Ministry Centered Technologies

We have some new updates being released today (Monday, November 3rd)! We decided to do an earlier update during mid-quarter just for fun. You can watch this video for an explanation and a tutorial on how to use these updates. Let me tell you a little bit about them first.

Changing the name of Ministries: We will be changing the name of Ministries to Services. So from now on, when you see ‘create a new service’, it is the same as ministry. We felt this fit much better.

Transposing mp3’s: Another change is the ability to transpose mp3 files. We now have a direct link to transposr.com through PCO. When you are in your song’s attachments, hover over any mp3 attachment and you will see a new blue gear icon you can click on to transpose your mp3 and attach it to the new key! This will eliminate a step for people that are wanting to quickly transpose from inside PCO.

Files Box & Moving Song Attachments: Also, our Files box in Songs looks a little different too. We compressed the different key files boxes into just one. In addition, you can move song attachments between the song or any of its arrangements or keys. When uploading or editing a song attachment, just choose if you want the file attached to the song, an arrangement, or a key.

Stage Layout: The other update (in my opinion the most exciting!) is the stage layout feature. This will allow you to create a replica of what you want your stage to look like! This has been a project for quite a while now, but is finally done. It offers easy drag and drop features and it takes your scheduled people and automatically adds them into the design. It’s very flexible, and easy to work with.

We also have been working on updating all of our tutorials to be in HD and have the most updated information. The ones that have been updated so far are: Setting Up Planning Center Online, How to Schedule and E-mail Your People, and How to Use Songs and Arrangements.

We hope you enjoy the updates. If you have further questions, please watch our video!!

So we have some exciting news for everyone today. First, we are very pleased to introduce you to our new Community Support Director, Katie Willard. After getting over 40 applications we were very happy to narrow it down to a person who was a perfect fit for this position.

Katie is originally from Oregon and moved down to Southern California with her husband in October 2007. Her husband is a youth pastor so Katie is busy doing ministry outside of her work here as well. She comes to us with a teaching background but is excited about this new line of work. She really has a heart for helping people learn and has the technological know-how to become a master of all things Planning Center.

Please feel free to shoot her an e-mail and say hi.

Transposr.com has been my little side project over the last month. When talking with churches at the conferences we go to, I find that many of them love our chord chart transposer but might not need a full worship planning tool. So about a 6 months ago I came up with the idea of pulling our chord chart transposer software out of PCO and making this site. It took a while to complete, but I am very happy with how it turned out.

One of the things that I am really excited about is the introduction of an MP3 transposer that I have been working on for quite awhile. This software will take any MP3 you upload into the system and transpose it to any key by changing the pitch but not changing the tempo. There is already downloadable software that does this, but this is the first free online solution I have seen. After a couple weeks in action, making sure that everything works, we will port this functionality into Planning Center so that we can automatically transpose your MP3s for you.

Please check out the screenshots below or check out Transposr.com and let us know what you think at support@ministrycentered.com.

Thanks!

Jeff Berg
Owner/Developer
Ministry Centered Technologies

Well, it is that time again. We are about to deploy an update to our flagship product Planning Center Online and we are so excited to get this update to you. We have been really busy and already have some great plans for the next version of Planning Center which should be out after the 1st of the year.

Also, if you haven’t heard we are growing and we have just created a new position that we need to fill, you can find out more about that on this blog post.

Text Messaging

We have been asked several times for a way to do text-messaging and there just didn’t seem to be a good way to reliably text-message users for awhile. E-mail to sms providers are free but are not reliable and most pay-gateways are too expensive, especially with the amount of text-messages we will be sending out. But a couple of months ago we found the service called TextMarks.com and I mentioned this service to our customers in the forum and the response was very positive.

New “Schedule” View

Another requested feature was a Schedule view for people to see everything that you are scheduled for. This new screen will show all plans you have been scheduled for, any upcoming times you are scheduled for & will include the “My Calendar” in the sidebar. All Scheduled Viewers will be directed to this page by default, and other users can click “my schedule” under their calendar on the main plans page.

Volunteer Video Tutorial

We have added a new Volunteer Video tutorial to help your volunteers understand the aspects of Planning Center Online that they have access to. This video tutorial is very quick and simple. It can also be downloaded and burned to a DVD if you wish to show it to your volunteers on a projector. You can view this video on Vimeo, this video will also be available on the Planning Center Website at launch.

Linking to AmazonMP3

Trying to stay copyright compliant while also making sure your teams are well rehearsed is a huge obstacle nowadays. To help provide you with a solution to this obstacle we have made it very simple to link to MP3s on Amazon’s MP3 store, so your users can download them legally. Click the new “link to AmazonMP3″ button in a Song Arrangement Attachment box, and Planning Center will look up your song in Amazon’s store for you to add the link to your song arrangement with one click.

New Custom Properties Editor

With Planning Center getting used by more and more ministries in a church we have some churches with more than 50 property options which was making it impossible to manage. So we worked really hard to create a new interface that will show you what properties someone has and easily add new properties to a person. We are really happy with this new interface and we hope you are too.

