You can email your teams from multiple places in Services. You can also set up Automated reminder emails to remind teams of upcoming assignments.
General emails are emails unrelated to a specific plan, such as messages to welcome people to Services or ask for scheduling preferences. These can be sent to members of a particular team or from the People page.
Scheduling emails inform your team about their assignments or information related to a plan.
Important
Emails will be sent to the primary email address, except in the case of Account settings. Accounts sends an email to every email address listed on an Organization Administrator or Billing Manager's profile.
General emails are sent to members of a specific team or people you've selected from the People page. These emails include a link to log in to Planning Center.
You can email team members from the All Team Members list or a Position list.
If you want to email only people assigned to specific times on a Split Team, filter the list for the people you want to email and select the email icon.
From the People page, filter the list for the people you want to email and select the email icon.
If you want to let your team know about their assignments or send information related to a plan, email them from the plan or matrix. Scheduling emails include:
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Buttons to accept or decline assignments for unconfirmed recipients if the email is sent from a plan
Notice
Emails sent from a matrix won't have these buttons.
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All times assigned to the recipient
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A link to view the plan (unless the team is not allowed to view the plan at all)
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The team's plan notes
You can send scheduling emails to one or multiple teams from a plan or a matrix.
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To email people on a specific team, select Email from the team dropdown or click Send.
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Anyone with an email icon beside their name has a prepared notification and cannot see the plan yet.
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To email everyone in the plan, click the email icon above the individual teams.
If you are sending an email to a single team with any unsent prepared notifications, you will go straight to the email. If you are emailing multiple teams in a plan or matrix, you can narrow down your recipients.
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Select Scheduled People to email everyone scheduled. If you have Signup Sheets set up, select Signup Sheets to send people a sign up email.
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Choose the teams that you want to email from the list of teams that you lead.
Notice
Schedulers can only schedule the people listed here. Editor permissions and higher can add other teams by clicking Add.
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If there are teams assigned to more than one time, you can choose which times you want to email.
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Check which statuses you want to email.
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Check to email people with Prepared Notifications only.
Note
If you are emailing from a matrix, you will also have the option to exclude plans from the email.
After you have set up your recipients, click Next.
Choose a schedule template or customize your own subject and body.
When you are finished composing the email, click Send.
After sending your email, the Save note option will appear if you've added new text to the body of a default email. Sometimes, you may add this information so your volunteers can refer to it later. While emails can get lost or forgotten, your volunteers can always find the plan (if permitted), so use this modal to save that info as a plan note where they can easily find it!
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A confirmation message shows the number of people who were sent the email.
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Use the dropdown to select the category for your note.
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Review or edit the text of the note.
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The note is automatically assigned to the team that you emailed, but you can remove or add teams here.
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Select Yes, save note to add this note to the plan.
While it's not possible to attach files to an email sent from Services, you can attach a file to a plan or a public file-sharing site, like Google Drive or Dropbox, and then email teams to let them know where to find the files.
If you attach a file to a plan:
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All of your plan files will be in one place.
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You can keep the file up-to-date even after you email the team.
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You can see an access log of who accessed the file when you edit it.
There are various reasons why an email might have not been delivered. You can see a list of all the emails a person has received through Planning Center from the Communication tab on their profile page. Open an email highlighted in red to see if the email failed or was dropped.
Tip
To learn more about what specific error codes entail, check out Email Error Codes.
If someone mentions they didn't receive an email, or you see that an email failed to be delivered to them, try these things:
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Check Planning Center People to make sure their email address isn't blocked.
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Ask the person to add no-reply@planningcenter.com, no-reply@churchcenteronline.com, and no-reply@churchcenter.com to their email address book, which allowlists them.
If neither of these help, contact support by clicking the ? in the top right corner of the app.
Allowlisting an email tells your email provider to place emails from certain senders into your inbox, rather than marking those emails as spam. Doing this will help you and your congregation avoid the need to go through your spam or junk folder in order to find emails from Planning Center.
Allowlisting may look a little different in each email provider, but the basic process involves adding these three domains to your address book:
Click on the link that correlates with your email provider to learn how to allowlist email addresses in your email account:
After allowlisting those email addresses, Planning Center emails will always show up in your inbox, and these important emails won't slip through the cracks!