Planning Center Online

[hoosierdraft]

Any Planning Center Online users here? Good points, bad points, other alternatives.

My church is now at 4 services at two locations at 3 different times. Scheduling people is getting to be a real task on a spreadsheet.

[Sysmom]

Mark:

I use it all the time - just the free version. Nobody else has taken to it, I fear.

But it literally helps me prepare the timeline for the Service, and get that out to everyone with far less hassle (and time) than I used to using Excel.

So we're not using it for anywhere near the amount of things it can do, and I'm STILL a huge fan.

deb

[tekjojo]

I've played around with it--I like it--but everybody else is stuck on the old Excel method--which works--but doesn't help plan future services and scheduling. I really like Planning Center Online. They also just upgraded all of their servers and connections to rackspace so it should be much faster than it was in 2007.

Joe

[Mal]

I've been using Planning Center Online for several months now. We use it for communicating the service order to everyone, for all of our scheduling of people, and for making resources (song demos, charts & lead sheets, etc.) available to all involved. I have some band members who travel for business, and they use it for rehearsal on the road. It really has helped a lot. I have a volunteer using it to do all of our scheduling of people, while I take care of service orders and attachments. I even use the matrix printout in programming meetings. It took some people longer than others to get on board, but most people now automatically go there to see what's in the service or to remind themselves if they are scheduled.

[Winston]

We have also been using it for some months now.

It is great for scheduling and reminding people via email of their scheduled services. It is also nice in that it allows the volunteers to block off days that they are unavailable.

We do use it to communicate the basic rundown of the service but we have our own database that we generate the service rundown from for the Saturday and Sunday services.

Hopefully the rundown design and printing will become a little more flexible in the future. If you currently use Excel this might work for you as it currently is. It is definitely worth a look and test drive.

[frank]

I'd never heard of PCO until this post. Took a look-see and it's very impressive, but the recent downtime they had scares me from depending much on this or any other type of vendor's web-based applications. Our webhost I can trust implicitly, but another's? That's indeed a potential problem area.

If it could be used on our own webhost or our local server, I'd be all over it.

[Sysmom]

They've moved to Rackspace. There should be no issues now. There's enough redundancy built into that server farm to probably even keep the DOD happy.

deb

[Mal]

I've never had a problem. I guess their downtime was between my times using it. I tend to work several weeks ahead.

[Lee Ann]

We've used it for about 3/4 of a year now. Absolutely love it- don't know how we did things before.

[hoosierdraft]

Five days in. Have the next three weekends outlined and people scheduled. Working on getting practice mp3 loaded for people to access. Will be using it to upload sermon graphics for distribution to all of the services use. So far GREAT!!!

[Donald V]

We are testing out PCO online and I was wondering if anyone has any feedback now that they have been using it for longer. Thanks!

Also, is there an online service like PCO for whole church scheduling? Like room booking, notification of staff, etc??

Donald

[[Admin] osborn4]

My niece uses it in her nursery coordinator role. She like much of it but has found that folks find it easier to say No via email, particularly to a computer generated email, than if you ask them directly.