Planning Center
Planning Center is an amazing online tool for Music Directors and Worship Leaders. It revolutionizes the way you organize and prepare for every service. With planning center you can create your music plan for each service with times, notes, items, songs, media and files. You can service times and rehearsal times. From there you can schedule your team members and enable them to see the full plan.
You store your own media and songs into Planning Center’s database. You can tag songs, media, and people to categorize them any way you wish. This enables you to quickly find an upbeat song in the Key of G with an Easter theme for example. You can do the same to find inspirational videos or to find a guitarist who also sings.
With Planning Center you can set each vocalist, instrumentalist, media team member, sound tech, etc, with their own permissions and they can login from any internet-connected device including their phone using Planning Center’s free iPhone, Android & iPad apps. You can send each team member a scheduling request or automated reminders through email or texts from which they can respond and accept or decline your request. Planning Center then tracks their response for you. If they decline you immediately get an email with links to schedule anyone else who fills that position.
Planning Center is a scheduler’s dream! Not only for the administrator but for every person invited to as a user. All users can keep track of their own schedule. When they sign in they are able to see their pending requests. Any events they have already accepted will show up on their “My Calendar” page. They are also able to block out dates ahead of time that they will not be available and provide an explanation if they wish. They can also set scheduling preferences for how often they would like to serve, i.e. once a month, every other week, etc. They can also sync their Planning Center calendar with their personal or Facebook calendars. As the Worship Leader and administrator of the Planning Center your will be able to see any block dates, scheduling conflicts, preferences conflicts or conflicts with other ministries for each individual as you work on the schedule.
I love that you can schedule weeks at a time. There is a matrix that allows you to load many plans in their own columns. You can then copy service items from week to week and easily schedule by dragging dropping people into the next column as well. You can also access your entire people, song, and media libraries to drag directly into your plans.
Planning center is quite intuitive. You can tell the program how many people you need for each position, i.e. 2 sopranos, 3 basses, 1 pianist, 3 saxaphones, etc. Choose which categories of people you would like scheduled, i.e. band, vocalists, and Planning Center fills in your schedule, prioritizing people who have not been scheduled in a while and avoiding all block outs and conflicts. This is a tremendous time saver!!
One of my favorite features of Planning Center is the ability to change keys for any chord chart! This is something that would take a moderate or even advanced musician anywhere from 30 minutes to hours to do. Now it can be done in a simple click! You can upload chord charts and lyrics to Planning Center. Then from there you can automatically get separate chord charts and lyric sheets in pdf form in the original key and or change it to any key you wish. You can even change the key of any MP3 recording!! Speaking of MP3 recordings, Planning Center makes if very easy to import lyrics & charts from SongSelect by CCLI or search & link to iTunes, AmazonMP3 & Youtube without ever leaving Planning Center. When you upload from Planning Center you can be certain the music you are uploading is protected and compliant with all CCLI regulations.
When a person “accepts” the request to be on a scheduled event that event then shows up in their calendar. When they click on that day the event plan comes up. From there they can click on the “Rehearse” tab. The rehearse tab streams audio or video from the songs and media that have been added to that plan. Users can also download a pdf book that includes all of their pdf files included in their plan, i.e. lyric sheets, chord charts, etc. Individual files can be found as attachments and accessed straight from the Plan Page as well.
If you really want to get tech savvy, Planning Center has a newly added feature called Planning Center Music Stand, for an additional fee. It allows you to connect directly to planningcenteronline.com on your iPad where you can select one of your dates, and your PDFs are loaded and ready to go. I have not had the privilege to use this yet. But I understand it gives each use the ability to do all kinds of wonderful things. For example, every user can access it (with the upgrade price) so any band member and vocalist view their music paper-free and change keys in a moments notice during rehearsals and live performance. They can even use a highlighter, pen or text tools feature to annotate their PDFs. Notes save to the server and you can even import notes made by other users.
You can link multiple Ipads so one person can turn everyone’s pages. You can change the order of pages, remove pages, or even duplicate pages in your pdf to compensate for repeats in your music which is really helpful when it comes to making changes in the “road map” of the music. There are other nice features like the ability access the last 10 plans even if you are not connected to the Internet as the Planning Center iPad app will save them for you. You can also zoom and crop any Pdf pages if the original is too small. If you really want to go crazy you can buy a clip that holds your iPad and attaches to a mic stand. From there you can attach the AirTurn pedal to your iPad so you can flip pages by pressing the foot pedal!
There are 4 package options to Planning Center that range in cost from $14/month to $99/month. These packages allow as many as 35 users with the “Lite” $14/month plan that includes 1 GB of storage up to an unlimited amount of users on the “Premium” plan with 15GB of storage. They offer helpful Webinars on the PlanningCenter.smartevents.com website.
After having researched this program for this project I am ecstatic that I soon I will be moving from a user to an administrator of Planning Center.
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