One of the best ways to support your team members is to schedule them far in advance so they can plan their serving schedule around their personal schedule. Then you can send an automatic reminder email the week they are serving, especially for those whose serving schedules aren't predictable. We've heard from many of you over the years that you'd like to include other important information in these reminders, and now you can!
Centralize Info with Plan Notes
Part of the appeal of Planning Center is that you have one centralized place for all the important information about your services. If important information is only sent in an email, it's very likely not going to be seen by everyone. What you usually want is a place within Planning Center to store that information, so that even if everyone read the information you emailed them, they know they can still log in and get to anything important. That place is Plan Notes.
Earlier this year we enhanced Plan Notes, allowing you to assign each plan note to specific teams, and even assign the default teams for each category of notes. Now we're taking that to the next level by including any note for a team in any reminder for that team. So if you want to customize a reminder email, add a Plan Note, and make sure it's assigned to the right teams!
Emails, Notifications, and Texts, Oh My!
Assigned Plan Notes aren't only included in reminder emails, they're also integrated into push notifications and text messages in different ways. If your team members have set up reminder text messages, the full text of the notes is included in the text message. If they have push notifications enabled for our mobile apps, the first part of the note text is included there, and if they tap it, they are taken to the plan where they can see the full note.
Reading is Believing
Up until now, reminder emails only included the times a person was scheduled for. But often, team members already know the time, they just need to remember that this is their week. So when they see the subject of the reminder email, they just delete the message without reading it. In an attempt to prevent people from missing important notes, we've changed the subject lines of reminder emails so that if there is a note included, "NOTE" is the first word in the subject. Subject lines will now be one of the following:
- NOTE reminders and Times for Sunday Services, June 18
- Time reminders for for Sunday Services, June 18
Up Next
We hope this helps you communicate the right things to your people at the right times and continues to give your team a centralized place for important information. We have a few other updates we're cooking up to make using Plan Notes easier and more integrated into your normal communication workflows, so stay tuned!