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:

• Visit the PCO website,
• Check out the online manual,
• Follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

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And as with most churches, there are a lot of events – all of them worth going to! For example:

• Prayer meetings,
• Carols under the Bridge,
• Annual Vestry Meeting,
• Women’s events,
• Anglicare Winter Appeal,
• Weekend Away,
• Connect Groups,
• PowerPoint training,
• Worship leader training,
• and many more!

As we prepare the calendar, three considerations come to mind:

1. We want to promote the events, without making church members feel overwhelmed by all that’s happening or obligated to come to everything,
2. There are some events that we’d really like people to prioritise, while others are good, but less essential, and
3. Some events are relevant to everyone (e.g. church weekend away), while other events are relevant to smaller groups (e.g. women’s event, or newcomers dinners).

I’ve been thinking about how to communicate these events most effectively, keeping the above considerations in mind, throughout the course of the year.

Here are four steps to a communications strategy for promoting events – I’d love your feedback on what your church does, and how this process could work better.

Step 1. I think the first step is to identify available communication channels. We’ve got quite a number of communications channels at Church by the Bridge:

• church news during services
• printed newsletter distributed at services
• printed quarterly calendar (example)
• weekly e-news
• website news
• website calendar
• Facebook page
• Facebook events
• Facebook advertising
• Event-based minisites (e.g. www.iheartkirribilli.com)
• Twitter account
• phone
• face-to-face
• Connect Groups
• meetings (i.e. communicating to people to a select group of people face-to-face)
• emails to all of church/groups within the church
• A6 postcards (mainly to promote events to people outside the church, e.g. I Heart Kirribilli)
• letterbox drops
• noticeboard (housing A3 posters)
• A1 posters (positioned in frame against the wall outside the church)
• community newsletter (example – though we haven’t printed a second edition!)
• community noticeboards

There are other communications channels available too – for example text messaging isn’t something we’ve explored, but I know of churches using FrontlineSMS for group messaging. Other channels that come to mind are online platforms like On The City, and video messaging (e.g. facilitated by TokBox).

Can you think of any other useful communication channels?

Step 2. Identify which audiences these communication channels engage most effectively with. For example, announcing an event in church will communicate with everyone who is in the service (and listening!), but miss anyone who wasn’t at church that week. Similarly, the church noticeboard, community newsletter, A1 posters, A6 posters are all primarily targeted at people who don’t currently attend the church.

Step 3. Categorise the events. The events can be categorised in (at least) six ways:

1. by type (e.g. training, church service, outreach),
2. by primary audience (i.e. church members, church members and local community)
3. by broad audience (e.g. men, women, everyone at church, local community, parents, Connect Leaders, etc), and
4. by importance – this category is to help members of the church if they need to decide between two events. For example, church services and the weekend away fit into the ‘essential’ category, whereas everyone doesn’t need to come to every outreach event that’s run throughout the year.
5. by regularity (e.g. weekly – church, quarterly, annually, one-off – weddings!)
6. by necessity (e.g. child protection training is essential for anyone working with kids)

By this stage, you’ve got a list of all events, communications channels, the audiences for each channel, and the six categorisations of each event. It’s sounding complex, but I think the clearer the planning, the better the communication to the people who need to hear about the events.

Step 4. At this point, I think a matrix would come in handy. I played around with several formats for this, and decided on a form. It’s rough and there’s information missing, but it should give you an idea what I’m thinking of. Check out the Calendar Communication Matrix. I’m thinking that events could then be entered into the form, one at a time, with each of the fields completed along the way. One of the many advantages of creating this form in Wufoo is that all the information can easily be exported out into other formats.

Once events had been entered, you could look at the spreadsheet and plan how each event will be communicated throughout the year, based on all the elements supplied in the form.

What do you think about this strategy? Would it be helpful? Is it far too complicated? How could it be improved?

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1. Define your Events – repeating daily, weekly, monthly, annually or at adhoc intervals
2. Define your Roles – linking them to events and setting their properties such as how many people for each role/event combination are required
3. Enter your People – setting their absences, preferred serving frequencies, and relationships, preferred events, and possible roles – or import them using the powerful import function
4. Create association preferences, such as who prefers (or must) be scheduled together or apart
5. Schedule them manually using the powerful and intuitive drag and drop interface
6. Finally hit the AutoFill key and watch as SmartRoster fills all the remaining vacant slots, and optimises the schedule according to your preferences
7. 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
8. 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
9. Create daily individualized email reminders of who is required in which duties
10. 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.

A 30-day trial is available for download, so if you’ve got a PC, check it out!

Time for some feedback – have you used it? What do you think? Try out the demo and share your feedback!

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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).

In terms of pricing, for a church of 250, the cost would be $112.50 per month. See a full list of the pricing structure.

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!

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While I’ve started looking at some tools (see 16 tools to build services and assist church musicians), the step before that and the one I’m keen to hear about today is one of processes.

At my church the basic rostering process goes something like this:

1. our administrator sends out a mega roster with the proposed roster for each service for the next three months. This includes all your regular church gathering activities – musicians, Bible readers, welcomers, prayers, service leaders etc.
2. people can respond to this mega roster, and indicate weeks that they will be unavailable to serve.
3. an update roster mega roster is distributed, and if you are unable to serve on a particular week, it’s up to you to arrange a swap.
4. each week, a reminder is sent out to the people on the roster for that week, including details of the structure of the service. The service leader might also phone the people serving.

This is a rough outline – it doesn’t always work like this, and different services operate in slightly different ways.

I’m keen to hear how your church does it, and what you think works well and not so well about the current processes.

Also, does your church post its rosters on the church website?

