Say hello to Planning Center’s latest feature: Chat!
Communication is core to building relationships and running effective teams. That’s why we want to bring the conversation to where you are already doing your work — in Planning Center! Churches are leveraging emails, group texts, messaging from within Planning Center Groups, and all kinds of other products to coordinate and communicate with their teams but we believe that Planning Center Chat is going to make it simpler than ever to do the kinds of communication that churches do most.
We’re going to start by rolling out Chat in the Services mobile app so that you can get your teams on the same page by talking about specific plans. In the future, we’re planning on bringing Chat into the Planning Center admin pages as well as the Church Center app alongside Groups messaging!
How does it work?
To get started, tap on the new Chat icon in the top of your Services mobile app.
Services Chat focuses on communication for two things: teams and plans. As a team leader, you can chat with one or more of the teams that you lead. When you start a conversation with a team, you can rest assured that anytime a person is added or removed from that team that the conversation will be updated accordingly.
You can also filter the conversation down to focus on a specific plan. You’ll be able to easily communicate with just the team members that are serving on that date. Just like team chats, people will be added and removed from plan conversations dynamically. This enables you to spin up separate conversations about different plans without bugging people who aren’t a part of it yet, while also allowing you invite them into the conversation at a later time.
Conversations that dynamically update their members are where the real power is at with Planning Center Chat. Not to mention how this also protects people’s privacy as you won’t be required to share everyone's email addresses or phone numbers with large groups.
You’ll also have access to many of the features you’re familiar with from using other messaging products like sending gifs, images, and adding reactions to messages.
When can we start chatting?
We’re in the process of slowly rolling this out to all of our users by organization. Once the organization you’re a part of gains access, you’ll see the Chat icon in the top of your Services mobile app which indicates you’re ready to get started.
There is not a set timeline for a full release because we’re going to be assessing the situation and addressing issues as we go to ensure this is a smooth and efficient process for everyone. That said, we generally expect it to take a few weeks from the time of posting this update. We’ll be adding new organizations all the time, so keep an eye out!
Who can chat?
Anyone who has Scheduler or higher as their permission level in Services can start a conversation. Everyone else will only see the Chat icon once they’ve been invited to participate in a conversation and can only contribute to the conversations they are a part of.
Team membership determines who can see a team chat just like the people who are scheduled for a Plan determines who can see Plan chat with a few exceptions:
- Children under 13 years old will not be able to read or participate in any conversations because of our privacy policy
- People who have a prepared notification or have declined a request to serve will be excluded from Plan chats
Chat is designed with team leaders in mind which is why we’ve made it easy for you to search through “Teams I lead” to identify what teams you want to chat with. Once you’ve started a conversation, everyone who has the Services mobile app installed will receive a push notification they can tap on to respond.
Group conversations
If you’re familiar with Planning Center Groups, then you’re probably aware that groups have been able to chat with each other for quite a while. As a part of building Chat for Services, we’ll eventually be migrating all of your group conversations over to the new Chat system as well. This creates a way for you to stay connected with all of the areas of the church that you’re involved in from one centralized location.
We just wanted to make you aware of this. It’s not here yet, but it’s coming soon. We'll have more juicy details then.
The nitty-gritty details
Chat is brand new which means it’s going to have some rough edges until we get further down the road. We’re considering this a Beta release until Chat receives the polish and tuning that you’d expect from a Planning Center feature, but it was just too good to keep under wraps any longer.
Here’s a smattering of FAQs and additional information about Chat to help you wrap your head around it.
Edit and delete
You can edit or delete any message you send, but team leaders can delete anyone’s messages in a conversation. This is a moderation feature to help protect team members from inappropriate communication.
Notifications
Anyone can choose to mute a conversation at any time. They’ll still be able to access and contribute, but they’ll no longer receive notifications about new messages in the muted conversation. This is available from any conversation’s detail screen which is accessible by tapping the conversation title in the header.
Linked accounts
If you have Planning Center accounts for multiple churches, regardless of which account you are currently logged in as, you will receive notifications for conversations across all of your linked accounts. There will also be a way to see which account has unread messages so you can quickly swap over to it from the Chat window.
Now is a good time to remind people that just because you are a part of multiple organizations does not mean that your accounts are linked. Take this opportunity to properly link your accounts to ensure you never miss out on a conversation!
One other fun wrinkle with linked accounts is that if you have access to Chat in one of your accounts, you’ll also have access to it in your other accounts even if it hasn’t officially been rolled out to them yet!
So much more
We know Chat is going to become an essential feature for many of you and cannot wait to start building even more functionality into it. So please get in there, try it out, and let us know what you’d like to see added! Thanks to our early access testers, we’re already dreaming about how we could implement features like threads, direct messages, and ways to create and access Chats from more convenient places in Planning Center. Not to mention bringing Chat to more areas of the Planning Center ecosystem!
Now go get chatty!
— 💚 Team Services