Over the last few weeks we’ve been burning the midnight oil to crank out a few important updates and features. We’ve had five major People features released and a couple more approaching on the horizon. But enough about the future, let’s take a look at what’s ready to go right now: Introducing auto-refreshing lists and automatic actions.

Auto-refreshing lists

We know you’ve been clicking that refresh button all the time, so you’ll feel refreshed with this fresh new update… Auto-refresh! I think I tried too hard on that sentence.

PCO People will automatically refresh this list every night at 2am. Here’s a few ideas that we’ve thought through for how you might use this:

  • A Birthday List that automatically refreshes for the current month.
  • You can have a list of “Elementary Students” that automatically adds any new students between 1st - 5th Grade.
  • Show a list of children who have checked in before but haven’t since January 1st.

So now we have auto-refreshing lists. Seems like a nice, basic feature. But, there’s more! Like cheez-its and almonds, auto-refreshing lists pairs exquisitely with the second feature of this update...

Automations

Automations are any action that you’d like to automatically perform on lists. These actions will be performed immediately after a list is refreshed. So that could be every night after 2am if you’re auto-refreshing the list or right after you’ve manually refreshed a list.

Planning Center People automations dashboard with actions drop-down menu.

Here are a few ideas we have for Automations:

  • If someone has checked in more than 3 times since January, set their status to “Member”.
  • When someone donates for the first time, send them to a “new donors” workflow.
  • If it’s the first time someone has checked in or registered, drop that person into a Visitors workflow.
  • If someone has completed a background check step in a workflow, automatically add a custom field that says they’ve completed the background check, and also add a “background check” tag in Services.

We hope you can see the flexibility of the new auto-mazing features. The possibilities are endless! We can’t wait to see the awesome ideas that our customers discover.

Until next time,
- Team PCO People