New for You in Planning Center September 2024
Get an overview of what's new in Planning Center this fall, and find ways to streamline your workflow!
Planning Center
3 min read
Planning Center Blog
Planning Center Registrations
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Add people to waitlists for any Registrations event
Waitlist attendees for any event type and send a mass announcement when spots open up!
Jon Aleixo
·Marketing Copywriter
2 min read
Send event reminders for your church registrations
Send reminder emails to help people stay on top of the events they registered for and when they’re happening!
Dyllan Wilson
2 min read
Improved: checking people into Registrations events
Use the updated integration between Check-Ins and Registrations to quickly check people into your events this summer!
Jon Aleixo
·Marketing Copywriter
4 min read
New automations: Organize event attendees in Registrations quickly
Use automations in Registrations to organize people into groups when they signup for events!
Daniel Murphy
·Product Manager
2 min read
New for You in Planning Center July 2023
Happy July! Tis the sea-sun for popsicles, pools, and product updates! We’ve got some new features and improvements to help you in the months ahead. ☀️ RehearsalPack: All Your Materials in One Place Gather lyrics, chord charts, audio files, and licenses all in one place through our exclusive integration with MultiTracks.com! Watch the video to see how to set up the integration! 📺 Invite People to Church Center With a Custom Link Share a custom setup link with your church so people can ea
Planning Center
3 min read
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
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
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
Collect Signups for Ongoing Opportunities
When you need to collect general information from your congregation — like a welcome card or prayer request — you can use a form in People. And when you need to collect signups for an event on a specific date — like VBS or weekend gatherings — Registrations is your best bet. But maybe you’re collecting signups for baptisms, and people aren’t assigned to a specific date until later. Or people are signing up for ongoing volunteer opportunities, where signups are always open but you only ne
Allie Rice
·Product Manager
2 min read
Take Attendance in Services and Registrations
They confirmed their request to usher from Services—but did they show up? They signed up for morning worship through Registrations—but did they attend? Check-Ins is the Planning Center go-to for keeping track of people as they arrive, but sometimes you don’t need everything a Check-Ins station provides, like labels and alerts. Oftentimes, you just need to take basic attendance, and it would be nice if you could do it in the product where you got everyone organized—now you can! Leaders can no
Allie Rice
·Product Manager
2 min read
View Household Registrations on Church Center
Ashley registered her middle schooler for camp, but her spouse wants to log in and pay the balance due. A volunteer registered Greg’s kids for VBS but he never received a confirmation email and wants to make sure they’re signed up. Robin’s husband signed their family up for the Sunday morning service, but when they go to show their confirmation, he realizes he left his phone at home. Now Ashley, Greg, Robin, and the rest of your congregants can view registrations for everyone in their household
Allie Rice
·Product Manager
1 min read
Let People Cancel Their Own Registrations
One of the ways we're all keeping each other healthy right now is by staying home when we don't feel well. But with strict capacities on many events, we often have to sign up for gatherings in advance—and if we aren't going to make it, we want to make sure our spots are available to others. Now you can let your congregants cancel their own registrations from Church Center. When you enable self-cancelations for your event, registrants will be given a cancelation link both in their confirmation
Allie Rice
·Product Manager
2 min read
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
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
What’s Next: Phasing Into Gathering Again
When it comes to church, "How do I limit attendance?" isn't a question we often (or ever) ask. We are much more likely to find ourselves saying, "The more the merrier!" or "Can I find you a seat?" But as we phase into gathering again, limiting attendance for social distancing is necessary for many of us. While some of you are trying to determine when and whether to gather, others may be figuring out how to gather. Today, we're sharing some of our best practices for facilitating smaller gatherin
Allie Rice
·Product Manager
4 min read
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
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
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
Locations for Event Signups
Summer camp at the lake. An annual community Christmas concert. Volunteer training for a local nonprofit. Youth group coffeehouse night. Events like this often happen somewhere other than your church’s weekly gathering spot. Whether you’re hosting an event at one of your campuses, in another city, or anywhere in between, you can now specify a location for your event in Registrations! Simply select a campus or enter an address. Include a building name or room number to help people find their wa
Allie Rice
·Product Manager
1 min read