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Aug 18, 2020

Show Registrations Events in Calendar

Event coordination almost always has two sides—the behind-the-scenes magic and the attendee experience. Together, Planning Center Calendar and Planning Center Registrations help you manage both sides. To simplify communication and streamline organization between all your teams, we released a new connection between the two products—a feed of all Registrations events into Calendar. Subscribe to the feed and you’ll see all of your existing Registrations events on your master event calendar, and

Evan Lemmons

Product Manager

2 min read

Aug 12, 2020

Waitlists for Simple Signup Events

Managing event capacity is tricky, especially right now. You need people to sign up in advance so you can follow guidelines for safety and social distancing. But, when their plans change, you want their spots to be available to others. Now you can plan ahead and plan for changes by including a waitlist in your simple signup! Let’s say your church is hosting four small gatherings on Sundays — and the 9am service fills up first. When it reaches capacity, the waitlist automatically becomes availa

Allie Rice

Product Manager

2 min read

Aug 04, 2020

Directory: A New Way to Connect in Church Center

It’s always awkward when you meet someone at church, invite them to lunch…and then forget their name on the drive to Panera. What about the stress when you promise to invite a couple to a small group and forget to ask for their phone number? No shame. We all do it, but also, awkward. Enter, the church directory—it’ll be relevant as long as community is, which is to say, always. As of today, you can give your congregation access to a directory in the Church Center mobile app, and on the web. I

Planning Center

3 min read

Aug 04, 2020

Share Your Event Calendar with Congregants in Church Center

What is happening when? With more and more churches continuing to host some events virtually and others in-person‚ it feels like the calendar might be lying to us. Are you sure this event hasn’t been canceled? Is the monthly prayer meet-up on Zoom? Do I need to pre-register for Sunday service, or can I just show up? As of today, it might get a little easier to keep people in the loop. You can now share your Calendar events to Church Center, a custom mobile app and web experience where congreg

Planning Center

2 min read

Jul 30, 2020

Summer Update 2020

What month is it? The heatwave in San Diego is telling us it’s summer, so we’re here with our quarterly update. Whether you and your church are working on mask-shaped face tans as you meet outside, or living the Zoom life and planning for reopening, watch the video to learn about our newest features. Pledge Campaigns: Plan budgets and projects. Invite your congregation to join a long-term vision by pledging to give towards a goal. Simple Signups: Plan simple events. Somet

Planning Center

3 min read

Jul 15, 2020

Track Event Attendance and Capacity with Headcounts Live

Now more than ever, it is incredibly important to track exactly how many people are present at in-person gatherings. Keeping attendance within a set capacity allows you to account for social distancing to promote health and safety. With the latest update to the Headcounts app, we released three new features to make it easier for you to stay on top of how many people are present. Live Headcounts The counter page in the Headcounts app now reflects the total number of headcounts across all devi

Scott Myers

Product Manager

2 min read

Jun 23, 2020

Gather Household Information through Forms

When your church is ready to check children into classes again, it will be more important than ever to provide parents with confidence in their children’s safety. Welcoming families to a stress-free environment with a smooth check-in experience is often the first step, but what if you started relieving parent’s stress and inspiring their confidence before they arrive? With the new household fields in Forms, you can collect all the necessary information you need to check in an entire family b

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Jun 15, 2020

Event Templates for Faster Planning

If there’s one thing I know about Calendar users it’s that y’all are planners, which is a hard thing to be in the event business these days. But as your church considers safety requirements and possible reopening options, know that when you are ready to plan, getting events on the calendar will be much easier with the brand new event templates feature. You can now save combinations of rooms, resources, tags, and a location as a template to use later when creating events. Simpler Startup for N

Evan Lemmons

Product Manager

2 min read

Jun 15, 2020

Group Messaging: New Features and Improvements

Messaging can be as much fun as it is practical—a way to connect and laugh, and a way to share information and coordinate plans. Group Messaging is still in public beta while we work on polishing things up, but we didn’t want to wait too long before we released a few updates to improve both the fun and the practical side of this feature. So based on feedback from users, here are a few new options now available in Group Messaging! Stay on Topic One of the problems with group texts or email t

Jessica Fleming

Product Manager

3 min read

Jun 01, 2020

Introducing Donor Pledge Campaigns

An annual church budget or a plan to build a new church building usually starts with a question: what can we accomplish as a community? A pledge campaign can help your church find the answer. Unlike a fundraiser, which asks for a donation today, a pledge campaign asks for a commitment to long term giving. For this reason, a pledge campaign is typically designed for your regular, consistent donor base. As we talked to churches about how they use donor pledges, two common use cases we found were

