Planning Center Services 4+

Please send notifications after plan is updated

For the most part, PCO works really well. But for the love of everything decent and holy, PLEASE send a notification to all users on a plan when the plan is updated. Too often, keys get changed, arrangements are changed, and there is no way to know unless the person the changing notifies everyone themselves. It makes no sense why all users wouldn’t receive a little Notification saying what changed. I know it’s easy to say the person changing SHOULD send out an update. But people make mistakes and what’s the point of automating some simple tasks if we simply say that other simple tasks are human responsibilities.

And while it’s easy to say you don’t do this because e-mails are easily over-looked, that’s kind of a cop-out since the notification could easily have a custom subject line that lets the user know an important change is made. If anything, you could prompt the admin or editor with a notification, “Would you like to notify your team?” after a change is made.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for sharing! At the moment, we aren't tracking each change made to a plan, which would potentially be in the millions. We also try very hard to limit the amount of automatic or manual emails people receive from Planning Center because the more emails people receive, the easier it is for them to overlook something important.

So, for now, we've decided against creating a feature to automatically notify people of changes made to a plan they've been scheduled to. When you make a change you feel needs to be communicated to your team, click email these people on the plan to customize a message with more meaningful detail than an automatically generated email would allow. - Matt

[UPDATE]
Great suggestion! We'll keep that in mind as we continue making updates to the app.

App good, but a few problems

The app works well, but the PCO system has a few problems, if you like more collaboration. The app has gained in features & abilities, and works well as designed. The Planning Center Online is set up with team leaders (e.g. a leader for musicians, a leader for audiovisual workers, etc.). When a team leader sends a notification or other communication, there is no way to reply within this app; I'm always looking for ways to keep communications organized, and email decluttered! I can't reply in this app, but must go to email. I'd love to have Ministry chats kept in this app. When a team leader seeks input from team members, that's not possible here; members are limited to Accepting assignments! If an unexpected event causes someone to need to cancel their prior acceptance of an assignment (PCO DOES allow that to be processed), there is no way to swap with someone else and have that swap show up in PCO. Support has recommended that we put the name of our substitute in the Reason for Declining field; the team leader will have to perform the actual swap, but that means Leader is aware of the swap.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for the honesty! Though, there seems to be a misunderstanding. Members can always reply back to the emails they receive, in order to communicate and work out any scheduling changes. Our heart behind every product we make is far from totalitarian. Swapping would require a member also have Scheduler permissions. Instead, try having members talk to each other and then put the person's name in the "Reason" field when they need to decline. The leader will see that and be able to make those changes quickly and easily. Of course, there's always room to grow, and you seem to have some ideas! We'd love for you to share them with us, by emailing support@planning.center (or use "Help" to send a request right from within the app).

Amazing, but....

Hey PCO. I love Planning Center and I love your app. Super intuitive and practical!! I use it almost as much as I use PCO on my computer. But I’ve been having a couple of problems lately. When I create a new person on the app and put their info in, it doesn’t save the info. I know this because after I create a new person and schedule them for an audition, I ask them to check their email for a PCO invite and they never get it until I redo creating them on the full-site version. Also, sometimes it crashes and it seems to always be at the worst time. I lead worship for The Point Church out the Raleigh area of NC. One thing we are asked to do is to be praying about things to say at certain points in the service. God will give me things to say at odd times and when I receive them, I like to write them in my notes on PCO immediately. I was doing that tonight and was almost done when the app crashed. This wasn’t the first time this happened, but tonight it was extremely frustrating.