Chances are, if you work at a church that’s leading production ministries, you’re organizing your services and teams with Planning Center (PC, planningcenteronline.com). We think you’ll find that these six tips make your workweek a little bit easier.
Keep Your Data Costs Down
Have you noticed your subscription cost changing from month to month? That’s probably because your data is over your allotment, so PC has started charging you their per-gigabyte data rate. It’s one dollar per 0.5G, so it may have ballooned out of control if you haven’t been keeping an eye on it. How do you fix your data?
You have to keep your Media tab clean. Now this is tricky, because if you simply navigate to your Media tab on Planning Center Services, you might not see much, and this is a slight beef I have with Planning Center because they kinda keep your actual media hidden. To actually see all of your media, you’ll open your PCO dashboard, hit your Media tab, and then look for a little gear icon toward the top-right of your screen.
As you can see, it looks like there’s just one item in my media tab, but once I click the gear and click on “manage files…”
… then you can see all of this:
Yes, that’s 13,222 media files, taking up about 17 gigabytes of data. I don’t know why PC doesn’t make this more obvious, but if you’re way over your data limit, this is the place to start cleaning house. You can arrange the files by size, and start chipping away at your biggest problems. No, you cannot select multiple files to delete at once; you have to do this “by hand.” Yes, it’s a pain. No, they don’t have any plans to fix it soon, to my knowledge. If you have an intern, this is probably something they’d love to spend their time on.
How do all these files get there? Well, any media attached to any plan or song file within your PC account ends up in your files. Thankfully, PC tells you who uploaded it, so you can tell them to stop if you need to. There’s also a setting with ProPresenter that automatically uploads your playlist media to PC, so you might want to turn that off. We’ll get to that later, though.
Use Planning Center for Music Charts
Next to creating plans, this might be the best thing that PC does, and a lot of people are unaware that it’s even an option, much less how to actually use it. You can create music charts within PC itself, and once they are made, you can transpose them to any key as well as create number charts and numerals charts.
There’s a slight learning curve to this because Planning Center created a simple coding language to make this work, but they have a great tutorial that teaches you how to do it, and this means you can ditch those sort-of-accurate SongSelect or Multitrack charts for something clean and accurate like this (click on the images below for an expanded view):
Sync Planning Center to ProPresenter
If you’re using ProPresenter, you can link it directly to your planningcenteronline.com account and use it to seamlessly create ProPresenter playlists from your Planning Center plans. Once the playlist is created, you simply click and drag presentations from your libraries into your playlist as well as click and drag media into those presentations from your media bin. Here at LifeMission, we’ve built multiple libraries within ProPresenter for different service types to make this process more efficient. We can set up a whole weekend service with sermon notes in about 25 minutes, and the sermon notes are usually the longest part of that. Importing the PC plan and adding our media to the generated playlist takes less than five minutes.
Remember what I said earlier about not syncing your ProPresenter media to Planning Center? This is the place where you adjust that setting. When you’re setting up your ProPresenter sync, you see this list of options:
Uncheck “Automatically Upload Presentations and Media.” If you do not uncheck this, every video file, ProPresenter presentation file, and audio file that you use in your ProPresenter playlists that you imported from Planning Center will be uploaded to that specific plan on Planning Center and will live forever in your media files until deleted. We did this by accident and it took me the better part of a day and a half to delete all the files after we spent hundreds of dollars on extra file storage and couldn’t figure out why. Consider yourself warned.
Add Items to Plans with Keyboard Shortcuts
In 2020, PC rolled out a new Plans editor, and the new editor features handy hotkeys to make your life easier. When you’re editing a plan, you simply tap certain keys to add certain items. PC wrote better instruction documentation than I can, and you can read that here. But certainly use this to make your plan creation seamless. It’s saved me lots of time.
Integrate Services Live with your Confidence Monitor
I’m assuming you already know about Services Live, an app included with your Planning Center Services subscription that lets you keep track of your service times with a big timer. Here at LifeMission, we have two confidence monitors, one from ProPresenter with our lyrics and other pertinent information throughout our service flow, and then one with Services Live, which displays a countdown timer for the different sections within our service flow, which service section we’re in, and which service section comes next. But if you don’t have the convenience of two confidence monitors, you can add Services Live to your ProPresenter Confidence Monitor.
Renewed Vision wrote great instruction for setting this up, and you can head right here for all of that.
What’s the advantage of using Services Live on your confidence monitor? Well, most of us use timers to keep our services on track, and any one of us knows the tedium of building a bunch of different timers for something like a weekend conference or even Sunday services. Planning Center plans allow you to create set times for plan items, and then Services Live will turn those times into timers so you don’t have to create individual timers for each of your plan items. Services Live will also automatically adjust your timers to get you back on track if you start running behind, and you can edit item times on the fly if you need to add more time to any particular service element.
If you’re unfamiliar with Services Live, you can get a full rundown here.
Build a Stage Layout within Your Services Plan
While it’s a good idea to create “stations” for different instruments on your stage and then not move these stations from week to week, that’s not convenient to everyone for a variety of reasons. Whatever your reason, if you have different stage layouts each week, you can let your team know where they’ll be standing by creating and attaching a stage layout to your plan.
On the left side of the plan page, you’ll find the “Files” panel underneath your “Teams” Panel. Click “add.”
From here, you can select “Stage Layout,” and use one of PC’s templates to create a layout for that week. I’ve always used “grid” in the past because it’s the simplest. You can create and upload your own templates from some kind of photo or graphics editing software if you’d like, but I like to keep things quick and easy.
