Top 3 Reasons Your Church NEEDS Planning Center

www.planning.center Check it out today!!

Today we are talking about a wonderful and magical thing today, and no I’m not taking about Star Wars. But today we are talking about the amazing service called Planning Center Online. . . . or PCO. This is a service that every church should have. Oh yes, I said it, EVERY Church including yours.

#1 Volunteer Scheduling:

Scheduling musicians, greeters, ushers, media, kids workers and other volunteers can be a big pain in the neck. You are probably working with people who serve in multiple ministries. Scheduling and confirming you have everyone you need for services and events can be stressful. We’ve all been there where is 20 minutes before service and the drummer hasn’t shown up yet and you send out a text to see if he’s coming. He responds saying “I thought Daniel was on the drums this week”. So now you have no drummer and end up like I have before, playing the guitar with a kick drum in front of me. That is why it is imperative that you get Planning Center. Planning Center makes is super easy to schedule all of your people on a master online calendar. It lists all of your services and all of the positions needed and people who have been scheduled. You can even send out text messages and push notifications through their app when someone has been requested to serve. They just reply with a yes or no and BOOM, that person has just confirmed. And if a person has something come up to where they can’t make it, they can decline that service and you get a notification that they aren’t going to make it. Your volunteers can even black out dates that they are not available for so when you go to schedule them, you’ll get a message saying they are not available.
Gone are the days of printing our Excel spreadsheets and paper schedules. This is the master of scheduling people.

#2 Music/Song Management:

Planning Center is a fantastic service that organizes all of your songs and media files. Planning Center will have a master list of all your songs, store all of your chord charts, transposes your chord charts, keeps track of the different keys used, manage tempos, arrangements and manages all of the files associated with that song. If you have any click tracks or YouTube videos that you have for the song, just upload them to Planning Center’s storage and they are there for EVERYONE on your worship team to access. If you have a CCLI Song Select subscription, Planning Center can literally import the lyrics and chords and music from any song in the Song Select database and create a new song.
Not only does it manage all your songs, but it also can be used with their Music Stand app to view chord charts and music for the songs. No more endless printing of music! Just swipe across the screen to change pages and songs and that’s it! And you can even change the key or capo version of the song on the fly. So if you have that one guy who capos everything, he can change the key so he has everything in the key of “G”. You know what I’m talking about, don’t pretend like you don’t do that!
Planning Center can be used by your musicians to practice their music along with the recordings and for choir members to sing along with various harmonies and parts you might have uploaded. It is the greatest communication and practice tool for worship teams.

#3 Service Scheduling:

Another huge use of Planning Center is the actual plans for your services. You can enter every single thing that will be on the schedule for your service. This includes anything pre and post service, sermon notes and file uploads like Powerpoints and pictures, songs, prayer, offering, and anything else you can think of. You can also add different headers to the plans to nicely organize you services. You can also add notes into each of the items. For instance, in the note section a video, you could put in, “Start passing the collection plates” or “Bring out communion elements”. So the all the departments will be able to know when different tasks might need to be done during the service. By putting the schedule into planning center, everyone who has access to that plan can view what will be going on in service. Planning Center ends up becoming the master schedule for everything in the service. The great thing is that it can be changed on the fly as well. If you have something that needs to be changed last minute and even during service, someone can edit the service and the changes will be reflected on the plan. Having these service schedules online is super helpful for keeping everyone on the same page as far as your services.

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