Miscellaneous

• Added Birth & Aniversary Dates
• Added Notes To People & Plan People records
• Added check/uncheck all to Plan E-mail dialog
• Added arrows to calendar under “My Calendar” to allow you to view any month
• Accounts that have been disabled will not show up by default in the people list
• Added an “Alternate Owner” that you can assign to another person who then will be able to update your payment information and receive the payment receipts
• Ability for us to send out notifications to users via a notification bar at the top of the page
• Ability to copy a plan to a template and copy a template to another ministry
• Added stock matrix reports to everyone’s matrix
• Added Church’s Logo To Standard Plan Print Out
• Lots of clean-up of user interface

Update: This position has been filled. Thank you to everyone who applied.

Ministry Centered Technologies is looking for a person with great communication skills.  This person would have to possess strong writing skills for customer, tech and community support.  We want someone who would be in charge of responding to all support e-mails, phone calls & forum posts. Also, this person would be in charge of developing our support tools such as online documentation, tutorial videos and podcasts.

The position will be fully equipped to do the job at hand with an iPhone, MacBook Pro & and all software needed. We offer a competitive salary with full benefits package including medical & dental. You can work from anywhere but if you wish to work in the office we would help with relocation if necessary.

If you are interested & passionate about making churches more efficient through software you can send your resumé to jobs@ministrycentered.com. Please make sure your resumé is in to us by September 8th and all resumés will be kept confidential.

Tom Roepke from the “Who are these guys” website recently wrote a review on how his church uses Planning Center for their Student Ministries.

Originally when I sat down to develop Planning Center we really worked hard to make sure that this site could meet the needs of not just Worship Ministries, but all the ministries of the church. Thanks for the glowing review Tom, this really confirms that we are meeting our goals.

Planning Center (www.planningcenteronline.com) has made numerous administrative duties light. Our church was already using it to manage our multi-site campuses with four weekend services

Planning Center has lived up to its own promotional material. It allows you to develop a matrix that can track all songs used, track and notify volunteers, and give you critical control of all aspects of the service.

The biggest and most useful part of PC is that all the information regarding a service is located in one centralized place. Since it is web based it allows all users and participants quick and easy access anywhere anytime.

From the Who Are These Guys Website

This article actually hit the web a couple weeks ago but I have been a bit busy so I wasn’t able to post it until now. Pretty cool.

“PlanningCenterOnline.com has an attractive interface. The site is easy to navigate and contains clear, detailed information on the platforms features. It is great that PlanningCenterOnline.com is easily accessible from internet connection. PlanningCenterOnline.com has many great features to help organize services. The music options are truly remarkable and very important for worship. It is great that once you sign up with PlanningCenterOnline.com you always get the upgrades. The video tutorials and testimonials are a useful way to explain the application’s functions.”

Read the whole review at KillerStartUps.com

Easter is just over a week away and we decided that it would be fun to list the top 30 songs that all of our Planning Center Online users are using for Easter. I hope you find these stats as interesting as we did.

Easter 2008 Planning Center Online Song Usage Statistics Compared To Easter 2007

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I don’t know if anyone noticed but our own Aaron Stewart has been writing a featured article for WorshipLeader.com every month. Aaron has done a great job writing these articles and I hope that you enjoy them. Below I have posted links to the first three and I am going to post the rest of the articles as they are released:

January 2008 – A Master Plan For Faster Planning

As a music pastor, I’m always looking for the most efficient way to accomplish my tasks in order to be more of a minister than an administrator. I have the pleasure of serving at Central Christian Church in Las Vegas, Nevada. When I started there, I was thrilled to find that they had already made organization a high priority as evidenced by a plethora of Word and Excel documents. There were the monthly band and vocalist schedules; Big Brother, our Excel document with all past and future weekends side by side (including every song, person, video, and other elements for each week); Excel documents for each and every service order; Excel booking sheets, detailing every person and piece of equipment necessary for our tech department; plus all the other various details floating around in our heads. Read more at WorshipLeader.com

February 2008 – A Worship Plan For Vegas

Living and working in Las Vegas has many similarities to living and working as a music pastor. Being a music pastor is not a job that can easily be turned off at the end of the day; it can be the job that never sleeps. You can’t really tell your creativity what your hours are, and your volunteers don’t usually stick to your schedule either. In addition, just like the lights of Las Vegas, there is a barrage of distractions coming at you from every angle. With so many things competing for your attention, it can be difficult to remain focused. Read more at WorshipLeader.com

March 2008 – How the Matrix Changed My Life

Until about a year ago, if I thought about the Matrix, I would be envisioning the 1999 Keaunu Reeves movie in which a computer hacker learns that the world is not what he thought it was. But all that changed when Planning Center Online, our online worship planning software, added a new weapon to its arsenal: the Matrix. Not only would that word begin to conjure up a completely different image, it would also drastically simplify the way I plan my services and schedule my volunteers. Read more at WorshipLeader.com