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

3 min read

May 20, 2020

Introducing Simple Signups

When you’re coordinating a complex event, you need a robust sign-up process. You need to know exactly who’s coming, and you often need to collect lots of information and provide lots of options. But what about the events where you just need to know how many people are coming? Now you can make it simple to sign up for your simplest events with simple signups. To sign up, people can select a quantity for each available option and then enter their name and email. That’s it! As we begin to navig

Allie Rice

Product Manager

2 min read

May 12, 2020

Simplify Event Assignments

With Registrations, you can use assignments to get your event attendees where they need to be, whether that’s a bus, cabin, classroom, table, or anything in between. But here we are, in a season when we would normally be assigning middle school campers to cabins and placing kids into classrooms for VBS—and the only kids we can assign are the ones in our house, and their bedroom is both their cabin and classroom. Even though your summer plans may be in limbo, we still prioritized some major upd

Allie Rice

Product Manager

3 min read

May 08, 2020

Check Out with the Church Center App

One of the universal challenges of children's check-in is getting parents to keep track of their security labels. Can we blame them? Even in the least stressful of mornings, it's hard to keep track of a little piece of paper! Shoving it into a Bible or deep into the depths of a purse or pocket seems like the right move when you're trying to hand off a squirming kiddo. However, most people can easily keep track of their phones—which is why parents can also find their security codes in the Churc

Scott Myers

Product Manager

2 min read

Apr 24, 2020

Emergency Text Notifications for Parents

Texting parents has been one of the most requested features we receive for Check-ins, and now it’s included in every plan for customers in the US and Canada—completely free. We know this feature is not entirely helpful while you’re doing church from home, but we want you to know it's here for you when you are back to welcoming families in person. One day you will again need parents’ help with diaper changes and hurt elbows on Sunday mornings, and texting will be ready to help you communicate t

Scott Myers

Product Manager

2 min read

Apr 24, 2020

Find People Quickly with New Filters

Sometimes you need a quick list of some subset of the people in your church. Maybe you're starting a new youth ministry and need to estimate how many students will be going into high school this fall, or how many women within a certain age range are members. You could make a list. That’s quick and easy, but it’s also a little… much. Lists are powerful reporting tools, but you really don’t need to keep a list kicking around your account forever because you needed to answer one question once and

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

1 min read

Apr 22, 2020

Spring Update 2020

We know ministry looks a little different right now...and so does this update. We have a few exciting new things to share, but mainly we want to focus on features uniquely helpful for doing ministry during the pandemic. You can watch the video to learn more or just to see if we managed to pull it off with webcams and no studio! Connect your church with group messaging! No more group texts and email strings! Groups now have a central place to keep in touch. Make onl

Planning Center

3 min read

Apr 15, 2020

Virtual Locations for Events

When being in person is out of the question, some events have to be canceled—but others can be reclaimed and enjoyed online. Your middle schoolers may not be able to gather together to celebrate your youth pastor's birthday, but they can still sing her Happy Birthday over Zoom. To help facilitate these kinds of online experiences, we added virtual locations for Registrations events. The event page on the web and in the Church Center app will denote that the event location is online, and anyon

Allie Rice

Product Manager

1 min read

Apr 09, 2020

Self Check-In with the Church Center App

Taking attendance is pretty simple when people are physically present, but what about when you're hosting services or classes virtually? With the latest release of the Church Center app, congregants can now check their entire families into an event from home! This feature might be especially useful while your church is hosting online services, but it's really designed for any situation in which you want to take attendance, but don't want to print labels. So how does this work? Once you enab

Scott Myers

Product Manager

2 min read

Apr 07, 2020

Stronger, Safer Passwords

Take a minute to consider the sensitive, personal information stored in your church's Planning Center account. You have people's donation records, background checks, medical notes, prayer requests; and if you use Check-Ins, children's regular times and locations. We do a lot to protect this precious data behind the scenes. In the coming months, we'll be releasing some security features to help you protect it even more. The first of these features have to do with the proverbial keys to the king

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

3 min read

Apr 06, 2020

Announcing Group Messaging: It’s in beta!

Group Messaging is in public beta, which means your small groups can make the Church Center app their official center for communication. No more cycling between Facebook Messenger, the dreaded group text, and infinite email strings! Read in browser We know many of you have temporarily suspended weekend services due to COVID-19, and some of you are also under state-mandated shelter-in-place orders, making even small gatherings impossible. We

Jessica Fleming

Product Manager

3 min read