updates we made to Lists will save you a lot of time! Duplicating a List, Rule, or Condition If you find yourself tediously creating similar lists with just small differences between them, you’ll love this! From the list of Lists, click a list’s new new duplicate icon to create a brand new list with all the rules of the original. You can also duplicate the list from a link in the list’s Actions dropdown. While you’re in

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

1 min read

Nov 02, 2017

Expected Response Times in Workflows

You are busy, your team is busy, so sometimes even in the most organized of Workflows, tasks can still be overlooked. Today we released Expected Response Times, a new Workflows feature designed to help you communicate to assignees when you expect specific tasks completed, and to send reminders if something's been overlooked. Now you can set a deadline for a step in a workflow by checking the box next to Expected Response Time at the bottom of the step's settings screen. Once you’ve

Jeff Berg

1 min read