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Product Updates

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Mar 19, 2020

Coronavirus: Product Updates to Get You Through

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 orde

Planning Center

3 min read

Mar 16, 2020

Simpler Avatars for Profiles

When you don’t have a photo for someone in your account, we’ve been using some stand-in avatars that vary based on the age and gender of the person. This week it’s time to say goodbye to our generic family. In their place, you’ll be seeing people’s initials. If you’re like me, you may be so used to seeing this family that you’ve developed a little soft spot in your heart for them. However, after all these years, we’ve recognized some shortcomings with this family. First, in most contexts, the

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Mar 11, 2020

Expanded Permissions for Workflows

Your church is more efficient and effective when you empower your people to work together as a team, which is the motivation between our latest addition to Workflows. Previously, someone's permissions on a workflow were tied to their overall permissions in People (Manager, Editor, or Viewer). If you wanted someone to be able to create a new workflow, your only option was to make them a manager, which comes with all sorts of other privileges that they may or may not need. Now, these permissions

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Mar 02, 2020

Four New Custom Label Options

It’s been a few months since we released our beta of Universal Printing, and we’re now excited to officially release it as the best option for every church. If you haven’t heard about Universal Printing yet, all you need to know is that it’s faster, more secure, and has a ton more features. It’s the future of Check-Ins, and we’re really excited about what it can do. On top of officially coming out of our beta, we’re releasing some really exciting label updates, including integrations with Plann

Scott Myers

Product Manager

3 min read

Feb 27, 2020

Locations for Event Signups

Summer camp at the lake. An annual community Christmas concert. Volunteer training for a local nonprofit. Youth group coffeehouse night. Events like this often happen somewhere other than your church’s weekly gathering spot. Whether you’re hosting an event at one of your campuses, in another city, or anywhere in between, you can now specify a location for your event in Registrations! Simply select a campus or enter an address. Include a building name or room number to help people find their wa

Allie Rice

Product Manager

1 min read

Feb 06, 2020

Resources has a new name—Calendar!

Every successful event takes teamwork—from the smallest prayer group on Wednesday mornings to the largest Sunday services. Facilities teams have Resources to help them communicate and coordinate these details, but they’re not the only ones who need to know the event schedule. People from ministries across your church need to have easy access to what is happening when, where, with what stuff, and know who is responsible for it all. In the last year, we’ve expanded the scope of Resources to meet

Planning Center

4 min read

Jan 23, 2020

The New Event Page

Last year we updated the calendar and tag system, simplifying scheduling and categorizing events by making it easier to find events in the bigger picture of the church calendar. Now we are bringing that same simplicity to managing the details of events with the complete redesign of the new Event page! A few weeks ago, we released this page as an open beta and starting today, we are rolling out the change to every organization that hasn’t already opted in. By February 7th, everyone will have the

Evan Lemmons

Product Manager

4 min read

Dec 16, 2019

New Integration with Zapier

At Planning Center we rely on a combination of tools like Slack, Trello, Basecamp, Zendesk, Github, and of course good old fashioned email to get our day to day work done. Now, if these tools didn’t talk to each other, we’d spend a lot of time looking for information and copy / pasting from one app to another. Fortunately, there’s an app called Zapier (Zapier rhymes with happier) that allows us to easily send information from one app to another—it’s the glue that ties our tools together so we c

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Dec 02, 2019

Custom Labels for all Printers

Yes, you read that correctly: with Universal Printing (formerly Direct Printing), you can create custom labels and print them from any supported printer. Create Custom Labels When you add a new label you can build off of our default labels, or create your own masterpiece from scratch with a blank label. From there, you’ll be whisked away to a new world of creating or editing your own labels for all your printers. Here you can create a label to be everything you ever wanted it to be, with tex

Scott Myers

Product Manager

2 min read

Nov 20, 2019

Fall Product Update 2019

Anyone else feeling like fall went by too fast? It seems the window of time in which it is seasonally appropriate to go apple-picking has officially passed. Now we're in that in-between space when we debate whether or not we’re allowed to listen to Christmas music before Thanksgiving. Well, before you fully transition into the holiday season, take a minute to watch this video and learn how to make the most of Planning Center during this hectic time of year! Updating family

Planning Center

3 min read

Nov 19, 2019

Templates, Times, and Other Transformed Tools

We've improved all the popups for keeping track of service and rehearsal times, importing templates, using auto-schedule, and sending out plan emails to make these planning tasks go faster!

