Church Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) provides a great service to the church.
However, I find the requirements for the copyright and reproduction licences very confusing. Am I alone here?!
I want to ensure that my church is doing the right thing and abiding by the terms of the licence, but try as I may, I’ve struggled to get my head around exactly what this looks like in practice. Perhaps this says more about me and my capacity to understand complex things!
That said, I wanted to find a way to articulate in simple terms, what we as a church should be doing and reporting on, to comply with the requirements.
To this end, I put together a brief guide to copyright for my church. I then ran it past CCLI to ensure that what I had put together was correct.
This guide is for my (Australian) church. The way your church uses music is most likely different, so some of the specifics won’t be relevant to your church.
If your church is outside Australia, the copyright requirements in your country will likely be different.
This guide was developed with the best of intentions, but if anything is incorrect, I will happily and promptly change it.
Perhaps you are better able to understand church copyright.
If not, I share this document with a view to helping other churches produce something similar, to make it easier for all involved to comply with the requirements, and honour those who serve us with their musical gifts.
The one aspect that I, and other ‘rosterers’ find frustrating with Planning Center Online is this: it’s not possible for people to arrange a swap.
When people are scheduled on to serve, they receive an email and within the email can either accept or decline the serving request.
Under our previous rostering system (the ubiquitous Excel spreadsheet), people were expected to find a replacement when they couldn’t serve. Since using Planning Center Online, it falls back on the rosterer to find a replacement.
People finding their own replacements isn’t risk-free, for example:
the rosterer often doesn’t know if a replacement has been arranged, and
the replacement may not be suitable for the task, or particularly reliable (it’s not good finding a replacement if they don’t turn up!).
However, it would be great if Bible readers could easily swap with other Bible readers, and welcoming teams swap with other welcoming teams.
That’s my one request for improvement – I’ll leave it with the great team at Planning Center Online who continue to roll-out great updates on a regular basis. Thanks!
Last year I started to look for ways of improving the rostering system at my church. With 5 services (at that time) and growing, rostering was becoming a challenge. I began to review a range of different rostering tools to streamline our rostering – you can see the reviews here.
In the end, we decided on Planning Center Online (PCO) and haven’t looked back. PCO is a tool to enable you to:
roster people on to serve
create service schedules (map out what happens when)
manage the songs you sing and assist musicians as they practice
You can watch the guided tour below, or on the PCO website:
The larger a church gets, the less it can rely on an Excel spreadsheet to manage rosters. It should be noted that PCO takes some time to set-up, and some time to get used to. It’s also a shift in how many churches (mine included) do rosters. This presents some challenges that I might explore in another post at a later date.
However, taking into consideration all of the features, PCO is a tool that fundamentally makes life easier for service administrators and musicians, and the church as a whole.
In no particular order, here’s 10 reasons why I recommend Planning Center Online:
1. It makes it easier to find people to serve in specific roles. PCO allows you to create custom properties, and assign these properties to people. For example, the properties ‘Bible reading’, ‘Preaching’, ‘Pre-Service Prayer’, ‘Barista’ and more are assigned to me. This means that come rostering time, the service administrator can easily see who is available, and with the necessary skills/willingness, to serve in a particular role.
2. It makes it easier to roster people to serve at services. PCO allows you to create templates of services (for example, Saturday night service – Week 1). This enables you to set-up the unchanging elements and order of service, and the number of people required to serve. You can then apply that template to a particular week, and assign people to the roles required, according to the custom properties for each person.
3. It makes it easier for members to indicate when they won’t be at church. When a member logs-in to PCO, they can select ‘block-out dates’ – dates they won’t be at church. This is very helpful when it comes time to prepare the rosters, as the service administrators can easily see that they won’t be available on a particular weekend.
In the past, members could send an email indicating the dates you were unavailable. Come roster time however, it was a fiddly task to cross-check each service each week, against the different dates people were unavailable. Now, if the service administrator tries to roster a member on when they’ve selected block-out dates, a conflict appears (see below), informing them that they’re not available.
4. It makes it easier to create a service schedule (run sheet). By simply dragging and dropping, elements within a service can be easily arranged. Move the Bible reading to earlier in the service. Drop songs in. Indicate when prayer will happen. Then, when a member is rostered on to serve, they can see when in the service they are ‘on’ – for example, when they will be praying, giving an announcement, or presenting the kid’s talk. You can indicate how long each element should take too – to ensure that the service doesn’t have more elements than time allows. It also makes it easier to print this out as a run sheet, or to give to the person who prepares the slides.
