As a company who not only creates software for churches, but has many employees actively serving in their own churches, we are always on the lookout for new ways to use technology to benefit the church. With Planning Center, Smart Events, Music Stand, Projector and other big projects in the pipeline, we're usually not able to devote any time to extra projects, but at a recent company retreat, we decided to all huddle together to create a brand new web application. Let me introduce you to Planning Center Spotlight!
Spotlight is a service that connects churches with artists. Bands, musicians, speakers and other types of artists can all create profiles with their bio, location, audio and videos. Churches can search through the Spotlight directory to find an artist or speaker for a concert, special event, or even just to give them a weekend off. The powerful search tools automatically show you artists closest to you, and let you search based on any combination of music genre, artist type, or target audience. The service will always be free for churches to search, and will eventually cost artists $5 a month.
During the initial launch, artists can create a spotlight for free, but sometime no sooner than July 1, 2012, we will start charging $5 a month to keep your spotlight active. We're not sure how fast this will take off, so it's possible we won't start charging until even after that. The $5 monthly charge is meant to be extremely affordable while discouraging people who are not serious artists from signing up.
In the future we plan to offer more features, including a new section for churches to create pages each time they are looking for an artist. We also plan to make it even easier for churches with Planning Center Online accounts to find artists right from their Planning Center accounts.
If you are an artist or speaker, head on over to spotlight.planningcenteronline.com and create your spotlight today! If you have questions or suggestions, send an email to spotlight@planningcenteronline.com.