Worship Planning Site Review: Planning Center

I have had the opportunity to use two online worship planning sites recently and I thought I would give a review of them both. Perhaps readers of IsaiahSix have suggestions of other sites or desktop software solutions they use and the discussion could be helpful to us all. Today I will review Planning Center and tomorrow I will review WorshipWebsite.net.

Planning Center Overview

Planning Center is a web-based worship planning solution. With this site, users have the opportunity to plan and store detailed data for worship services. For example, you’re able to see the last time you used a particular song in a worship service. When you enter a new song into the database, you can upload scores and sound clips for your musicians to use when they access the worship services. And managing who is supposed to participate in which services is a relatively simple process.

Song Database

One of the strengths of Planning Center is its song database. In this database, you enter songs as you program them in a service. This happens only once per song; the next time you program the piece, it’s there ready to be inserted into your worship plan.

A nice feature of the song database is the ability to enter multiple arrangements of the same song. For example, at our church we make frequent use of WORD’s Hymns for Praise & Worship collection. We also use HymnCharts and every once in a while, we’ll use the version straight from our hymnal. So, if I were to enter the hymn “How Great Thou Art,” I could enter all three arrangements under the same song heading. For the HymnCharts arrangement, I could upload the appropriate files so our instrumentalists could download them and see them ahead of time. When planning a worship service, if I were to select “How Great Thou Art,” I could specify which arrangement we would be playing, and the necessary files (if any) would then be available to our musicians. You can also upload arrangement-specific sound files. (By the way, you have the ability in your account settings to allow your team members to download the sound files or simply stream them. If the files are your own recordings of your own songs, there wouldn’t be any problem allowing downloads. But if they’re commercially available recordings, you’re already on shaky legal ground by uploading them at all. Don’t risk further damage by allowing downloads, too.)

UPDATE: Comments from readers have alerted me to the feature in Planning Center allowing you to import song data from CCLI. That’s a very helpful, time saving feature and I apologize for overlooking it in my original review.

Planning Worship

Planning worship services at Planning Center is fairly straightforward. You can enter header items such as The Greeting or The Welcome and under the headings include details of that particular element. Each item you enter is placed at the bottom of the current list but moving it to its proper location is easily accomplished by click-and-drag functionality. Simply move it to wherever you want it. If later you want to move something to a different place in the service, no problem. As I mentioned earlier, when you enter a song into your order, the accompanying files and sound clips show up alongside the title for your team members to download or listen to.

Planning worship is made simpler through the use of templates. This will be of more use to some than to others, but if your services have any amount of predictability to them at all, templates allow you to set up those predictable elements so you’re having to do less work from week to week.

The Matrix

You have the ability to compare week to week what has been happening in your worship services through the Matrix. The Matrix can be a helpful tool to give you a bigger picture if you limit your viewing to just a few weeks. Any more than that and the screen gets a little too crowded to be helpful.

People Scheduling

Resource management is relatively simple through Planning Center. Enter all of your team members (up to the limit allowed by your plan) and when combined with the template feature, you can set up specific groups of people for specific worship services. That’s very helpful and saves a good bit of time. Once your service is in its final format, simply notify your team members from within Planning Center. They receive an e-mail and are asked to confirm their availability. If they’re on the schedule for a particular worship service, it shows up on their calendar when they log in. If they’re not scheduled for a worship service, they don’t see anything listed for that date.

UPDATE: Comments from readers and e-mails with the kind folks at Planning Center indicate that your team members have the ability to mark dates for which they are or are not available. I apologize for overlooking this feature in my original review.

The Pricing

The major downfall of Planning Center–and ultimately the reason I no longer use this service–is its pricing and account structure. There is a free plan, but it’s really just to let you see how everything works. You don’t have to upgrade to a paid plan, but you’ll be extremely limited in what you can do. The first plan that would be remotely helpful to anyone would be the Lite plan, which I see has recently increased in price from $9 per month to $14 per month. On this plan you’re limited to 100mb of data storage (charts, sound files, etc.) and 35 people. You could work around both of those limitations, but where you’ll be stuck is that this plan only allows for one “ministry.” Planning Center basically defines a ministry as one unique worship service. So, if you have only one corporate gathering a week, you’ll be fine. But if you have multiple gatherings per week (Sunday and Wednesday, for example), and those gatherings are different from one another, or if you have multiple worship services of varying styles on Sunday morning, you will have to at least upgrade to the Basic plan, which is limited to two ministries (still not extremely flexible) and costs $29 per month. There are ways around these limitations, but it goes against the spirit of the service’s intent and I found that trying that was extremely annoying and time consuming anyway. This way of pricing the service is peculiar and I would be interested to know how it came about.

Summary

Planning Center is a slick, well designed web-based worship planning tool with a lot of nice features. A lot of time and design talent went into planning this service and its front-end interface. I enjoyed using it for several months and it did make it easier than my old method of planning worship (pen and paper followed by Microsoft Word). While I was able to work around some of the limitations of the pricing structure (and from a budgetary standpoint I couldn’t justify jumping to the next level), ultimately the restrictive use of “ministries” was (and is) its Achilles’ heal.

Tomorrow I’ll take a look at WorshipWebsite.net. UPDATE: Here’s the link to that review.

Impacting the Kingdom through Worship,