We’ve breathed new life into an old feature by giving it a design overhaul and streamlining the process of using it. I’m talking about Public Plans — a great way to share plan information with your congregation! Use Public Plans to share links to the songs you’re playing this week or to set expectations for what is happening during a service.
New look, new location
Public Plans have been around for a long time and were overdue for being brought up to our new design standards. Here’s a little before-and-after for you to see the transformation for yourself.
The Public Plans page now lives in Church Center which is the congregant-facing side of Planning Center. If you’re familiar with Church Center, you’ll notice this new design adopts the fresh and clean aesthetic you’re used to. Don’t worry if you’ve bookmarked links to the old version, we’ll make sure you end up in the right place regardless!
Automatic publishing
Previously, each individual plan had to be manually published but in this new version we can handle that for you if you want! If you know that you’ll always want to publicly share plans from a specific Service Type, head over to the Service Type Settings and enable the new Schedule Publish feature!
Like before, you can choose which information shows on the public page including any links you've added to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and more. This new version also gives you the option to show your beautiful Series Art as well!
You can be confident that the plan will always be available to the public by the day of the service, but if you’d like to share it even sooner you can manually publish it from a plan’s share menu.
More ways to share
So how do you get your public plan into the hands of your congregation?
For one-off events, you could view the public plan on Church Center to copy the URL. For recurring events, you would probably want to create a permalink that will always send people to the most recent plan.
To take it a step further — we’ve also created a new integration with Planning Center Publishing’s Sermons that will allow you to share a link to your public plan from a Sermon Episode!
We refer to Public Plans as “Order of Service” here to help your congregation better understand what it’s for. That’s just the default name, though — you’re able to customize it to whatever you’d like it to be depending on what kind of information you want to show.
You could manually add the Order of Service to each Episode, or you could go to the Channel and add Order of Service as a default link so it will appear on all new Episodes.
When paired with the new Scheduled Publish feature, you can be confident that you’ll always have a public plan to show when your Sermon goes live!
💚 Team Services