Planning Center News

  • By ministrycentered

Planning Center Update: Text Messaging, AmazonMP3 and a lot of prettiness

Well, it is that time again. We are about to deploy an update to our flagship product Planning Center Online and we are so excited to get this update to you. We have been really busy and already have some great plans for the next version of Planning Center which should be out after the 1st of the year.

Also, if you haven’t heard we are growing and we have just created a new position that we need to fill, you can find out more about that on this blog post.

Text Messaging

We have been asked several times for a way to do text-messaging and there just didn’t seem to be a good way to reliably text-message users for awhile. E-mail to sms providers are free but are not reliable and most pay-gateways are too expensive, especially with the amount of text-messages we will be sending out. But a couple of months ago we found the service called TextMarks.com and I mentioned this service to our customers in the forum and the response was very positive.

New “Schedule” View

Another requested feature was a Schedule view for people to see everything that you are scheduled for. This new screen will show all plans you have been scheduled for, any upcoming times you are scheduled for & will include the “My Calendar” in the sidebar. All Scheduled Viewers will be directed to this page by default, and other users can click “my schedule” under their calendar on the main plans page.

Volunteer Video Tutorial

We have added a new Volunteer Video tutorial to help your volunteers understand the aspects of Planning Center Online that they have access to. This video tutorial is very quick and simple. It can also be downloaded and burned to a DVD if you wish to show it to your volunteers on a projector. You can view this video on Vimeo, this video will also be available on the Planning Center Website at launch.

Linking to AmazonMP3

Trying to stay copyright compliant while also making sure your teams are well rehearsed is a huge obstacle nowadays. To help provide you with a solution to this obstacle we have made it very simple to link to MP3s on Amazon’s MP3 store, so your users can download them legally. Click the new “link to AmazonMP3″ button in a Song Arrangement Attachment box, and Planning Center will look up your song in Amazon’s store for you to add the link to your song arrangement with one click.

New Custom Properties Editor

With Planning Center getting used by more and more ministries in a church we have some churches with more than 50 property options which was making it impossible to manage. So we worked really hard to create a new interface that will show you what properties someone has and easily add new properties to a person. We are really happy with this new interface and we hope you are too.

Miscellaneous

  • Added Birth & Aniversary Dates
  • Added Notes To People & Plan People records
  • Added check/uncheck all to Plan E-mail dialog
  • Added arrows to calendar under “My Calendar” to allow you to view any month
  • Accounts that have been disabled will not show up by default in the people list
  • Added an “Alternate Owner” that you can assign to another person who then will be able to update your payment information and receive the payment receipts
  • Ability for us to send out notifications to users via a notification bar at the top of the page
  • Ability to copy a plan to a template and copy a template to another ministry
  • Added stock matrix reports to everyone’s matrix
  • Added Church’s Logo To Standard Plan Print Out
  • Lots of clean-up of user interface

55 comments

worship1 #permalink

Sounds great! Can’t wait.

Jeff Reed #permalink

AWESOME!!! Love the Video and the Scheduling interface. Amazon will be big for you as well (do you get any commission on sales? I hope so!)

Keep up the good work. jreed

kenboer #permalink

This is excellent. Thank you for all your work on it!

ministrycentered #permalink

Thanks for the comments…that was fast!!!

Eddy #permalink

Looks great, will the iphone app be updated as well?

tom #permalink

very cool…taking something great and making it better. you guys rock! have made my life (and my colleagues lives) so much easier.

ministrycentered #permalink

The iPhone app will only be slightly updated to support any new fields we have added to PCO, editing is still a little while off but is still on our short list.

Jeff Seymour #permalink

Yes!

Daniel Mosley #permalink

While this update sounds awesome, I am really looking forward to editing capabilities from the iPhone. I wasn’t positive you guys were headed in that direction. Great to hear that its on the short list.

Thanks for all you guys are doing to help us better serve our local church.

Jim Drake #permalink

Can’t wait… I’m still wearing my t-shirt!

AllPraise Ministries #permalink

Awesome stuff! Looking forward to the updates. Still wish there was an easy way to go from “add a song” to the plan, to the “add song” to the database function, and then back to the same plan I was working on. Currently, one must go back out and click on the plan date.

Paul J. #permalink

Why no automatic iTunes link? Certainly the more popular source…

David Trigueros #permalink

awesome, love it, love it.

ministrycentered #permalink

@AllPraise: Actually if you go into a plan and then click “Add A Song” and then click the “Add a song” button in the dialog. Fill out all the fields (or use the CCLI import) and then click create, then upload any files you might have and then save the song it will take you back to the plan you were on

@Paul: We really looked into the choices and here are the primary reasons we choose AmazonMP3.
1.) They sell 100% DRM-Free music, which means their music will play on any computer & any MP3 player
2.) You do not have to have any software installed to use it, iTunes would have to be installed on all of your volunteers machines who want to use the iTunes link
3.) Amazon has a programming interface that I can program against, iTunes does not. The programming interface is what allows for the seamless integration into Planning Center.

