Wouldn't it be nice if your congregants only needed one app to interact with their small group, process their donations, sign up for events, and manage their entire volunteer schedule? Well as of today, the Church Center app (and website) bring this all together, plus much more!
Each person's profile now has a My Services section listing any new requests or signup sheets at the top. They can respond to those from there, and they can even request to get push notifications in the Church Center app!
Below the New Requests section is the Schedule section which is a timeline of everything else they are scheduled for. This shows each time they are assigned to, including service times, rehearsals, other times, and blockout dates, in chronological order. Tap on any time to see the basic details of that plan, and tap on any blockout to edit it, or tap Add blockout to add a new one.
Basic Plan Details
When tapping a time to view plan details, it shows the positions they are assigned to, and any assigned times. If the positions are pending, they can use the buttons to respond. If the position has already been accepted, they can tap the green check mark to change their response.
You might notice that many of the other details from the plan, like the order of service and other team members, are not shown. My Services in Church Center is meant to be a great replacement for general volunteers that are only concerned with their schedule.
Band, Vocals, Tech, or any other Rehearsal Teams, likely need to get to the order of service, use the media player, and access song files. We don't plan to bring those advanced worship planning features to the Church Center app, so those team members will still need the full Services mobile app. If those teams do see their schedule within Church Center, they will have an View in Services button to quickly switch to the other app to get those details.
Push Notifications
With this change, team members can choose which Services experience works for them, and they can choose to route their notifications to the app they prefer. This preferred app is Services by default, but it can be changed to Church Center by the team member or any scheduler.
Team members can go to their profile in Church Center, tap Notifications, tap Team & Schedule, and then set their preferred app to Church Center. They can even choose which types of Services Notifications to receive. Whichever notifications they choose, they will still continue to receive email notifications for all of them.
Schedulers can go to their team member's profile on the web and change the preferred app to Church Center. Then the team member simply needs to install Church Center, and enable notifications.
Linked Accounts & Households
The full Services app allows team members to manage the schedule of their entire household, and allows people who serve at multiple churches to see a combined schedule for all of their linked accounts. For now, Church Center is limited to a single church and doesn't support managing household schedules. Users who need those features will still need to use the Services app.
When creating or editing blockouts, if a person has linked accounts or household scheduling privileges, they will have the option to create the blockout for all linked accounts or for everyone in their household, even from Church Center, but it's all or nothing.
Just the Beginning
At the moment, My Services in Church Center is only accessible from a person's profile, or from a push notification. We know that many churches will want to give this a more prominent location, potentially on its own tab. What we've done so far is just phase one, and we are already hard at work on phase two. In true Planning Center fashion, I won't say much about that just yet, but in the next 3-4 months we'll give you options to make this information more prominent, and I think it will be worth the wait. :)