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Product Updates

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Jan 12, 2022

A shiny new Approval Groups tab

Calendar is where you can find all the answers to what events are happening when, where, and with what stuff. But there is one last question—who? Who is in charge of all the rooms and resources assigned to these events? We made it a little bit easier to answer the “who is in charge here?” question with the shiny new Approval Groups tab! Now you can see the full scope of what an approval group is responsible for—rooms and resources—and who is in the group, all in one place. You can still edit

Evan Lemmons

Product Manager

1 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

Nov 17, 2021

November 2021 Product Update

Hello friends, and happy fall! 🍂 Pumpkin spice and product updates—the perfect pairing! No? Perhaps it is possible we pretentiously pushed the pairing to produce a pleasant alliteration...presently...post-haste. Pickles? Anyway, check out this video to see all the new ways to use Planning Center in your ministry! Want to dive a little deeper into one of the new features? Check out the blog updates for more information! 👇 Create Custom Dashboards to View and Share Metrics Tr

Planning Center

3 min read

Nov 09, 2021

Quick add items to your service order

Last week we introduced a faster and more discoverable way to add items to your plan—the quick add item row! If you have Editor or Administrator permissions, you will see an empty row at the bottom of a plan where you can type an item title, hit enter, and see it added to your plan. Quick add is perfect for when you already know what items, songs, and media you want to do and get them into the order as soon as possible. But there's way more power built in to that little bar. * Set the

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

2 min read

Nov 04, 2021

New customization options for pages in Church Center

Bring even more unique content and style to your Church Center mobile app and website with a brand new page editor in Publishing! Now you can give your Church Center presence a more customized website feel by creating your own page headings and stylizing your call to action buttons! Create Page Section Headings Section headings are a banner spanning your page with whatever image you upload. From there you can layer text over the image or add a button for a call to action! This way you can b

Benson Lee

Product Manager

2 min read

Oct 06, 2021

New Permissions in Groups: Group Type Managers

You probably don’t want the person managing the Thursday night softball teams to have too much insight into your Celebrate Recovery groups. You probably also don’t want your small group manager to have access to the leadership team group. And at the very least, you don’t want to overwhelm your Groups Administrators with all of the groups ever in your church account. To give you more control over who has access to group information, we are releasing a brand new permission level for people who n

Scott Myers

Product Manager

2 min read

Sep 29, 2021

The New Plan Rehearse Tab

If you’re on a volunteer team that needs to access song files to rehearse (called a Rehearsal Team), we’ve designed an entire new view in Services just for you! The new Rehearse tab makes songs and all their files easily accessible to musicians so you have everything you need to practice. Songs from the plan are on the left, and when you select a song, you’ll see all of the details, notes, and files in the panel on the right. If you want, you can choose to include media or regular items with

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

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

Aug 19, 2021

Add Group Members from Church Center

Say one of your group members brings a guest to their small group, and they decide they want to join officially—awesome! It’s now a little easier to add and invite new members to your group right from where you already are with the Church Center app! We think it will speed up the process of inviting new members, while respecting their privacy. It also gets new members instantly connected with their new Group in Church Center! Adding Members If you’re a leader in Groups, you’ll see a new butt

Scott Myers

Product Manager

3 min read

Jul 19, 2021

Schedule Visible and Open Signups

Imagine it’s Tuesday afternoon, and you’re figuring out how and when to roll out VBS signups. It’s getting complicated. Because you want to announce VBS at your weekend gathering, but you also want to share the Church Center page with your staff and volunteers ahead of time… But then, you don’t want to share it with the whole congregation until after it’s announced. And people can’t start registering until the following Tuesday, but they need to sign up at least 72 hours before VBS begins. O

Allie Rice

Product Manager

2 min read

Jul 14, 2021

July 2021 Product Update

All eight of our products have brand new features, and we made a video to tell you about them...and to make some bad puns. What else is new? Want to dive into the details a little more? Check out the blog post announcements from each of the new features from the last few months! 👇 Send Church Center Push Notifications Canceling due to weather? Need to remind everyone about the quarterly business meeting? Send out a push notification right from a list in People! Learn how to send not

