Review: Planning Center Online

August 19, 2010 in Administration

As I’ve been looking at, and tweeting about tools to help with rostering, I keep hearing good things about Planning Center Online. Both PCO and Elvanto have the most professional (read: attractive and accessible) websites of the tools I’ve been reviewing, so I’ve been keen to check it out.

There are a lot of impressive features included in Planning Center Online. I could write about them, but this introductory video will give you a good feel for how PCO could be used to help streamline service planning and scheduling at your church:

Setting Up & Getting Started from Planning Center on Vimeo.

One of the key features that I’ve been looking for in a service building/roster application is the ability to easily schedule people to particular roles within a service. Currently this is a very time consuming process. PCO has some good tools to help with this process:

Scheduling & Emailing Your People from Planning Center on Vimeo.

For a system like this to work, it needs to be easy to use – not just for the administrators, but also for the people being rostered on! PCO has put together a video tutorial to help volunteers learn how to use it:

Volunteer Training from Planning Center on Vimeo.

As an iPhone user – and with an increasing number of people at church with iPhones – I like the fact that there is an iPhone app to access Planning Center Online, on the go. Plus (and this really is a luxury!), they’ve got a tool to enable you to use your iPhone or iPad as a music stand. You can also check out this app at the iTunes store.

In terms of pricing, there are four different accounts to choose from, starting at US$14 a month. For a church like mine, with 5 service types, we’d be looking at $US49 a month. Obviously it’s more expensive than an Excel spreadsheet, but there could be significant time savings if this were adopted and used to its full capacity. A free, 30-day trial is offered to give you a taste of the product.

This really does look like an impressive product.

If you use Planning Center Online I’d be keen (and so would other readers) to hear of your experience.

For more information you can:

  • Sam C

    We’ve started using it at UNSW. Still in the early stages – takes a bit of training to get used to – but mostly working.

  • http://midwaychurch.com Sarah

    We started using Planning Center here at our church around 2 years ago… I give it the highest recommendation! We pay $49 a month and it is worth every penny. It has helped us really organize our Worship Ministry. Two thumbs up!

  • http://josh.st/ Josh

    We use it at St. Stephens Anglican Newtown/Erskineville Village Anglican Church – it’s pretty effective at organising EVERYTHING, though we’re not using it to its full potential for most of our services. Some more than others, of course – the 7pm service at Newtown is probably the heaviest user with a younger (tech-saavier?) demographic in a larger congregation.

    I’m part of a 10am church plant to Erskineville and while we still find it effective (I love being able to check what’s up next with PCO mobile app, as well as how easy it is to make last-minute changes by dragging/dropping service order), there’ve been a few issues with it. The biggest challenge has been that, for a new, small church like ours (~30 core people) the level of organisation and abstraction that PCO gives can actually be a bit of a hindrance.

    This might sound obvious, but we have use of it as a part of the larger St Stephens organisation so we weren’t really assessing it independently. It remains very useful for scheduling music, though we still change this last-minute relatively often, and to a lesser extent bible readings – everything beyond this, though (prayers, kids spot/sunday school, morning tea, etc.) either doesn’t significantly benefit from the tool or is organised in parallel somehow.

    We’ve also experienced some email deliverability issues for people getting notifications they’re scheduled for something. Not sure how widespread this is, though. What *would* be nice is the ability to RSVP directly from the email program (i.e. reply “accept” or “decline”)

    For larger churches, that email issue notwithstanding, this is a pretty sweet program that really serves to tighten up schedules (in a positive, no-awkward-gaps way) and get buy-in across different people involved in a meeting.

    Smaller churches will see some benefit, but it really depends on the people. Beyond a certain point it can just end up feeling impersonal, even if it’s easier to use and theoretically a better tool for all.

  • Duncan robinson

    Hey Steve,

    We use it for 2 Sunday services, celebrate recovery and FPU along with a bunch of other services, we use the $49 plan and love it.