5. It helps musicians to practice and prepare. PCO is a very helpful resource for our music teams. PCO makes it possible for musicians to download the chord charts, sheet music etc., and view videos and audio files for every song we sing at church. Not only can musicians see when they are rostered on, they can see what songs we’re singing at church on these weeks, and access the resources (chord charts, sheet music, etc.) for these songs. This allows our musicians to rehearse in advance (not just in the hours before the service), and to practice new songs from home.
6. It makes it easier to find songs to sing. Not only do musicians have access to songs in advance, so do service administrators. Songs can have custom properties applied (e.g. themes), so you can find songs relevant to the sermon for that week (e.g. resurrection).
7. It makes it easier to remember when you’re serving. If you use an electronic calendar (e.g. Outlook or iCal), you can sync the dates you are serving to this calendar. In this way, you can automatically view the dates you are serving on your calendar.
You can also set-up email reminder to be sent out automatically in the days before the service each week, so you can be reminded that you’re reading the Bible this weekend (in case you’d forgotten!).
8. Rostering can be managed by individual ministry leaders. PCO enables individual ministry leaders to manage their own rosters and be updated when people are unavailable to serve. This means that welcome team leaders, or Kids Church coordinators can create their own rosters, and see the availability of people on a given weekend, and how else they might be rostered on to serve. As a church, we’re still getting familiar with PCO and so haven’t set this functionality up yet, but we intend to make it available in the future.
9. It makes it easier to spot the gaps. When people either accept or decline rostered serving (and they can do this easily within an email you send them), you can see this in the plan (and you’ll get an email notification too). This makes it easy to see what gaps exist that need filling. The custom properties also means that with two clicks, you can easily ask someone else to do PowerPoint, or sing, or bring morning tea, if the person you originally asked is unavailable.
10. The support is excellent. I don’t think I’ve ever waited more than 12 hours (certainly never more than 24 hours) to receive a response to a question I’ve had. I can think of very few organisations that take support so seriously. Not only is the email support excellent, but they are constantly improving PCO with new features and improvements constantly being added. It seems that each time I log-in I can do something that I couldn’t do before! They provide details on these updates on their blog, and notifications when you log-in.
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:
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:
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:
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.
I don’t have a PC so I can’t trial this application out. However, according to its website, SmartRoster allows you to:
Define your Events – repeating daily, weekly, monthly, annually or at adhoc intervals
Define your Roles – linking them to events and setting their properties such as how many people for each role/event combination are required
Enter your People – setting their absences, preferred serving frequencies, and relationships, preferred events, and possible roles – or import them using the powerful import function
Create association preferences, such as who prefers (or must) be scheduled together or apart
Schedule them manually using the powerful and intuitive drag and drop interface
Finally hit the AutoFill key and watch as SmartRoster fills all the remaining vacant slots, and optimises the schedule according to your preferences
Create reports using many different built-in formats, using SmartRoster’s own viewer to see the output before printing, exporting to MS Word®, adobe pdf format (great forpublishing on your web site), or even as tab-delimited data into virtually any other program
Distribute your reports via email – SmartRoster was the first such program to be able to automatically create personalised reports (with a person’s name highlighted) and forward to each person’s email address
Create daily individualized email reminders of who is required in which duties
Automatically share your data over a LAN or by internet-connected PCs at completely different locations – even across the world!
In terms of pricing, there are numerous pricing options, but to give you an idea, a 5-user pack is AU$295.
The first thing you notice about OnlineRostering.com (OR) is that the font size is very small. When it’s difficult to view a website, this isn’t a good start!
However, the functionality of OR is promising – check out the list of features on the OR website. The process within OR in a nutshell is:
create services (e.g. Sunday at 9.45am),
create teams (e.g. worship leaders),
allocate teams to services,
create positions within teams (e.g. female worship leader),
add team members (people) to teams,
assign these people to positions within the teams,
roster the teams of people to serve at particular dates,
activate the roster.
It sounds a bit complex, doesn’t it? However, to give it the benefit of the doubt, all new processes take time to learn, and I’ve only spent a short amount of time looking around.
Some of the benefits of this system include:
people can log-in and see when they’re rostered on to serve,
reminders can be automatically sent out,
people can indicate when they’re unavailable to serve and this is made clear within the system (i.e. avoid confusion and complex note-taking),
you can assign leaders of teams to manage their own teams (if you so desire).
You can access a demo, and check it out for yourself.
My verdict (after admittedly a relatively short trial) is that OR includes some very useful functionality, that might be a tad complex for my church to administer – though for larger churches and those with complex structures, the administrative savings in this set-up could make it worthwhile. Also, the font small enough to make it difficult to use on a regular basis. Font size is a small issue, but for regular use, it would become tiresome. Clearly, a lot of work has gone into this program, and the developers have done a great job. Thanks for your service of the kingdom in producing this application!
Time for some feedback – have you used it? What do you think? Try out the demo and share your feedback!