Planning Center

3 min read

Jun 24, 2021

Multi-Campus Support for Giving

You can now track donations from multiple campuses in Planning Center Giving! Giving now automatically tracks donation’s associated campus based on the donor’s set primary campus in Planning Center People. If you’re a multi-campus church and have already been tracking people’s campus affiliation, then you are all set to use this feature—no set up required! Here are all the details for where you’ll find campus information throughout Giving. Dashboard Filters All multi-campus churches will se

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

3 min read

Jun 17, 2021

Import Events from an iCal Feed to Calendar

Transitioning to a new master calendar can be overwhelming—how do you get all of your already-planned events moved over? And what if, after you move everything over, there’s a rogue calendar over in youth ministry that is still holding out? Calendar has a new feature to make these scenarios a little easier for you—an iCal import! How to Import Events from an iCal File Heads up: this feature is only available to org admins because the only thing worse than not having all of your events in the

Evan Lemmons

Product Manager

2 min read

Jun 09, 2021

Control Group Notifications in Church Center

The primary pillar of Groups is connecting you and your community. It’s a balancing act to keep everyone in the know about when things are happening and keeping the swirling conversations in order. And now, it's a little easier to manage those conversations in Groups with new notification options and preferences! New Notification Options Wouldn’t it be nice if you could upload a resource to your group, and your group would just know without you emailing them about it? Especially because of B

Scott Myers

Product Manager

3 min read

Jun 01, 2021

Easier and Faster Station Set-up

It’s Sunday morning and there’s a long line out the door for families to check in. In one way, this sounds great—the church is growing, families are being welcomed, and children are safe. But in real life, this experience isn’t ideal. When checking in isn’t fast, people miss out on worship and connecting with others, all because they’re stuck waiting for labels to print. With our recent update to Check-Ins, we’ve made the process of creating check-in stations even easier and faster so you can

Scott Myers

Product Manager

3 min read

May 26, 2021

Giving API Improvements

If you've developed a software integration with Planning Center Giving (or perhaps you've thought about developing one) then this update is for you! Giving now supports webhooks—messages sent from our software system to yours, letting you know about some new or changed data in our system. So instead of periodically looking for changes to the Giving database, your application can now have them delivered to you as they happen. You tell us what kinds of data you're interested in tracking, give u

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

3 min read

May 13, 2021

Link Services Plans with Sermons in Publishing

If a worship service were a coin, Services and Publishing are the two sides of it. While Services helps you handle all the planning and coordination, Publishing is a way to host a live streaming experience on the day of, and provide congregants with the option to watch the service later. Last week we released an integration between these two products—so you can connect the planning side to the experience side. Import Sermon Details from Services to Publishing In January, Publishing release

Benson Lee

Product Manager

2 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

Apr 27, 2021

Split Registrations: Signups for Specific Date and Time Blocks

Spring is here—maybe you’re organizing a church work party to do some cleaning. You might have two-hour blocks throughout the weekend for people to come paint, landscape, reorganize, and make repairs, and people can volunteer for as many different time blocks as they’d like. In the past, there were a few (creative) ways of crafting this kind of signup, but now Registrations has a first-class experience for it: Split Registrations! Create a simple signup for your work party, add selectio

Allie Rice

Product Manager

2 min read

Apr 20, 2021

April Product Update

It’s officially spring—time for gentle breezes, fresh flowers, and a product update video! 🌻 Watch the video for an overview of everything new to come to Planning Center in the last two months, then check out the original blog posts for more details! Send mass texts right from People! You can now buy credits to send text messages to lists of people, just like you do from email! Emoji usage encouraged. 🙃 Stay on top of background checks. The new dashboard surfaces expiring

Planning Center

2 min read