Ministry Centered Technologies

Hello everyone,

Ok, ok, I know. I am late, but I’ve got a good excuse. Truth be told we have some things that we wanted to include in this e-mail, but just hadn’t finished yet. Also, it is hard to get this e-mail done in the middle of the week. So in learning from our experience we will now be sending out the Planning Center update every other Friday instead of every other Tuesday.

Downloadable tutorials

Some of you knew that this was coming, so here it is. We have recorded tutorials highlighting specific features of Planning Center. Our first batch of tutorials include:

• How To Schedule People
• How To Use The Matrix
• How To Import A Song From CCLI
• How To Use Custom Song Properties
• How To Use Song Arrangements

You can find all of these tutorials on our website at: http://www.ministrycentered.com/planning_center/home/tutorials

Song Keys Update

Based on a lot of feedback we got from our users, we have reworked how you use Song Keys. You now have the ability to specify Major or Minor keys and you can also specify an ending key. We hope that this will help out those of you who were needing to be more specific in the information that you were storing in Planning Center.

Address & Phone Number Types

For all of you administrators out there you can now add and remove different address & phone number types so that you can customize Planning Center to your church. Administrators can find this if they click on the “my account” link in the top right hand side of their screen after they log in.

Dragging People In The Matrix

The Matrix has become one of those great features that you didn’t know you needed, and the more we add to it the more we are excited to use it in our own churches. Well, last week we added the ability to drag and drop people between different plans & positions. There is a tutorial highlighting this new feature that also gives an overview of the matrix.

I’m excited for you to use these new features and look forward to serving you as you plan your worship services.

In Him,

Jeff Berg
Developer/Owner
Ministry Centered Technologies

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the first Planning Center Update. Since try to do a good size update to Planning Center every two weeks we decided that it would be good to try to communicate all of the changes and new features that have happened. So every other Tuesday you will receive a new issue of the Planning Center Update. Right now the owner of each Planning Center account will get the update, but in the future we want to allow you to subscribe and unsubscribe other people in your organization. Now onto this weeks Planning Center Update!

Wow! This last month has been fun yet hectic. From the many conferences to the numberous features we added to Planning Center before it’s official launch at Purpose Driven Worship. Then right after PDW we have many e-mails requesting features, asking for help and reporting bugs (”gaspe”). So we have been hard at work prepairing the latest release that just went live Monday night.

Speaking of Purpose Driven Worship, I just want to say how honored and humbled I was to hear all of the great things that many of you had to say about Planning Center. It has been a long labor of love and it is very exciting to see all the churches that are able to save time and, because of this, spend more time doing ministry.

Well, that’s it for the sappy part of this message, on to the meat! Here is a list of updates:

Features List & Help

Though Planning Center is simple, there are so many features that it might be a little hard to find all of the great things that Planning Center can help you do. So over the last week we have put together a full list of all of the features and a little help on how to use the feature. You can get to our new features page by clicking the link below.

You can find the feature list at: http://www.ministrycentered.com/planning_center/home/features

We are also in the process of making a detailed help manual that goes much deeper than the features list. When it is ready we will let everyone know right away.

Phone Numbers & Addresses

This is probably the most requested feature at the Purpose Drive Worship and with a lot of hard work we were able to implement it a with-in a week after the Purpose Driven Worship. Right now the standard address type is “Main/Home” and the standard phone types are “Home” and “Mobile”, in next mondays minor update you will be able to add as many address & phone types as you like.

Plan People Get A Face-lift

As churches started using Planning Center more, their list of people in each plan was getting long and was taking up too much room, so we made it so that each “category” of people was collapsable. So if you want to see everyone in a particular category you can click on the blue arrow to the left of the category name.

We also added a couple of features like being able to select who get’s the e-mail update when someone accepts or declines to be in a plan. We also track and display when an e-mail notification is sent, read and when it is accepted or declined.

Locked Down Scheduled Viewer Accounts

This is a small one, but very important to mention. Scheduled viewers can now only see songs & people for plans that they have been scheduled for. They will no longer be able to browse the list of songs or people.

In Him,

Jeff Berg
Developer/Owner
Ministry Centered Technologies