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. Yesterday I reviewed Planning Center and today I review WorshipWebsite.net.
Disclaimer: WorshipWebsite.net is the service I’m currently using, but I have tried to be fair and objective as much as possible here.
WorshipWebsite.net Overview
WorshipWebsite.net is one of a handful of online worship planning tools that help worship leaders manage their physical and human resources. It allows you to store charts, scores and sound clips with song records for easy retrieval and team management is a relatively painless process with the team oriented approach the site takes.
Song Database
WorshipWebsite.net allows you to store songs you have used in worship services in your online database. The next time you program that song in a worship service, the details are there waiting on you. One very nice aspect of WorshipWebsite.net’s program is the ability to import song data from SongSelect. If your church or ministry has a CCLI license (and if you don’t, why don’t you?) and you subscribe to CCLI’s SongSelect service, you don’t have to enter song data manually. Simply log in to your SongSelect account, find the song you want to enter, download the song file1 and import it into your song database. Lyrics, authors, composers, copyright information, etc. all import in. This feature has worked flawlessly for me every time I’ve needed to use it.
Of course, if you’re programming one of your own songs or a song that isn’t otherwise in the SongSelect files, you can enter song data manually. If you do, the title will appear in ALL CAPS. I assume that’s by design to show which songs have been manually entered and which ones have been imported, but my OCD2 finds this a little irritating. The list of songs that populates the right column in your song database screen is peppered with ALL CAPS titles and Regular titles. That’s not really a huge issue, but it looks a little messy.
Unlike with Planning Center, WorshipWebsite.net does not allow multiple different arrangements under one song heading. For example, if I wanted to store different details for “How Great Thou Art” from the hymnal, Hymns for Praise & Worship, and HymnCharts, I would either need to store them all together and walk my team members through differentiating the scores and details, or store the song three different times. Ideally there would be a way to store the different arrangement details in one record and then when plugging the song in a worship service, you would have the option of which arrangement you were planning to use.
You can store scores and audio files (the website’s developer requests that you not store video clips because of the vast amount of server space and bandwidth it would require) with your songs. There are no storage limits, but I would suggest that you be reasonable and judicious in your use of this feature. And don’t forget about your copyright issues, too.
Planning Worship
Planning worship is a pretty simple process in WorshipWebsite.net. You create a new service, pick the date and time for the service and choose whether or not you want to use a previously stored template as your starting point and then start plugging in your worship elements. You can enter header items and then enter service details below the headers. Elements are color coded for easy viewing; songs from the database are one color, service items are another color, etc. And you can customize these colors to some degree. While I haven’t found this feature all that helpful, I’m sure some folks would, so it’s a nice bonus.
Items you enter into the order of service automatically appear at the bottom of your current order. Simply drag and drop in their appropriate place.
People Scheduling
Managing your team members is pretty easy in WorshipWebsite.net. You can enter their data and their roles (multiple roles are possible) and organize them into teams (morning musicians and evening musicians, for example). When your service order is ready, you can select teams or individuals to notify. If you notify a team, everyone on that team is notified so you don’t also have to notify them individually. One nice feature of the notification system built into the service is the ability to notify your team members via SMS, or text messaging. Be careful, though; they may bring you that first mobile phone bill and tell you to pay the text message charges if they didn’t know they were coming. WorshipWebsite.net doesn’t charge to send the text messages, but carriers will.
Recently integrated into WorshipWebsite.net is the ability for your team members to mark on the calendar when they will not be available. As you are planning your events, you’ll be able to see who is and who isn’t available on any particular day.
The Pricing
Pricing for WorshipWebsite.net is pretty straightforward. It’s based on your church size. There are no subsequent limitations on the number of services you can plan or the number of people you can enter into your account or the number or size of files you can store in your song database. Too, there is an offer for new ministries that can’t yet afford to pay for the service to receive one year’s access for free; that’s a generous offer.3
Firefox vs. Internet Explorer
UPDATE 8/24/2007: Good news! The Firefox java issue mentioned here has been fixed and other java issues, if any, are in the process of being identified and fixed. A brief note about browsers: I’ve used WorshipWebsite.net on two different computers and have come across some glitches when using the service with the Firefox browser. Whether these issues exhibit themselves in other Mozilla-based browsers such as Netscape or Flock I do not know. When entering dates and trying to print worship services, it seems to get caught in some sort of javascript loop and tries to execute the script over and over again. I had to manually stop the process by clicking the Stop button at the top of the browser. This happened on two different computers, so I’m reasonably certain the issue is on WorshipWebsite.net’s side of the equation. This problem was not existent when I used Internet Explorer. So my recommendation is still to dump IE as quickly as you possibly can. Use Firefox and download their IE Tab add-on, which lets you mimic IE when you need to.
Summary
WorshipWebsite.net is not the prettiest site on the internet; the interface could use some updating. And the browser compatibility problem is slightly bothersome, especially if you forget and get stuck in one of the loops. But the features offered through the service make up for the design’s shortcomings. If you’re looking for a way to streamline your worship planning and team organizational efforts, WorshipWebsite.net will help you walk that path much more easily.
Services like WorshipWebsite.net and Planning Center prove that churches and ministries can and should embrace the technology of our times to have a positive impact on the Kingdom. Are these sites and others like them going to be directly responsible for the salvation of thousands? Of course not. But they will allow you to be a better steward of your time and resources and thereby free you to do more Kingdom-focused activities.
Impacting the Kingdom through Worship,
- Be sure to use the “Export” feature in SongSelect, not the “Save” feature. WorshipWebsite.net requires the formatted *.usr files. The unformatted *.txt files won’t work. [back]
- Technically I don’t have OCD, but even my wife will tell you that’s only because I haven’t sought an official diagnosis.
[back] - To be fair, while I don’t want to commit them to anything, I would guess the developers of Planning Center would make a similar offer to the best of their ability. [back]
Great reviews on both products, thank you. By the way, I'm not sure if you know, but Planning Center also allows your volunteers to block out dates from the home page right underneath the calendar and it lets you import songs from CCLI when you import a song. Great blog!
Thanks, Aaron. I had a very kind e-mail exchange yesterday with Jeff, the owner and founder of Planning Center and he shared with me that team members could in fact block out dates for which they're not available. That's a fairly new feature over at WorshipWebsite.net and I suppose it stuck out to me because of a change in one of our musician's real life job that will require him to be absent a little more than in the past.
If the ability to import songs from CCLI into Planning Center was there before I left, I'm not sure how I missed that. I do humbly apologize to Jeff and the folks at Planning Center for overlooking that one very helpful feature.
NOTE: I'm going to duplicate your comment and mine over on the Planning Center article just so folks reading it later will see the updated information.