[This is a post from my worship leader's toolkit blog series. You can read the series intro and find links to the other posts here.]

Nothing in the last few years has changed the way that worship leaders plan services, manage resources and communicate with volunteers like Planning Center Online. If you are still using a mishmash of email, spreadsheets, sticky notes and Word documents to schedule volunteers, keep track of what songs you’re singing and plan your services, you owe it to yourself and to the ones you are leading to look at Planning Center. Their site is full of great tutorials and the guys behind the product are more than willing to help show you what it can do.

Here are a few things that Planning Center does really, really well:

• scheduling and communicating with volunteers in the way that best suits them – email, text, facebook, etc
• manage chord charts and lead sheets for your entire music library
• integrated mobile apps for iOS and Android
• lots, lots, lots more!

I’m coming up on five years (our first Sunday using it was January 21, 2007) as a Planning Center user and here are three (of many!) reasons why I love using it:

1. Planning Center is the easiest way to communicate with my volunteers
With one click, I can send an email to everyone scheduled to serve on any particular Sunday. If I make a change late in the week, if there is something I need them to know after rehearsal, if I want to bring a particular song or transition to their attention, Planning Center makes it very, very easy to do.

Sure I’ve got everyone’s email address but it’s not uncommon to have 12 or 15 or 20 people scheduled across our band, singers, projection and audio teams. One little click is definitely preferred over digging up a dozen or more email addresses.

2. Planning Center is the easiest way to plan and manage my service outlines
Sorting the song database to see which songs we haven’t sung recently, the matrix feature to see several outlines on one screen and the crazy easy drag-and-drop interface are all ways that Planning Center is a huge help for me as I plan services. Let me give you a heads up on one way that I love to use the matrix when I’m planning a series. Time for some screenshots!

First, I’ll lay out the weeks of a new series in the matrix. For this example, let’s use our Easter series coming up this March & April which will run for three Sundays, Good Friday and Easter Sunday:

Click the image to see it full-sizeNext I’ll add songs to the last Sunday of the series that I think may work thematically with the big idea of the whole series. At this point I’m just trying to build a pool of songs which may work during those Sundays. I’m not concerned yet with grouping songs together, building sets of songs or which songs will happen on which Sunday. I’m just gathering ideas. Here’s what it might look like after I’ve added some songs:

So now I’ve got my series laid out in a matrix, a pool of song ideas on the last Sunday. Usually I’ll end up with around 30 songs in my pool for a series which would run 4 to 6 weeks. From here, I can scan the list of songs and begin to see how song sets might work together and which songs may work with a theme on a particular Sunday. The beauty of the matrix is that I can drag and drop songs from right inside the matrix across the whole series. With just a few clicks and drags, my series can now look like this:

This alone is worth the price of admission and makes service planning really manageable whether you do it on your own or as part of a creative team.

3. Planning Center is constantly developing and improving
One of the hesitancies people have when they commit to an online tool (whether it’s free or paid) is future product development. Moving to any online resource is fine but the internet is littered with online tools which launched with a bang and have simply been left to rot or have been canned altogehter. We’ve all seen and used tools which were promising and practical but either didn’t develop the way we thought or have gone to the digital graveyard. Planning Center is not one of these.

All you need to do is have a quick look at the Planning Center blog to realize that development on this product is on-going in the right direction. With mobile apps, a complete redesign of the look, the iPad music stand interface and a long list of other improvements over the last few years, the team at Planning Center have shown they are committed to not only maintaining the status quo but pushing the limits on what the product is able to do and how the users are able to interact with it.

Here’s where you can find more info on Planning Center Online -
www.planningcenteronline.com
www.twitter.com/planningcenter
www.facebook.com/planningcenter

Do you use Planning Center at your church? Jump in the comments and let everyone know how you plan services at your church and what tools you are using to help make it happen.

So there you go, the first post in the worship leader’s toolkit blog series. Many more to come!

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Thanks for stopping by the blog. I'm currently on sabbatical this summer - you can read more about my sabbatical here: Personal Update - What's Next

Since I'm away from the blog I've decided to close comments. I love the interaction and discussion that happens with readers and since I'm not able to do that this summer, I'll be very much looking forward to that when I return in August.