When you have information to communicate to your team about a plan, your two options are to email it to them or add it to a Plan Note. Most of us stick to email, and then that important information is only ever accessible in that email. Now when you send an email, Planning Center will detect any new paragraphs you've added to an email template, and suggest saving it to a Plan Note so your team members can access it at any time from the plan.
Earlier this year we improved Plan Notes, allowing you to assign notes to teams. This allows team members to more clearly see which notes are meant for them from within the Services app, and if your church uses the Church Center app as your church app, from there, too.
Next, we allowed you to have customized reminder emails, by including each person's assigned notes in their reminder emails or text messages.
Today, we're letting you know about two new ways to help you store important information in Plan notes. First, when you send an email about a single plan, we compare your email to the template you started from. If you added any new paragraphs, instead of just confirming that your message was sent, we will include an option to save that new information. If any of your note categories have default team assignments that match the teams you just emailed, we'll even choose that category for you. If you don't want to save the note, just click no to discard it.
The second feature comes from the other direction. If you put your important information in a plan note to start out, there is a new send button at the bottom of the popup that allows you to save the note and open up the email editor to those teams with your new note in it.
And finally, a little bonus feature for you! Any time you send an email from a plan, each person's email includes times they are assigned to, and if they aren't confirmed yet, buttons to accept or decline. We used to communicate that with some messy "comment" code within the email template itself. We've removed that from the body of the message, and added a cleaner description in a yellow box at the bottom of the email popup.
Our goal is to help you make sure your team members have all the important information they need for your ministry to run smoothly. We hope that all of these updates to Plan Notes make it even easier!