Things move fast—understatement of the week!
After receiving feedback from customers and some brainstorming, our product teams fast-tracked a few updates to help you and your church adjust your plans in this rapidly changing environment.
Services: Reschedule Plans
Last week we released a new feature in Services that allows you to shift entire plans—including people—back by as many weeks as you need. This week we released an option allowing you to reschedule the content of your plan, the order of service, but keep all of your pre-scheduled volunteers in place.
When regularly scheduled services are back on the calendar, you will have your plans and your people ready to go. In the meantime, you have the dates free to create new plans for your virtual services.
Groups: Add a virtual location to an event
You may not be able to meet in person, but that doesn’t mean you have to stop meeting altogether. Select the new Virtual (link) option in the Location field for your group and add the link to your video call—now your congregation can connect from a distance.
Check-Ins/People: Take virtual attendance
The Check-Ins team parachuted into the world of People to come up with a few options to take virtual attendance for your streamed or recorded services.
Starting with the Automations feature in People, you can create a form so that when a congregant fills it out it will check in an entire household or automatically check in the person who filled out the form. Once you have this attendance information, you’ll be better able to follow-up with the people who participated, and with those who may have been missing.
Registrations: Cancel all attendees at once
Canceling events is such a hard and sad call to make. We can’t help you get around the sadness, but to make the task a little less tedious, you can now cancel all the attendees for an event at the same time.
We recommend emailing everyone who registered before you cancel their registration. After you cancel everyone’s registrations, you will no longer have the option to email them all at once from within Registrations. If you do end up canceling attendees before you reach out, you can make a list of all the canceled attendees from that event in People and email them from there.
Do you and your team have any suggestions for updates that would help you in this season? Tell us about them. We’d love to help you find a solution.
More soon,
Planning Center