Wow! The last several years have been awesome for us! We have seen a huge number of churches saving tons of time and money using our products to plan and schedule their worship, children’s, and youth services around the world. Our passion is to help churches spend less time administering and more time ministering. With that in mind, we’d like to announce our next product: Smart Events!
While Planning Center Online is centered around services, Smart Events is centered around events like Camps, Conferences and Retreats.
Picture this:
You are having a High School Camp. In Smart Events you will be able to schedule each day’s activities and any prior meetings. You will also be able to create online registration forms, set up what pricing options will be available, create add-on packages, and ask an unlimited amount of customized questions. We also have many more exciting planning features to include after the initial release.
Now a parent is coming in to register their child for your camp. You enter in their information (or they do it via the website) and select what price and options they need. The site shows you that you need a health and rental form from them, but instead of having them fill out the form it is already filled out automatically by the Smart Events website using their registration information. So, all they have to do is sign the forms and give them back to you. It also automatically puts the kids in the correct rooms and busses with their friends.
Please check out our Coming Soon page at SmartEvents.com and sign up to be notified when we enter our beta testing phase.
But what about Planning Center?
We are still hard at work on adding some incredible new features and usability enhancements to Planning Center Online which we will be launching over the next couple of months. We actually released a small but pretty cool update yesterday!
Thanks!
Jeff Berg
Owner/Developer
Ministry Centered Technologies
Click the date to sign up for that specific day. We’ll see you there!
Around three weeks ago we enhanced the mobile version of Planning Center with the ability to schedule and email people. Now we’re proud to announce that we just updated our mobile site to include the ability to add and edit items, songs & headers!
Additionaly, each user can easily change their status from the mobile site as well. Status is indicated in a color-coded bar at the top of the flow, and can be changed independently for each position they are scheduled.
We apologize to our Blackberry users, but because the Blackeberry’s internet browser is not built on WebKit (like iPhone, Android & Pre), it is much more difficult to program and as a result, the Blackberry will still be read-only. Though our Blackberry users are very important to us, we discovered that only 2% of our mobile users use the Blackberry, but don’t worry- we aren’t giving up! We are continuing to find ways to improve the use of PCO on your Blackberry so stay tuned for any break-throughs and updates we may have in the future.
Until now, users were only able to block out dates a whole day at a time. We realized this did not meet everyone’s needs, especially since there are some weekend services that have something happening in the morning and evening. So now, you are able to block out your dates one hour at a time. As a result, when a scheduler is scheduling and conflicts come up, they will only show as a conflict if their block-out time actually conflicts with the plan time and/or rehearsal time. The new dialog box will look like the picture on the right, and it’s rather self-explanatory. Just choose the date/s and time/s you want to block out. It’s as easy as that!
You can now specify that scheduled viewers should see the full plan, the song list, or their schedule only. The full plan is how it’s always been. The song list lets them view the plan, but omits any non-song items and only shows headers and songs in the flow. The schedule only option doesn’t even let them go to plan view, but takes them to the “my schedule” page which just shows them the plan dates, times, and positions they’ve been scheduled for. This is great way to simplify the experience for your users who don’t need to see plan details. You can see what the schedule view looks like by clicking “my schedule” underneath the calendar on the main plans page.