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1. The Twitter Guide Book. A comprehensive guide from Mashable.
2. How President Obama spends his time. If you missed it, this relates to ‘You’re busy, but are you productive?‘
3. 11 ways to use images poorly in slides. Some lessons for churches here?!
4. 100 online tools for non-profits. Which of these does your ministry use?
5. Why use royalty-free music. Good article, following the recent discussion on copyright and churches.

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1.    Plan for the future

Most paper diaries last for 12 months (although, in an effort to sell more merchandise, the Twilight book/movie machine recently released an 18-month calendar!). When the diary runs out, you need to spend hours adding birthdays, anniversaries, staff meetings, etc into the new diary. With an online calendar you can just copy and paste.

2.    Set up recurring events

Even better, if an event takes place on a regular schedule (e.g. a staff meeting each Monday from 9-11am), it takes just a couple of clicks to set-up an event to recur as often as you would like it to. This saves the effort of writing in the details of staff meetings to every week of your diary (or birthdays, Bible study or whatever else you do or need to remember on a regular basis).

3.    Change recurring events

Regardless of how well organised you are, plans change. The ease of creating recurring events also means that if the details of an event change (e.g. the day or time of staff meeting), you can easily change the details for all future events with just a couple of clicks (saving you the time of crossing out the old details, and then adding in the new details).

4.    Collaborate with others

At Church by the Bridge, the staff use Google Calendar to manage church-wide events and bookings for the church and other church buildings. This enables staff to easily see what rooms are being used in a week, and avoids (or tries to avoid) double-bookings. This saves multiple emails back and forth, e.g. “is anyone using the Hub next Monday night?”.

5.    Share specific calendars

It’s easy to decide who you would like to share calendars with. For example, you can create a calendar and make it public (i.e. share it with the world), or choose particular people who can view or edit it – e.g. the whole staff team or specific lay people.

6.    Embed calendars on a website

For a simple solution for displaying a calendar on your church website, create a calendar using an online calendar and embed the code for that calendar (this is provided for you) onto your website. There are also lots of ways you can customise how the calendar appears.

7.    Invite others to attend an event

When you create an event using an online calendar you can also invite others to attend. Just add their email address and they will receive an email with all the details of the event. Also, if they use an online calendar, it (usually) takes just one click to import the event you have sent them straight into their calendar. Through the online interface you can monitor who has accepted your invitation, and allow guests to invite others (if you wish!).

8.    View information in multiple formats (day, week, month, 7 days)

Paper diaries come in a fixed format – e.g. day to a page, week to a page. In an online calendar you can choose how you wish to view your event information. On Monday morning as you plan how to tackle the various events of the week, you might like to view events in a weekly format. When you are planning events across a year, you can change the view and look at your calendar a month at a time. Need to print off your diary for the next week? That’s easy too.

9.    Multiple calendars for different responsibilities

Sometimes it’s good to keep different parts of your life separate. With an online calendar it’s easy to create multiple calendars (each with a different colour to distinguish it) – e.g. for personal events, birthdays, anniversaries, church events, etc. You can also ‘switch’ calendars on and off – e.g. to show or hide particular calendars.

10.    Never forget again!

There’s no excuses for forgetting an event when you use an online calendar. When you create an event you can choose to receive a reminder as a pop-up or email, minutes, hours, days or weeks before the event.

Which calendar is right for you?

For this article, the online calendar solution I’ve had at the front of my mind (and have used the most) is Google Calendar. Other calendar options include Yahoo Calendar and 30 Boxes. More advanced solutions include FuseCal and Jiffle. However for my money (it’s free), Google Calendar is the simplest solution and includes the most common tools you will need to use.

Can you think of any other uses for online calendars?

Or have I missed the mark? Are there good reasons to keep your paper diary out of the bin?!

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1. set a time, send out the email, and wait for the emails to come back in from people who can’t make the time you suggested. This cycle can continue indefinitely!
2. make use of the free online tools that help you organise a time that will suit everyone.

I’ve been exploring some of the websites that assist in the process of finding a suitable meeting time. Whilst they have varying features, the basic premise of each is this:

1.    As the event (meeting) organiser, you select the dates and times that you are available to meet.
2.    You send details of the event (a link to a website) to the people you would like to attend the meeting.
3.    On the website, the invitees select their available times from the list of times you provided.
4.    You review the times people are available, and settle on a time for the meeting.
5.    You email the invitees the confirmed time.

This is a time-efficient and cost-effective (i.e. free) way of working out a meeting time. It avoids emails coming back and forth and frees you up to prepare for the meeting itself. Here are a couple of suggestions for websites you can use to arrange your meetings.

When is Good

It’s not the prettiest website to use, but it’s very easy to use. Here’s a screenshot of what an invitee would see when they click on the link to the event you send them via email:

As the event organiser you are given a link to view the results (i.e. the dates and times that work for your invitees).

Meeting Wizard

Meeting Wizard has more options that you can select from when creating a meeting. For instance you can select the duration of the meeting, specify if the meeting times are approximate or definite, and select the type of meeting (face to face, teleconference, social, etc). You can also decide if you would like the invitees to know the other people you have invited to attend, and if you would like them to be able to see the times that suit others (see screenshot below). You can even create a reminder to automatically be sent to invitees X days before the meeting.

Schedule Once and TimeBridge

One of the features I really like about both Schedule Once and TimeBridge is the ability for invitees to indicate preferred times. Not only can you give your invitees the option to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a proposed time, but they can also indicate if a particular time works best for them – creating a hierarchy of preferences, if you will.

Other options

A couple of other options to explore include:

• Meeting Puzzle
• Time to Meet
• Meet-O-Matic

For my money (or lack thereof), When is Good [link: http://whenisgood.net/] is the simplest and easiest solution. However, your meeting needs might be different to mine, so let me encourage you to explore these options and find a better way to arrive at a suitable meeting time.

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