I hope this answers your questions.

Thanks!

Jeff Berg
Owner/Developer
Ministry Centered Technologies

Stephen Canfield #permalink

Love the new updates…on thing though, I need to be able to check whether text messaging is available for certain people. The reason some of them want text messages is so they can avoid going to planning center, so I don’t want to force them to log in and navigate around then click the text message option. As an administrator I want to be able to make that change for them and should have control over that. Otherwise, things are great!

Tom #permalink

Great work! when is the release scheduled? The single view of only currently scheduled, upcoming and pending events is awesome. As to the iTunes question, I want to thank you for not being the i-Everything clones as some of us don’t want to load new software on our PC’s :) .

As for showing peoples email in this comment section, I beleive that should be up to the user and not made available by default when leaving questions or comments.

Thanks
Tom

Emily Klophaus #permalink

Thanks so much! This is only our second month using it, but our people love it. The updates you’ve done have cleaned it up even more. I’m also excited about the new AmazonMP3 option. Thanks for all your work!

Emily #permalink

I LOVE the upgrades. Awesome.

Scott Avey #permalink

Thanks for all you guys do: pursuing excellence with the end user in mind.

Planning Center ROCKS! at A Day in the Life of a Lemon #permalink

[...] go on and on but you have to check it out.  They just made some more updates today. Read about it here.  My favorite is text messaging! AH [...]

ministrycentered #permalink

@Stephen: We chose to only allow people enable their own text-messaging so that they are not caught off guard when they receive the subscription text messages. We want to really respect this because most people pay for text messages individually, but that being said we will talk about maybe allowing either the account owner or administrators the ability to enable text-messaging for users.

@Tom: Thanks! This release was released September 1 and all accounts were automatically upgraded.

@Tom: When you supply your e-mail address, this is just for us internally. It is not displayed anywhere on the site to the public.

Josh Martin #permalink

Thanks so much! I’ve been using textmarks for months now to send out reminders to my students in the band. It sends out the songs we are playing and a quick reminder. So glad you guys integrated it into planning center!

~JOSh-X #permalink

@3amJosh How did you make Textmarks send out the songs and a reminder?

Ken Green #permalink

I haven’t checked out the new stuff yet, but really appreciate the service. It really has changed (in a good way) the way we organize our ministry. One more feature that would be perfect: Can you drive around to everybody’s house and make sure they show up for rehearsal? Thanks again, I love it!

David Woll #permalink

I really appreciate all the updates you put into PCO. I was laughing because if you want to add a person, the header says, “Create New Person.” Now if you edit someone’s information, it says at the bottom, “Save Person.” I’m feeling very powerful…maybe too powerful (sinister laughter).

ministrycentered #permalink

@david: LOL!!!!

Steve Ray #permalink

Wow! TextMarks.com! Too cool. I just sent an email to my worship team telling them I was going to be using TextMarks with them. You just made my job easier!
Thanks,
-sray

Ben Moreno #permalink

Thanks for the update. I like the text msg feature. I do agree with some of the other comments and wish that you had some editing capabilities on the iphone but I can wait.

Thanks again.

Aaron #permalink

Excellent… some great updates!

Is there decent forum for future suggestions? I would love to be able to see all of my people schedules laid out together..I know for each day I can see but like if I wanted to see, say all the drummers unavailable dates for a month on a calendar that could be done easier… I had been using google calendar in the past if planning center had something similar that would be so sweet….
Either way, excellent stuff..keep up the good work!

Jeff Peckham #permalink

I set my account to use the text feature, but have yet to receive one through the service. Do you have to setup an account with the texting service?

Jason Morris #permalink

You guys are life savers!!!!
Any thoughts on the Live function going on the iPhone? I would LOVE to time the service from my iPhone!
Love what you guys are doing!!!

Patty Grimm #permalink

Love the new changes! When I checked Schedule View for myself, it only shows me the weeks I have accepted. Should it show all the weeks I am scheduled, but have not accepted?
Keep up the good work, you guys are life savers!

Jared #permalink

Awesome, good work! But, it’s “prettiness”, not “prettyness”….just FYI. :)

ministrycentered #permalink

@Aaron: If you go to “My Calendar” and then click on the month name you can see a calendar with all the block out dates on it.

@Jeff Peckham: When you enable text messaging you should get a message asking you to subscribe to the keyword PlanningCenter. Once you are subscribed you will get all the text messages. If you did not get this please make sure your carrier is supported by TextMarks: http://www.textmarks.com/info/help/

@Jason: This is really hard to make work since the iPhone does not support flash which Planning Center Live relies on, I have some ideas on how to make it work but it would take making a new architecture for the whole feature.

@Patty: The reason those are not showing up is probably because the e-mail notification has not been sent. ;-)

@Jared: Uhhh…opps, thanks for that. Fixed!

