Programming

Scheduling and Programming your Services

We constantly look to simplify programming of our services and scheduling of our volunteers in efficient- easy to use ways.  With hundreds of volunteers and four weekend services, communication and management become key to making everything work and flow together.  What we found to work well is an online web-based program called Planning Center Online.  Planning Center is [...]

We constantly look to simplify programming of our services and scheduling of our volunteers in efficient- easy to use ways.  With hundreds of volunteers and four weekend services, communication and management become key to making everything work and flow together.  What we found to work well is an online web-based program called Planning Center Online.  Planning Center is an extremely flexible and powerful tool that every worship leader, planning team, pastor, and just about anyone in church leadership can use to make their life easier every week.

Although there are way too many features to list here — just go to their website and watch some videos – I am going to mention a few that we have really liked. 

SERVICE PLANNING

Each week we plan our services on a “blank slate”.  We do not use set working formulas such as “Three songs, Announcements, Song, Message, Closing” and just fill in the blanks.  What we do is take the theme or concept of the weekend and brainstorm many ideas and plan a service that best tells the story in the most creative way.  This can include many songs, few songs, videos, dance, spoken word, specials, bumpers, etc… some which take weeks of planning to pull off.  We use Planning Center to place these brainstormed ideas in the specific service plan weeks in advance.   We also like how Planning Center handles and organizes the music.   Before, we had secure folders on our website that any band or choir member could get the chord charts and mp3s.   If they wanted to, they could download all the mp3s and charts and keep them on their computer — there was no control and we had to think about the legality issues with that as well.   With Planning Center, the band, choir, even tech team members only see the charts and mp3s for the weekend they are scheduled.  The worship leaders still have the large database of mp3s and charts to pull simply place into any weekend plan, but the only thing our volunteers see is the weekend they are on.  Plus you can set whether or not they can only stream the music (no music downloads) or download them as well.  

SCHEDULING

Like I mentioned earlier, we have hundreds of volunteers on a weekend and communication can be difficult.  Each volunteer is given a username and password on the Planning Center website and can do a variety of things such as look at the plan for the weekends they are scheduled and block out dates they cannot serve.  Most everything is done through email though so most volunteers rarely even know they are using the website.   As you plan your services, you can set what positions you need and schedule rehearsal times if needed each week.   Then you just fill in the blanks!  You see the last time a person served, if they had the weekend blocked off, or if they are serving in another ministry that weekend. You can set it up for a couple of ways–  The volunteer is scheduled and confirmed or the volunteer needs to Accept or Decline that weekend.    We just schedule them confirmed as hopefully they already blocked out the dates they cannot be on and then we don’t have to wait for them to click on “Accept”.     Planning Center has a powerful matrix tool that we use to show a whole months volunteers list and make it a pdf to send out to our volunteers.  One feature we do wish is that when we email a whole team through planning center, there is no option to add an attachment…. yet.  Speaking of email, one other thing is kinda annoying is that it automatically adds a “Hi (username)” at the beginning of any email you send.  This is only a problem when you send out an email to the whole team.  I have had volunteers think I am sending them a personal email about something when I was addressing the whole team.  I think once I was mentioning I need some extra help for our 5th Easter Service and a volunteer that was going to have surgery that week thought I was asking him to cover that service.  It would be nice to allow variables in the email such as Hi %firstname% or something like that.

I did not even touch some of the other features this program has… Take a look at their website and check it out…  If you would like an easy way to plan your services and schedule volunteers, I would highly recommend this program for your church.  It has made our lives easier and our volunteers feel more connected to what is going on each week.  I think they still have a 30 day trail that is free so pop your browsers to planningcenteronline.com