Among my roles at NCC I am also heavily involved in our Arts Department in the creative media area. One of our large issues has been proper communication and scheduling of people, specifically as it pertains to Sunday mornings. After searching the web and even contemplating coding my own homebrew solution I came across Planning Center Online. We actually signed up for the basic plan back in late 2007 and just kind of sat on the project. Eventually I found the volunteer who could take this on and really get it setup properly. We have now just completed our first month or so of “official” use. So far we are scheduling around 60 people consisting of our 3 bands and multiple praise teams as well as our tech. people. People absolutely love it! It has also prompted us to really get serious in planning ahead, we are currently about 1.5-2 months out with our music/series. Hopefully in the next month or so we will be adding our choir to the system, which will add nother 60-70 people, brining our total scheduled people to well over 100+ people. Its working so well our Children’s Ministry department wants to tweak the concept and begin using planning center to distribute PDFs of lessons plans and even volunteer scheduling! This system is working so well we just upgraded to the higher package; we already used up the initial 1GB of data storage.
SO with that said….if you need a central place to plan…..definitely check them out!
At a later date I will post some more details of how we are using Planning Center; but just know it rocks!