Brian #permalink

When is the blackberry interface coming…..? I know everyone loves the iphone but the BB is still the defacto standard across the industry.

Thanks for all of the great response to updates and quirks! You have been a pleasure to work with and have saved us countless hours of extra work!

Mark #permalink

Why does the program show a conflict if someone is scheduled for a different event on the same day? I need to be able to schedule multiple events for one day using some of the same people without conflicts.

ministrycentered #permalink

@Brian: It is in the works, I hope to get it out when we do editing for the iPhone

@Mark: We will show a conflict if they are scheduled on the same day because we feel this important information to know so you don’t overload your staff. In the next release you will be able to make it so that it only find conflicts if they are within an hour of each other.

ministrycentered #permalink

@Mark: Also, the conflicts are a warning messages and will not prevent you from scheduling someone.

Top Posts « WordPress.com #permalink

[...] Planning Center Update: Text Messaging, AmazonMP3 and a lot of prettiness Well, it is that time again. We are about to deploy an update to our flagship product Planning Center Online and we are [...] [...]

Darien Gabriel #permalink

T-shirt?! I want one!

Will you all be at Catalyst? I hope to meet you there!

Rich Kirkpatrick #permalink

I heart PCO!!

The text thing is cool. I will see how many of our peeps will use that.

Eric #permalink

I may be a moron, but I can’t figure out how to do the text messaging thing…there is no option for it under my people…

ministrycentered #permalink

@Eric: Each person has to login to Planning Center Online to enable their own text-messaging. We do this because most people still pay per-message on their mobile phones and we don’t want people getting text-messages that they aren’t anticipating.

Darren #permalink

Thanks for all your personal attention and response to user input. I’m looking forward to seeing how well the text messaging is integrated. I’m hoping this may be a potential option for those in our ministry who don’t have regular access to a computer or computer skills to at least be able to get a notification about our next scheduled date and be able to respond if they are available.

In line with mobile access, for NON-iPhone users, is there a way to make the download links available for mobile windows-based browsers? I’m using Windows Mobile 6.0 and Internet Explorer as well as beta testing SkyFire, and while I could navigate the site, I couldn’t download the mp3 file I needed – upon clicking the link, the page would simply reload or there would be no response at all.

Thanks again for a GREAT tool!

Kelly #permalink

I love the updates BUT the “ALL” pages tabs are gone again from the Songs and People tabs… Those of us with large teams and a few hundred songs REALLY appreciated the “ALL” tab…
Can we have it back????

ministrycentered #permalink

@Kelly Thanks for pointing this out, sorry about that. This was an oversight, I have added it back.

Kevin Cook #permalink

Seriously PC Team, I’m gonna leave you guys something in my will! This update rocks!

Thank you for working hard, listening to our needs and doing your very best to help us do ours. We love and pray for you and your ministry to churches everywhere.

Soli Deo Gloria,

KevCo

Eddy #permalink

Will we be able to listen to the songs via the iPhone app in future updates?

Adam #permalink

Thanks guys…this is great!

One thing…*BLACKberry*(clearing throat)

Anything on the horizon for non iphone peeps? I love the site and being able to edit from an iphone or a blackberry app would be awesome.

Thanks guys…you seriously are saving me from hiring another assistant.

ET #permalink

I just tried out the text messaging and it works pretty good. Only one thing…. I was hoping people would be able to ‘accept’ or ‘decline’ from the text message reply. That would really be the icing on the cake. Is this in the works or is it even feasible. If so, would be a great feature because right now the text only notifies but does not give you ability to respond without logging into website.

Good work on the site and I really think you guys are doing a great job!

bandmom #permalink

Just a quick vote in favor of Amazon.com. Nice pick!! Why anyone would continue buying music with DRM is beyond me. I can’t tell you how many times members of our worship team have uploaded MP3s that no one else can use b/c of iTunes (or Real) DRM. So far, Amazon has never failed to have the worship music we want or need. I’m not sure how the other companies can stand up to Amazon, except for the sheer abundance of marketing the other companies do. The direct download (with no special software) feature is icing on the cake, and very sweet icing indeed. All the way around, definitely the way to go. Props to PCO for picking a winner!!

Melissa S #permalink

Being in Australia, we can’t wait to use the text messaging function. Enjoying all the other fantastic stuff though.

Just a question, is there a possibility of us being able to run on our local time? At the moment we’re on US time which is ‘a few’ hours behind, just wondering that’s all.

You’re doing a great job, love the Planner!

ministrycentered #permalink

@melissa Could you e-mail support with some more details on this? Thanks!

Bill King #permalink

I cannot find the new “link to AmazonMP3″ button in a Song Arrangement Attachment box. Am I looking in the wrong place? (apparently!) :)

ministrycentered #permalink

@Bill: You need to go into the arrangement and it should be in the sidebar. Please e-mail if you have any questions.