Planning Center Online
Besides the amazing teaching and inspiration at Catalyst “Reverb” this year, the best thing that came out of the trip was learning about Planning Center Online. Everyone had booths in the lobby, and I of course collected all the swag that my arms could carry. The idea of Planning Center intrigued me from the beginning. To schedule our volunteers in the Communications Ministry at CBC we had been using www.cbcmediasite.com running a wordpress blog and inserting the weekend schedule as a blog post. It was working ok, but the biggest problem was keeping track of our volunteer’s crazy schedules. We also were creating tech sheets out of a Word document template and sharing them on Google Docs. So the idea of being able to do all that we wanted and more within one web based interface was very appealing. I signed up for a free account as soon as I got back to the hotel, and by the time I was back in San Antonio I knew I had to convince Betsy that this was the way for us to go. It has been an invaluable tool to us in the Communications Ministry since that time.
After we saw what PCO was capable of I attempted to pass on the love to both the music department and the youth department, but despite my best attempts it hasn’t caught fire with either group yet. I think, however, that that is about to change. I’m having a meeting this coming Tuesday with Scott (IT guy at CBC) and the music people to discuss the advantages of PCO. Currently I get 3 different emails from the music department from 3 different people. On Mondays we get the order of service from Ray, then on Wed or Thurs Ron sends camera cues and Lorraine sends the roster for both praise team and orchestra. I really hope the meeting goes well and that I can convince them of the benefits of everything being in one place and available to everyone at all times (not to mention the ability to include pdfs and mp3s).
I would be so excited if we actually have this in place where we can all communicate together… maybe then we could actually get ahead and plan some new things for our services (gasp!).
If you work on any aspect of a church service I strongly recommend that you check out Planning Center.