Today we released an early upgrade to lists in People for a small group of churches to try. The lists feature allows churches to search data from across the Planning Center system to find groups of people—from a list of first-time visitors, to lists based on donors who gave just in the last month, and so much more.
But now you can build complex reports just by typing out who you are looking for!
This is only available to a small group so we can improve performance based on feedback and monitor the reliability of the feature.
Join the waitlist to be notified as soon as we're ready to open up the beta!
An easier way to find people in your database
Using data from your People account, lists are the most powerful tool for identifying how people engage with your church.
Lists also come with a little bit of a learning curve, and we know a lot of church staff and volunteers have shied away from using it.
With this upgrade, you can enter in exactly who you want to find, such as:
Every child who has checked into a class in the last 90 days
All women between the ages of 18 and 25
People who have given a donation in the last year
People who have a birthday this month
Then we'll automatically create a set of suggested rules and conditions to help you build the right list!
This first iteration of the upgrade is focused on finding ways to make list-building even more accessible for other staff and volunteers soon. Join the waitlist so we can tell you when it’s ready for you!
How we got here: Finding solutions through experimentation
When we first started looking into how AI could help make Planning Center easier to use, we opened the door to all kinds of technical possibilities, and we were excited about the potential!
At some point, though, some of the interactions with the natural language model we were playing with (simply defined as an AI system) started falling apart. Instead of providing accurate results, it hallucinated, provided answers to questions with made-up data, and extracted meaning we didn’t ask for or want.
This kind of inaccuracy and inconsistency is a known issue with many AI systems, and is exactly why people have a hard time trusting the solutions put out by tech companies.
As our CPO and co-founder Aaron said, “All‑purpose answers can’t promise truth, and that erodes trust.”
But, because we’ve been watching the AI landscape carefully and we took the time to play around in the space, we better understood the technology and were ready to ask ourselves: What high-impact feature could AI make easier for our churches?
Lists.
Once we found a specific way that the technology could make an administrative ministry workflow easier, we were cooking.
Innovation for churches— not tech for tech's sake
As our CEO has stated publicly, Planning Center is not for sale. We are privately owned, and the churches who use our software are the only stakeholders we want to satisfy.
We’re committed to continuing our exploration of this new technology safely, ethically, and with you–your church–at the center.
Technology is never the point. AI is just another tool in service of our purpose—helping churches help people—and we promise to never hand you an AI tool we don’t trust and believe can meaningfully help.
A note on privacy: We are not training any AI models with church data
The large language model we use to help build lists never reads actual member profiles. Neither does it know which people are included in the conditions it creates. It only helps build the query itself.
So while the model can access some information (like group names or leader names) to help construct the filtering conditions you’re requesting, it only uses the data for the immediate task of creating the conditions, never to train or improve the model.
We handle member data only according to your instructions. Our tools are contractually prohibited from using any of your data for training, and all data is processed securely according to the same privacy standards as the rest of Planning Center. You can read more about our commitments in our privacy policy.
Join the beta waitlist
We specifically launched this first iteration of the feature under PicoLabs, our new technology playground, so we could get it into your hands as soon as possible without putting it in the product before we’ve tested it thoroughly.
We're planning to open it up to more churches very soon, though, so join the waitlist, we’d love to have you!
💙 The Planning Center People team