Planning Center Blog

Product Updates

No spam. Privacy guaranteed. Unsubscribe anytime.

Blog

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 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

Nov 19, 2018

Updates to Event Reminders

Updates to Event Reminders Sometimes the people in your group need a gentle reminder (or two or five) about events. After all, life is crazy, and everyone occasionally forgets to put an event on the calendar. The goal of reminder emails and RSVP requests is to give group leaders a way to encourage members to stay connected. In the last few weeks, we’ve released four updates to the reminder feature to help you improve and customize your communication with members. Automatic Email Remind

Jessica Fleming

Product Manager

3 min read

Nov 14, 2018

Remodeling Resources: Tags and Calendar

Hey there! My name is Evan Lemmons, the new Product Manager of Resources! I joined the Planning Center team earlier this year and I’m here to break our team’s silence with some exciting news! The first step to successful event planning is to establish when the event is happening. Before you can figure out who is doing what, in which room, and with what resources, you have to know when the event is. Since Resources first launched in 2013, the most requested feature from our churches is a ca

Evan Lemmons

Product Manager

3 min read

Nov 01, 2018

Edit Chord Charts with Music Stand 4.2

Last week Music Stand for iOS and Android was updated to version 4.2 and now allows you to edit lyrics & chord charts created in Planning Center, or create new ones from scratch. You can get chord charts into Planning Center in many ways. The most popular way is probably importing PDFs from SongSelect or PraiseCharts. If instead you make your own charts, or you want the ability to customize charts, you can enter the text into Lyrics & Chords, and Planning Center turns it into a PDF that can b

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

2 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

Oct 25, 2018

New Totals Sidebar for Registrations

Hi! I’m Allie, and I started at Planning Center as a designer on Team Registrations in 2017. Over this last summer, our team grew and I moved into my new role as product manager. Today I am so excited to share our first feature update since this transition! Have you ever managed a complex event with multiple attendee types, add-ons, discounts, and payments all within a single registration? With all those items in the mix, each with their own costs and quantities, the calculated totals can

Allie Rice

Product Manager

2 min read

Oct 10, 2018

More Reliable Integrations with API Updates

We have seven product teams here at Planning Center, with one team for each of our seven applications. While each team works primarily on their own apps, all of our developers also work together on an additional “product:” The Planning Center API (Application Programming Interface). If you’re anything like me (not a software developer) you may have no idea what Application Programming Interface means, nor why you should care. In the simplest terms, APIs enable applications to work together.

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

Aug 08, 2018

Totally Better Totals for Giving

When you accept online donations, processing fees are an unavoidable fact of life. Every time someone gives with a card or initiates an ACH bank transfer, there will be a fee. The good news is that we're on your side fighting to minimize those fees! Planning Center makes $0 from processing fees, no matter how many online donations you receive. Today, we are introducing a few new features which we hope will contribute to a clearer picture of how processing fees impact your donations.

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

2 min read

Aug 01, 2018

Fresh Stations Page Design

You should spend as little time as possible using Planning Center Check-Ins and as much time as possible doing ministry, which is why we are excited to share the new layout for the Stations page! We added more details about the information you need, and decreased the noise from the things you don’t. We thought it was time to give more screen space to the things you came to the Stations tab to use! On this page you will see all of the important details about your stations, including the St

Scott Myers

Product Manager

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

Jul 19, 2018

More Settings for Your Check-Ins Locations

No matter how big your church or how many classrooms you have, one of the most chaotic aspects of Sunday morning is getting everyone to the right place after they check in. Today, we are giving you the power to decide how you want Check-Ins to suggest people to locations. In each of your event folders you will see a new Distribution section. The Waterfall and Balanced distribution options are designed to suggest locations for new people, or those who haven’t attended in a while. Wat

Scott Myers

Product Manager

2 min read

Jul 10, 2018

Service Type Wizard

The first thing to do when you set up a new Services account is to create a Service Type. Once you understand what a Service Type is, it makes perfect sense, but at the start the term can be confusing. The new Add Service Type Wizard gives first-time users the context they need to get started and power-users the tools to create Service Types faster than ever. If you are an Administrator for a Folder you can find the Wizard by clicking the + Service Type button. The Wizard will walk you thr

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

2 min read

Jun 27, 2018

Bundled Scheduling & Notification Emails

The more emails a person receives, the more likely they are to ignore them. Today's update reduces the number of emails we send by bundling similar messages together! The three types of emails that are now consistently bundled are Scheduling Requests, Blockout Notifications, and Accepted Request Notifications. Scheduling Requests When a scheduler adds team members to a plan, the final step is usually sending out Scheduling Request emails. We recommend assembling your schedule for a couple

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

4 min read

Jun 27, 2018

Navigate Faster with Improved Universal Search

Learning to use the / key for Universal Search, will help you become even more productive than you already are, but moving fast isn’t the only reason to use it. Universal Search is the best way to navigate to almost any page in Services: use it to find Songs, Media, Teams, and Positions, in addition to People! Instead of clicking through the many pages in Services, you can click the search icon, or just tap the / key and find exactly what or who you are looking for withi

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

2 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

Jun 18, 2018

Expiring Card Replacements

Problems with payment processing can have a real impact on the health of your church’s donation management, and of all the payment issues churches encounter expiring credit cards are the biggest problem. A few years ago, Stripe introduced a groundbreaking new feature: automatic card replacements. In most cases, a saved credit card in Planning Center Giving will continue to work for recurring donations without donor-intervention, even if the physical card gets replaced by the donor's bank.

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

2 min read

Jun 18, 2018

Improve Your Group Planning with RSVP Requests

We know hosting and leading a group takes a lot of time and energy, and it’s frustrating if after investing so much into preparation, people forget to show up! Using the new event reminder feature in Groups you can keep the event on people’s radars, but wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly how many people are planning to come? You can! When you are ready to send out the event reminder you can choose to include a request for members to RSVP in the email. The new RSVP column on the

Jessica Fleming

Product Manager

2 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