All new streamlined signup workflow in Church Center
Give people a centralized place where they can sign up for everything happening at your church—from concerts to conferences to VBS!
Allie Rice
·Product Manager
3 min read
Planning Center Blog
Product Updates
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Blog
The Matrix reloaded: new features to help plan church services weeks ahead
Plan church services weeks in advance and view multiple services side by side!
Aaron Stewart
·Co-Founder / Product Manager
4 min read
Announcing sermon audio in the Church Center mobile app
Share your sermon audio on your Church Center mobile app and website for people to catch up on their own time!
Benson Lee
·Product Manager
3 min read
Event managers in Calendar: Get the help you need
Sometimes it takes more than one person to pull off an event. Other people are needed to coordinate details, take on different responsibilities, or chip in more if someone helping becomes unavailable. Now with Event Managers, an Event Owner can easily give anyone in Calendar full ownership of their events! Give Full Event Control It can take multiple people to bring an event together. But ownership over an event usually rests with only one point-person: an Event Owner. Anyone can be an Even
Evan Lemmons
·Product Manager
2 min read
Custom color themes for Church Center: Make your church app and website your own
Bring more cohesion to your church's branding with custom color themes for your Church Center app and web experience.
Jon Aleixo
·Marketing Copywriter
2 min read
Faster, safer bank account verification with Stripe Financial Connections
Encourage congregants to give using ACH transfers with faster, safer bank account verification through Stripe Financial Connections.
Jeremy Ricketts
·Product Manager
4 min read
Event request forms: a quick way to get new events on the calendar
Collect event details such as the event name, dates and times, and a description through new event request forms.
Evan Lemmons
·Product Manager
2 min read
New notifications for Giving: alerts for recurring donations, first-time donors, and more
Many of our features come directly from customer requests. These requests help us understand what you want to see next and which parts of the product need improvement. So let’s look at the newest customer-requested feature: alert options for Planning Center Giving! Giving administrators can now find this on their profile under the “User Profile” tab. Customize Notifications for What You Care About We’re often asked, “How do I know when people give online?” An email about every new donation m
Jeremy Ricketts
·Product Manager
2 min read
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
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
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
Event notes and visitor count for Groups
The heart of your small groups can usually be found in face-to-face conversations. Maybe someone shares a prayer request, a special moment, something to mourn, or maybe someone visited for the first time. The health of your group can depend on moments like this, and with Planning Center Groups, you can now keep better track of them with event notes and a visitor counter in Church Center! Event Notes On each event your leaders will have the ability to add a new note or view any notes made by
Scott Myers
·Product Manager
2 min read
May 2022 Product Update
Anyone else already get their first sunburn? ☀️ Summer is coming in hot, and so are the Planning Center Product Updates! Want to dive a little deeper into one of the new features? Check out the blog updates for more information! 👇 Planning Center Home Check out all the important updates and tasks from across your account on your new personalizable dashboard. Learn some of the best ways to use it! A New Home Base for Congregants to Get Involved My Church Center i
Planning Center
3 min read
Emoji reactions in Groups messaging ❤️
What’s worse: getting a million responses of “ok” to your message or having no one respond because they don’t want to bother the group? Either situation is less than ideal, but there’s a new way around it—reactions! Reactions are an unobtrusive way to acknowledge, send love, and respond to a topic or reply to a message without blowing up everyone’s phone! Replies and Topics 🙏 Hold down on any message, and you’ll see a menu that allows you to react, and shows an option to view reactions.
Scott Myers
·Product Manager
2 min read
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
Introducing My Church Center: A new home base for congregants
Where do your congregants go to see everything they’re involved in at your church? How do people RSVP for an event, see what they signed up for, and respond to scheduling requests without having to check four different places? Now they can check a single place for information on everything they’re involved in— My Church Center. What is My Church Center? My Church Center is your congregants’ new home base—where they can see important updates and notifications regarding anything they’re i
Jeff Berg
4 min read
New customizable content and style options for Church Center
You can now bring more unique content and style to your Church Center mobile app and website with Publishing’s new editor has more customization options! Contact Information The Contact block makes it easy to share an email address, phone number, or website, so people can reach out or find more information quickly. Event Schedule Want to share your service times on your home page? Maybe display a schedule for an upcoming event? You can use the Event schedule block to add the details to on
Benson Lee
·Product Manager
2 min read
The new event chart in Check-Ins
The first thing you see when you open Check-Ins is the chart showing all your events. This chart represents your most popular events, compares week to week details, shows locations where you need more volunteers, and where attendance is slipping. As of this week, we’ve completely upgraded the layout of the event chart to make it more customizable—so you can see the events and the event details you care about! There are several new things here, including the ability to filter the chart by spec
Scott Myers
·Product Manager
3 min read
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
New pencil kit in Music Stand 4.4 on iOS
We may have snuck a little Music Stand update under your Christmas tree last year—did anyone find it? Whether you use an Apple Pencil to annotate your music sheets, or you draw everything by hand, you will now see a whole new set of drawing tools. You’ll find a richer toolset, with a new Pencil to join the current Pen and Highlighter, and a whole new experience using them all. As you draw with an Apple Pencil, you will notice that your note will respond more naturally, almost like you’re dra
Matt Steingard
2 min read