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Blog

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

Oct 11, 2023

New for You in Planning Center October 2023

Get an overview of what's new in Planning Center this fall, and find ways to streamline your workflow!

Planning Center

3 min read

Oct 03, 2023

Collaborate more easily on tasks with real-time updates

See live updates on your task lists to know when someone else is making edits and avoid overlapping!

Allie Rice

Product Manager

2 min read

Aug 08, 2023

Announcing tasks: Create to-do lists and collaborate with teams

How do you keep track of your to-do list? Brightly colored sticky notes stuck all over your desk? An assortment of note-taking apps? Maybe a backlog of emails and text messages? All of the above? What if you could bring your scattered web of notes into a single place where you’re already doing your ministry work? Now you can create detailed tasks, organize to-do lists, and collaborate with other people on those tasks—all in Planning Center! And that’s not all. You can create tasks abs

Allie Rice

Product Manager

6 min read

Jul 26, 2022

Protect your church with two-step verification login

Your church’s Planning Center account holds sensitive, important, and valuable information. As an administrator, your congregation trusts you with their personal information (People), financial data (Giving), child location information (Check-Ins and Services), attendance history (Registrations), prayer requests (People), medical notes (Check-Ins), and more. The most important thing you can do to protect this information is to take a moment and enable two-step verification for your Planning Ce

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

4 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

Jun 13, 2022

Introducing the Planning Center notifications inbox

If you oversee or support a lot of ministries at your church (we see you, church office managers!) you probably receive notifications from Planning Center every day. Overdue workflow cards, new group member requests, approval requests for rooms and resources, declined and accepted serving requests —it’s a lot. And the notifications you receive about these things land in your email, so you have to constantly switch between different inboxes: Gmail, Planning Center, Gmail, Planning Center. Intro

Allie Rice

Product Manager

2 min read

Feb 14, 2022

Tidying up phone number formatting

Since the dawn of Planning Center, phone number fields have been the Wild West of the database—anyone could claim the field of any profile and declare their own formatting rules. Which is how we ended up with accounts looking like this. It’s enough to make anyone a little twitchy. So we officially standardized the formatting for the phone number field based on country! The phone numbers in your database will reflect the standard phone number format for the country you have set in your accoun

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Dec 10, 2021

Introducing Planning Center Home

You are responsible for so much at your church. Maybe you have multiple volunteer teams to schedule for the many events that you’re managing, and follow-up emails that you need to send to all the first-time visitors who came on Sunday… …and a million other things to keep up on and take care of! You need a home base where you can orient yourself to what’s going on and align your tasks with your priorities. So we made Planning Center Home—a personalizable dashboard highlighting all of the impo

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

5 min read

Jun 04, 2020

Taking a Stand

There are moments when a company needs to take a firm stand on an issue because silence and neutrality are themselves a statement. I believe this is one of those moments, and we must speak up. Over the last several weeks I, along with our staff, have mourned the injustice and systemic oppression consistently experienced by people of color, particularly in the Black community. And we want to turn our mourning to action. Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of a

Jeff Berg

Owner / Developer

2 min read

Mar 16, 2020

Simpler Avatars for Profiles

When you don’t have a photo for someone in your account, we’ve been using some stand-in avatars that vary based on the age and gender of the person. This week it’s time to say goodbye to our generic family. In their place, you’ll be seeing people’s initials. If you’re like me, you may be so used to seeing this family that you’ve developed a little soft spot in your heart for them. However, after all these years, we’ve recognized some shortcomings with this family. First, in most contexts, the

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 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

Mar 13, 2020

Coordinating Community during the Coronavirus

If your week was anything like ours, you might be feeling a little whiplash from so many major life changes in such a short period of time. Events canceled, schools closing, travel plans postponed—all because of the spread of COVID-19. Many health officials and city, county, and state governments across the country are making recommendations for how people should handle large gatherings of people, which we know impacts you, the church. We are not here to advocate for any kind of action apart f

Planning Center

6 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

Dec 11, 2018

Announcing the Church Center App

The core purpose of all Planning Center apps is to serve the needs of church staff and volunteers with ministry tools. We are now expanding our attention to provide you with tools to support your congregation with our new mobile app Church Center, a dedicated space for people to connect with the life of your church. Instead of directing people to a specific URL or your website to find more information or get involved, you can tell them to download an app on their smartphone a

Benson Lee

Product Manager

3 min read

Nov 29, 2018

Planning Center Fall Update 2018

Over the last few months, our team has been hard at work on new features across our suite! Watch our Fall Product Update to learn all about these exciting changes. If you want to learn more about the features mentioned in the video, click Read the Blog under each feature below for tips to help you get started! People Collect information with Forms! Create forms for people in your church to complete — and when they do, automatically send them an email, add them to a work

Planning Center

4 min read

Jun 19, 2018

Planning Center Summer Update 2018

Watch our Summer Update to learn how these new Planning Center tools can support your ministry! In the last six months, we released major new features and updates to all seven Planning Center applications, as well as our add-on app Music Stand! If you want to learn more about the features mentioned in the video, click Read the Blog under each feature below for tips to help you get started! People Updated Profiles: Make changes and find information faster with th

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