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

4 min read

Nov 04, 2019

Email Lists of People within Planning Center

Email has a reputation for being nothing more than a way for companies to send us their annoying marketing jargon, but we all know its more than that. Email can also be a launching pad for meaningful communication. Even messages sent in mass can be a way to refresh people with a word of encouragement, create opportunities for connection, or provide important information. You've always been able to send emails to large groups within your congregation from lists by connecting your Planning Cente

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Oct 29, 2019

Preview Custom Reports Live

Every feature we add or update in Planning Center People is an attempt to make life easier for you, which is why we recently launched a change so you can share Lists and have more control over what permissions List collaborators have. Now, if you use Lists on a regular basis, one of the possible next steps after List creation is to create a Report. The Report Editor has been a feature of Planning Center for years, but because it is so powerful, it can be a bit tricky to know exactly what visual

Geoffrey Lessel

Developer

2 min read

Oct 21, 2019

Share Lists and Collaborate

Reports—everyone wants them, which is why anyone can make a custom list in People. Making a list is a lot like putting together your own personal puzzle— piecing together just the right conditions to find exactly what you’re looking for! If you think puzzles are fun, and you have permissions across your church’s Planning Center accounts, there is a high chance you are the designated list-making expert at your church. And you might be happy to oblige, until you start getting follow-up requests..

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Oct 10, 2019

Create Specialized Forms with Conditional Fields

Have you ever asked “if this, then that” questions in your forms? Do you have a background in children's ministry? If yes, tell us a little bit about your experiences. If no, do you have any background working with children outside of ministry? This is an incredibly confusing way to ask questions. Not to mention a sure way to clutter your form with questions irrelevant to half your audience. Yes, you need the information, but people have to remember everything they learned about induc

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Oct 07, 2019

New Event Filters and Views for the Calendar

Everyone on your team is involved in event planning at some level. So everyone—from ministry leads to facilities staff—look at the event calendar for the details they need to play their role in the process. This is why the Resources calendar can be adjusted to show only the necessary details to whoever is viewing it. Recently, we updated event filters and event visibility to make the calendar more useful for anyone in charge of coordinating rooms and resources (so primarily facilities teams).

Evan Lemmons

Product Manager

2 min read

Oct 02, 2019

Use the tools you love alongside Planning Center

There are so many companies equipping churches with helpful tools, and some of them meet needs we don’t, fill spaces we can’t, or offer similar features in their own style. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to use these tools you rely on alongside Planning Center in your ministry. One of the ways we do this is by providing outside software companies with a platform to build their features into the framework of our products, so you can use them as you use Planning Center. In fac

Jeff Berg

2 min read

Sep 20, 2019

Dark Mode For Services Mobile Apps

Services version 4 for iOS and Android was just released, bringing with it an option to switch to a completely different look...dark mode!

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

2 min read

Sep 10, 2019

Easy Profile Editing for Households

Even the most organized People account can get messy because of incorrect profile information. An incomplete medical note during a check-in rush, a typo on an event form—these are the kinds of things that linger in your database. That is, until you're forced to update it after accidentally calling an outdated home phone (do these exist anymore?!) Editing People profiles is easy for admins, but you don't always know when someone needs to update their information, which is why your congregation c

Benson Lee

Product Manager

2 min read

Sep 06, 2019

Save Energy with Events2HVAC and Resources

It seems like most of the country is enduring a major heatwave, which means many of us are running the air conditioning 24/7. Thank goodness for central air, but in a large building—like a church, for example—it can get expensive! To help you keep your congregation cool, without blowing your entire budget on the energy bill, Events2HVAC developed an integration with Planning Center Resources so you can create custom HVAC schedules based on your event calendar! A New Way to Save Energy Even

Evan Lemmons

Product Manager

3 min read